Challenges of reading an unfamiliar book

For this entry, I chose a Thanksgiving book entitled Squanto and the First Thanksgiving by Joyce Kessel and Lisa Donze and The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons. There is a rationale why I chose these two books. As someone whose roots are not from this country, I have always been fascinated with the celebration of Thanksgiving and the carving of pumpkins during Halloween. We don't have Thanksgiving in my home country. Though we celebrate All Hallow's Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, we don't carve pumpkins for Halloween. This is something that I share with millions of second language learners in this country. For the Thanksgiving book, the four cultural aspects that will affect the comprehension of the book will be: (1) Who are the Native American people before colonial times, (2) Who are the Pilgrims and why did they migrate from England to this country? (3) seasons in the country, (4) food and crop available in this country. To provide scaffolding for the second language learner to learn this wonderful tradition of Thanksgiving, a teacher can use a compare and contrast methodology to provide context and at the same time, to draw familiar experiences and traditions that they have in their home country. Before a teacher can even start teaching about Thanksgiving and reading this book, he/she needs to ask the second language learners about a big, national tradition in their home country that they celebrate and find out the history of it and how the people celebrate it. Only by doing this can the second language learners find connection with a big, national holiday such as Thanksgiving. The same teaching methodology applies with the second book that I have chosen which is The Pumpkin Book. As I have mentioned earlier, I didn't grow up carving pumpkins during Halloween or even go trick-or-treating. I had a different celebration of this holiday. Halloween is a vigil night to prepare for All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. All Saints' Day is a commemoration of saints and on All Souls' Day, my family members and I would trek to the cemetery to honor our deceased loved ones. Thus, if  the book The Pumpkin Book will be read to a second language learner, the cultural aspects that will affect the learner's understanding of it will be: (1) What's so special about the pumpkin? (2) Why go to pumpkin patches and pick out a pumpkin? (3) Why carve a pumpkin? (4) Why does it occur only during the fall? Again, a teacher can use the compare and contrast methodology to provide scaffolding to the second language learner. I usually use this strategy with my adult ELLs and it works. As Wong-Fillmore (1985) writes, "prior experiences serve as the contexts within which the language being used is to be understood" (as qtd. in Gibbons, 2004).

Reference:

Gibbons, P. (2004). Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning: Teaching second language learners in the mainstream classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.