Week 7 Blog Kelsi Vidal

The comprehension articles this week were informational and again brought up comprehension strategies that we sometimes take for granted.  There are so many factors that go into comprehension while reading and these are connections that students must make to make sense of what they are reading.  The Tompkins text brings up three factors that are crucial to comprehension (text structure, genres or categories, and content of text)  which I completely agree with. For example, if a student is reading a fantasy book and takes everything for face value that he/she reads, what they take away from the story and how they apply their new knowledge will be skewed.  A person must first understand the implications behind each genre before they can comprehend their meaning.  The context of what a person is reading is extremely important in comprehension and if ignored can affect comprehension.  Also, knowing the elements of a story (plot, characters, setting, point of view, and theme) and how they fit together is imperative when approaching comprehension.  I'm sure we have all read the fairy tales (for example The Three Little Pigs) that have many versions of the story and are all told from a different point of view.  I have read Three Little Pigs stories from the points of the pigs, the wolf, a narrator and each one is a little different depending on whose point of view it is told from.  The character can completely change the context of the story and our understanding of the events that have taken place in accordance with their point of view.  

In the Gibbons text I really liked all of the examples they gave of things we can do that ELL students would struggle with.  The sentences written with jumbled letters, missing letters, and misspelled words at the beginning of chapter 5 was easy for me to decipher because I had background knowledge and was able to fill in the information.  This proves to me that having background knowledge is an essential part of reading and another obstacle for ELL because they must acquire and consciously learn things that we have inherently gained through exposure.  I also saw connections to the Tompkins chapter we read when they talked about knowledge of the content or topic and knowledge of the kind of genre.  When we see the headings "Bank Robbers Hold Hostages," "Area Manager required, permanent position," and "The Sly Cat and the Clever Mouse," we are able to predict not only what these titles content will be about but also the nature of the title by the way it is written.  Most of us know that these would be a newspaper article, job ad, and a book title but for people who did not grow up in this culture or are just learning English these titles would hold no meaning. Context clues and the way (format) they are written has no significance for beginning ELL students and I imagine this would be  very frustrating for students to not be able to understand what they were reading because they did not understand the context.  This chapter basically says to me that background knowledge and the context of what something is written is invaluable!