Entry #4 Foreign Language Text

I chose to examine the language of spanish within a local spanish newspaper and a children's non fiction text about birds. I am somewhat familiar with spanish after some high school spanish and also in my current teaching environment. As far as my teaching environment goes, I speak classroom spanish like table, bathroom, sit down, etc.

I checked out the newspaper first and my initial reaction was utilize my google translate app on my phone but I believe that would be consider cheating and I also taking the easy route. I attempted to use the pictures to make meaning and I was able to identify some articles for a dentist, a restaurant, a beauty salon, and a marijuana advertisement. I was able to recognize numbers in the newspaper however those are pretty much universal in the world. I came across some cognate words that I was able to figure out such as "presidente", "vacaciones", and "importante". In the reading I was able to decipher that President Obama had a taken an important vacation to Hawaii but that is as far as I got. I began to think about how the families within my district feel when they read papers that are sent home in English or how my students feel when I talk and then have no idea what I am saying. There was a word search on the last page with the words Memorial day, Labor day, Martin Luther King day, and Thanksgiving.

The next book was a nonfiction children's book about birds. Even though it was in spanish I was able to identify the books context by the pictures of birds. I was also able to somewhat read the 2 to 3 sentences on each page about the birds. The sentences spoke about the size, color, and what the birds ate. I was able to read the sentences or take a good guess about what the content was from background knowledge. They were also only 5 word sentences.

Overall it was a stressful experience. I looked immediately for the easy way out and was shocked at how fast I was ready to give up. It was sad. I found the children's text much easier to read than the newspaper maybe because of the pictures, simple language or my background knowledge that I was able to use as a tool.