I Read, I Don T Understand, By Hirano

Summary of the Article

The article that I chose for the first summary response is “‘I read, I don’t understand’: refugees coping with academic reading.” written by Hirano (2014).

The article reflects on the hardship and eventual success in reading of seven refugee high school graduates in their first year at a university. Throughout the study the participants were interviewed centering on what was assigned, the participants’ issues with the reading, and how they overcame the issues using various strategies. The students took a variety of first year classes which challenged them.

The reading that was assigned to the students consisted of college appropriate materials. The article states that the group had several problems reading. These

The challenges of L2 learners and the seven refugee students were similar. In the article, the author writes about four different issues facing the students. Two of the issues, language issues and insufficient background knowledge are typical of L2 learners. L2 learners with small vocabularies have difficult reading some texts. “However, if there are many unfamiliar words that are key words, comprehension of the text begins to break down.” (Aebersold & Field, 1997, p. 13). The other issue of insufficient background is something that is noted in our book and part of a class discussion. In the article by Hirano there is a scenario when one of the students assigned reading was Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream speech”. The student was unaware of the historical context being non-American. She did not know that the speech was given during a time of struggle in America. Her lack of schema was like the international students in our class not knowing about the Klu Klux Klan during the poetry reading of a poem about the group.

Another connection can be found from the article by Hill and Flynn (2008). Hill and Flynn (2008, p. 51) mention two questions that the teacher should ask themselves regarding how to pose questions: “(1) Are my questions aligned with my students’ stages of language acquisition? and (2) Am I asking higher-level questions of all my students?” This self-reflection is like professors as they should be aware of in teaching refugee students i.e. providing background knowledge, no