project 2..

Intro

How does being bilingual help you when your reading for context and or content? It helps you in so many ways, like in the way that you can use the other language you know as a sort of thesaurus or translating tool. Our ability to do this comes from our funds of knowledge, from where and when we come from. Different lives, different families, different times and different places lead to how u learn and how u learn to learn and understand all sorts of things. In this case I'm trying to demonstrate how my bilingualism helps me and can help u while reading. I can always use one specific time as an example, I remember when I was in the ninth grade in my English class and we were given an article to read in groups and asked to explain them. There were so many words that were too smart for my group to understand, I then decided to make it easier for them to understand, i read it and then explained it to them in Spanish , they were so glad that they were Hispanics and could use that as a tool to understand what it was they had to learn, thanks to they're second language they were able to complete the work we were asked to do. Then they started to comment to me on how some of the words had root words that came from spanish origins and I saw then that they had gotten the concept of how to use their knowledge and experiences as a sort of reading tool. Hass and Flower talk about how to understand readings and then Moll and Gonzalez talk about a readers backgrounds and how that affects how they learn. Well I plan on creating a bridge between them and showing how u can use your background knowledge to understand readings. I will also use surveys so that students can serve as examples on the advantages of being a bilingual.

Lit review

Hass and Flower said "meaning does not exist in a text but in a reader and the representations they build"(pg.167) but did they ever stop and think about how it is that they build representations or why is it that they came up with a specific meaning for a text? "we do not start with the classroom as the unit of study...We take a "mediated" approach, starting elsewhere, usually studying households"(Moll and Gonzalez pg.158-159). Moll and Gonzalez had a good point to asume that a students knowledge developes from their home and families, but did they think about what it is they use the things they learn at home for in school or during reading? I think that if Hass and Flower,and, Moll and Gonzalez would work together they would have learned to study different aspects of students lifestyles and reading strategies, maybe something like Suresh Canagarajah mentioned " rather than studying the product for descriptions of writing competence, we would study the process of composing in multiple languages."(pg. 590-591) Readers use many techniques when reading, such as note taking and summarizing, well i think that bilingual readers have an extra edge when it comes to reading and i dont think that many people realize that. most people think that it is harmful to be bilingual. i dont see how having an expanded mind and thinking ability hurts you when uderstanding or creating something as creative as writing.

Connection piece
  The article by Moll and Gonzalez talks about how teachers sometimes have a hard trouble teaching students about their reading and writing skills.They also talk about some studies, or experiments teachers did in order to figure out better teaching strategies that would be more suitable to the students by getting to know how a student interacts socially at home with family and friends and also how a cultural background plays a role in a students lifestyle.They found that sometimes bilingul students can understasnd better because of the fact that if they do not quite understand something in english they can translate it into another language they know better and grasp the information better.teachers cn not teach every student the same but they can try and compound many strategies into one lesson and try and get throughto the students .
  Hass and Flower talk about how they made a study on experienced readers and non experienced in order to see how they understood a writing. They found that experienced readers cared more about content than context. A simple text can have very diverse meanings depending on the readers experience and knowlege. readers have to take text after text and give each one meaning then link them together to understand the whole writing, like it says in the article Hass and Flower "..it is helpful to imagine the representations readers build as complex road maps, made up of many nodesof information, each related to others in multiple ways."(pg.168)
  Suresh Canagarajah's article is basically her explaining how and why some people think that it is harmful for students to be bilingual and to come from non english speaking origins, she creates experiments where she studies different students and their different ways of learning to prove that it can in fact be helpful to be bilingual. What i am trying to do is to help prove that what Suresh Canagarajah is saying is true and use Moll and Gonzalez, and Hass and Flower to help me prove it while at the same time showing my idea of  how helpful bilingualism can be when trying to understand a writing.

Methodology
Other than using the three articles to backi up my idea, I will create a survey to hand out to 50 people. In this survey I will ask a couple of questions starting with a simple , Are you bilingual? If the answer is yes I will then continue with a series of questions such as, do you find it useful when you read? do you think it is an advantage or a disadvantage to be bilingual? and finally, how is it helpfull or how does it hurt you? If their answer is no, then i will continue with the questions, do you think it would help you when reading if you were bilingual? How would being bilingual help you or hurt you when reading? I will distrib ute these surveys to random students both male and female. I will collect the data then divide the answeres into most common resposes. These surveys will show the different opinions of different students. After the students answer their surveys i will talk to them about my theory and see if they agree or disagree, or maybe they will give me a different perspective on being a bilingual by telling me about why they think what they think.

Research Data

After I finished with the surveys I was surprised with the answeres that i gathered. Out of the 50 students that i surveyed 38 of them said that they are infact bilingual, but when asked if being bilingual helped them understand what they read , 30 of them said no, that they did not see how that would help them to understand reading something in english. The other 8 said that it does help because they can sometimes translate what they have read and analyze it better, just as i thought. Out of the 12 that were not bilingual 9 of them said that they were better off just speaking english, " it would be confusing to know 2 languages because I could get mixed up or not know how to use the other language as an advantage" a student mentioned. The other 3 said that they saw how the ability of speaking 2 languages could help develop their reading skills. I would have expected for more bilingual sudents to be able and use that as an advantage for reading. I explained to them how i thought being bilingual helps you when reading, a couple of them then realized that they actually do use their bilingualism when reading, they just didn't realize it untill now that they thought about it, maybe it's because most of us bilinguals have been speaking two languages since we were kids  that we do use it to our advantage, we just don't realize it because we do it selfconciously.

Conclusion

The information that I gathered from the surveys that I handed out were very helpful although the outcome was not what I expected. I found that even though there are many students that are bilingual, they do not use it to their advantage, maybe its not that they don't want to or simple don't do it, I think that it is because they do not know how to use that to their advantage. If I were to choose someone to read my essay I think I would choose bilingual readers because this would matter most to them especially if they want to learn how helpful it can be to be bilingual. Wether it be that u were raised speaking a different language other than English because u come from a different ethnic background or simply learned a different language in school. Being bilingual is a Skill that students need to take advantage of.

 Works Cited

Canagarajah, Suresh, and . "Toward a writing pedagogy of sguttling between languages: learning from multilingual writers." college english. 68.6 (2006): 589-603. Print

Hass, Christina, and Linda Flower. "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning." College Composition and Communication. 39.2 (1988): 167-182. Print.

 Moll, Luis C., and Norma Gonzalez. "Lessons from research with Language-Minority children." journal of reading behavior. 26.4 (1994): 156-171. Print.