Gibbons Chapter 5

In my second grade class there are a majority of students who are not from the United States, and a few of them who have never spoke English before this year. Literacy is a subject that they struggle with very much, even though they are making excellent strides, and through reading Gibbons' chapter on textual understanding it is easier for me to understand why. In teaching it is common practice to never teach a new skill with new content and I believe that because I am in a lower elementary grade this is happening, and making reading for these ESL students very difficult. "Effective readers draw on different kinds of knowledge depending on what they are reading and how much they know about the topic". For ESL students who in their country have different cultural norms sometimes have new experiences with literacy and can not draw back on prior knowledge. According to Gibbons, "when you are unable to bring personal knowledge and understanding of a topic to a text, you are effectively robbed of the ability to make use of a key resource for reading: what you already know". Because these ESL students have no personal knowledge of a lot of topics that American authors write about, they often struggle. on top of this they are learning to read, adding a new skill to new content and making it almost impossible for them to understand the text.
There are strategies to combat this difficulty, including picking the right book, with pictures that match the words, or books that have repeated words. However, the "challenge for the teacher is to build up the knowledge and understandings that are relevant to the text the children will read, so that by the time the reader interacts with the text, the text will not be so unfamiliar". I have seen this in my CT's literacy circles, where she will almost give a brief history lesson about the topic of the text and ask for self to text connections before the book is even read. Students will skim the book, looking at pictures and characters, then predicting what the book is going to be about. In sense the students already know what the book is going to be about before they start to read it, so when the come upon a word they do not know they at least can draw upon personal knowledge or knowledge that they acquired before reading the text.