It all comes back to comics with me. Sigh, you guys’re gonna get so tired of hearing about them, however I will have a blast. Throughout the year I had to attend several staff developments on SIOP. If you had asked me a couple weeks ago what that stands for I could have told you, but right now I’m having a massive brain fart. Anywho, one of the tenets of SIOP is offering instruction for people at every level, specifically ESL students. We looked at this diagram of how ESL students of various reading abilities might read a sentence. The sentence had blocked out words, meaning that a student could not comprehend those particular words. Depending on their ability they could read a few words here and there, but not enough to draw meaning or complete their assignment. Eventually the reading becomes exhausting and the students give up.
The SIOP trainers made their point and I understood what they were saying, but nothing made me understand my students as well as Batman Inc. #3. In the comic, Batman goes to Argentina and meets El Gaucho, an Argentinean super hero, and the writer put some of El Guacho’s thoughts in Spanish. It’s actually a bit more complex than that, but your comic book literacy probably isn’t cranked up to 11 like mine is, so I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible. I know a bit of Spanish, but not as much as I did 10 years ago, so I could pick out words, maybe recognize a verb, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of the context. Then, just like my students, I quit reading El Gaucho’s thoughts. I gave up just like them, because it became too frustrating. I still don’t always know how to motivate them, or myself for that matter, but I will remember that when I am teaching next year, and I will at least understand where they are coming from.
The multimodal component is a link to Comicsalliance.com's Batman Inc.#3 annotation which shows just how in-depth and complex this goofy super hero comic book actually is. Plus, it offers the translated thoughts of El Gaucho!
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/03/14/batman-incorporated-3-annotations/
I hope that you will share some of the strategies that you learned in PD. Comic books and/or graphic novels are actually a great way for ELLs to construct stories because much of them are pictures. You can tell what they comprehend or not and the amount of written words is less than a full-blown essay.
ReplyDeleteOne of my duties was to stand in the library in the mornings to make sure students weren't getting out of hand, and there was a Hispanic boy that would read 3 volumes of Bleach a day. Bleach is one of those manga that you read right to left, and I had other students that read a lot Dragonball. My favorite comment was from a student that said he didn't like comics because they all read right to left, and I found it funny/awesome that he had no idea those were just comics imported from Japan.
ReplyDeleteWhen I have to work with English Language Learners I always think back to my work I did at Sears. A couple who could not speak any english needed a filter for their fridge, but I could only understand a few words that they spoke.
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