Several months ago, Ubaldo´s son called saying his father wanted to learn to read. His real dream, however, was to learn to read in Spanish, his native language. It just so happened that a tutor fluent in Spanish was available to help him. That was me.
He told me at the intake interview that he went to school during a few years in Mexico but very intermittently. As a child he worked in the fields and around the age of ten, came to Texas where he worked full time and so his schooling ended.
In the first lesson, I wondered why he had asked to learn to read in Spanish. It soon became obvious that he knew all the sounds of the letters both consonants and vowel sounds. Spanish is a phonetic language and there is hardly any variation in sounds of the letters or spelling. It seemed like he already knew how to read.
In the second lesson, however, I noticed that he never stopped at periods or commas or even the ends of words. What he was doing was reading the syllables of the words. He could not answer even the simplest question about what he was “reading.”
I began to investigate how to teach comprehension. In the meantime, he got a library card and met Lizbeth Perez-Cazares, the bilingual library Assistant at the Adrian District Library. She guided him to the easiest children’s books and each week he brought one to read to me. Suddenly he began to understand what “reading” meant. Ideas were conveyed and it was enjoyable to understand them. It didn´t bother him that the basic books were written for children.
Ubaldo has graduated to the youth section and now is able to tell what a whole book is about. Recently, he started to learn to read in English. Knowing how to read in Spanish has given him a good head start and he knows the joy that reading can bring.
-By Sister Carol Gross