I was fortunate enough last Friday to get the opportunity to preview the new Target Field. This is the scoreboard of that beautiful new ball park. While looking around and reflecting on how much I love baseball, I thought about all of the different sports there are in the world and how many of them differ from one place to the next.
But, as we saw with the Olympics this year, many different countries play the same or similar sports. While I don't know the rules to cricket, I've seen it played. It is a similar bat and ball sport to baseball. Another example of similar sports is le petanque in France is similar to bowling.
What does this do have to do with literacy? Plenty. Just look at this scoreboard and you'll understand. Pretend that you are from a different country and you go to a baseball game. You are unfamiliar with baseball but know that it is nicknamed the great American pastime. When you get to the field and the game starts, you are completely lost. You look to the scoreboard for help and you don't understand that either. On the left of the screen you might notice that next to Cuddyer (which you deduce is a player's last name) it says RF. What does that mean? and why are two of the four squares yellow in the little diamond diagram on the top of the screen? As you watch, you start to understand that if a ball is caught, the player who is running has to leave the field but you still don't know how the game is scored or why the guy (who you can only assume is some sort of referee) is being yelled at by 40,000 fans. You would have very little idea what is going on unless someone who was baseball-literate was there to explain it to you.
This same idea can be transferred to literacy in a foreign language. You can look at words and make certain assumptions that may or may not be right. These connections are an important learning strategy, even if they are wrong. However, the fact is, unless you have someone there to explain some things and help you understand, you will rarely ever become fully literate.
P.S. For any Twins fans out there, I thought this would be a nice tribute to Joe Nathan (the guy on the screen) who is not with us this season due to an injury. I am very sad, but hope he will be back next season.
This was very interesting to read because I have never been to a sporting event where I don't understand the rules of the game or what the different things on the scoreboard means. Sometimes I think I take for granted understanding the ins and outs of sporting events, but put me at some other type of event and I may be clueless. Foreign languages, for example, are very difficult for me and if I don't have the English translation right there, I don't typically know what the word means. I was not very good in my language courses through high school.
ReplyDeleteWe have talked about this before, but if you are making wrong connections, is that going to hinder your learning in the long run? I couldn't agree more with the idea of having someone there to explain things you don't understand. That works for all subjects. There will be times when some students will get a concept right away and others may not. This could be a great teaching moment when you pair the students up and they work together. This works not only on the academic concepts you are trying to get the students to grasp, but it also works on their social skills and communication skills with each other. Hopefully by doing this your students will become more literate in the area of study for the day and you are able to move forward.
I love this deconstruction of a baseball game. When I started reading your post, I thought you were going to talk about the "universal" language of sports, but instead you wrote about what baseball would look/sound like to an "outsider" and how s/he might decipher the game after careful study. When you consider the thinking/comprehension strategies we've studied this semester, which do you think would be most useful in figuring out baseball? Schema? inference? Questioning? Other? Do you think the same strategies would apply if someone fluent in English was trying to decipher a passage written in French?
ReplyDeleteOn a totally different tangent, you remarked on the fact that many cultures have similar forms of sports (baseball/cricket; bowling/le petanque). Have you thought about the pancake? If not, please do. Does France have a pancake? Mexico? Sweden? Russia? India? What can we conclude from this observation?