Adult Publication: The Game of Numbers By: Nick Murray

My husband Nic is a financial representative for Northwestern Mutual and one of

several books that he has read to extend his knowledge in the industry is called The Game of Numbers by a well known author on the subject of financial advising, Nick Murray. The book is primarily about the many different types of prospecting done by financial advisors, which is easy for most adults to understand. However, within the text there are many financial concepts and terms that are beyond my comprehension. An example of this is where Nick Murray explains to a prospect how to calculate his retirement needs based on the amount of annual income per year, number of years that income is required, the assumed rate of return, including inflation while accounting for limiting risks such as market risk, inflation risk, tax risk, and life span risk. Gibbons states that it is important for teachers to teach students to comprehend the value of learning by doing and enhance their comprehension by providing concrete experiences (2002, p. 49). To help myself comprehend the example above I started to think about my mother retiring and needing a certain amount of money to live off of each year, and the fact that my mother is in good health and can live another 25 or 30 years. Making this concrete connection to my mother’s real life situation helped me comprehend Nick Murray’s calculation of retirement income needs.

My purpose for reading The Game of Numbers is that I lack background knowledge in financial concepts and I feel I should have some level of understanding of what my husband Nic does each day and how he makes a difference in one life at a time. I went back to where Nick Murray describes the variety of different risks in calculating retirement needs and I associated the meaning of each word with prior knowledge. For example I associated market risk with the stock market, inflation risk with prices I pay for goods, tax risk with paying taxes, and life span risk with knowing that I could live longer than expected.

In closing, this task was difficult for me. I chose not to pick a text in another language, but rather an adult publication that to me was very foreign and challenging to understand. Identifying effective reading strategies to help ELLs comprehend is vital. “An ESL reader’s failure to activate an appropriate schema during reading may result in various degrees of non-comprehension” (Carrell, 1984, p.333). Literature argues that background knowledge of text has a major impact on whether or not a reader can comprehend text (Anderson& Pearson, 1984; Bransford, Stein & Shelton, 1984; Kintsch & van Kijk, 1978; Wilson & Anderson, 1986). Thus, it is imperative for English as a second language (ESL) students’ schema to be activated and build schema is essential to help them become successful readers and writers. To help ELLs learn new information it is very important to find out what they already know which demands specific preparation to find out what their previous educational experiences were.

Gibbons, P. (2002). Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning: teaching second language learners in the mainstream classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Navarro, A. M. (2008). Building Schema for English Language Learners. Online Submission, Retrieved from EBSCOhost.