ELL Case Study

Zulayka Adamson

Theory and Practice of Literacy Instruction

Reader Case Study

June 21, 2017

Student Background/Profile

I was able to meet a student named Fernanda who is currently enrolled in kindergarten. This is her first year at the charter school I completed my observations at. The particular geographic region in which I completed my field observation at has a large tight knit Latino community. Many of the students who attend the school live in the area or are also bused in from various areas within Manhattan. On my first day of observation, I spoke with the lead teacher of the class and she confirmed that Fernanda was a first generation American and Spanish is her first language and the primary language spoken at home. Like many of her classmates, her parents are unable to assist with school work or reading along with their child due to the language barrier. Despite the challenges of learning English, Fernanda has shown a great level of responsibility and persistence in mastering English. Early Childhood education are the informative years in which students make significant gains academically and form habits with education which they use for the remainder of their education.

Part of the kindergarten curriculum at the school is the implementation of morning meeting. During this meeting, students sharpen their everyday skills such as talking about the weather, reciting the days of the week, learning their numbers and telling time. Due to the large population of Latino students, the curriculum implements learning these activities in dual language. I watched eagerly as students recited the days of the week in Spanish and English. This fun and engaging song provides students like Fernanda a sense of comfort and acceptance in addition to teaching some classmates a new language. Watching Fernanda during this point of the day provided me a sense of hope as she was always excited to participate with her fellow classmates. Each day, students rotated the responsibilities and assist with leading the various aspects of the morning meeting i.e. taking attendance, directing students to the calendar and calling upon their classmates to answer various questions.

During instruction, Fernanda was one of the students who didn’t really participate in class discussion much. In fact, sometimes when she was called upon, she struggled to have the courage to provide an answer whether right or wrong. One of my observations was she typically answered questions or stated words in a very low voice and with a sense of hesitation. During that time, I always used it as a moment to highlight her by giving her words of encouragement. While observing the teacher’s practices, typically reading assignments are broken down into three different days. This practice provides students the opportunity to read the material as a read-along and have a discussion followed by reading independently and completing worksheets and/or a written assignment. During one of my observations, the teacher read a passage about a student’s first day of school. Students could discuss their first day of school and on the second day, they reread the passage independently and worked on a letter to a student who will be in kindergarten to give them tips on how to be ready for school. It was a great way to get them excited and creativity flowing while they are working on something exciting that they may relate to our feel passionate about.

SOLOM’s Observation

            Fernanda scored a phase 2 on the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. Her score was 16, on the comprehension portion, she can understand most of what is said, however at a slower than normal speed of talking much like her reading capabilities. She uses the finger tracking technique and sounds out many of the words using the letters sounds when she is reading to breakdown the word. She can comprehend a conversation, however, sometimes she asks you to repeat what you are saying in order for her to decipher the conversation. At times, you can notice she is nodding her head as a form of her confirming her comprehension or a signal that she is repeating the words back to herself to interpret the information.

            Regarding her fluency, during larger group discussions, she tends to become shy. However, once in a smaller group of peers, she is open to having dialogue and giving feedback that relates to the topic. Though she is on the higher end of fluency, at times she takes moments of pauses as a signal that she is looking for the correct word or expression to use. One of Fernanda’s biggest struggles, is the use of pronouns and past tense. When having a recap of her weekend or talking referencing one of her fellow classmates, she for gets to include –ed at the end and refers to classmates as “her”. During morning breakfast, Fernanda was telling me a story of a game they played and she stated “her won the game and her was happy”. As a Spanish speaker, I noticed that at times when you translate some phrases to English, it tends to be quite confusing in regards to pronouns hence Fernanda’s struggle.

            During reading assignments, the students had pronunciation problems to some words and typically used pictures to try to figure out the word. When she had issues with pronouncing words she would stop and look up at me as a sign of her request for help. I would then ask her which word did it remind her of and then follow up with asking her to sound out each letter and say it together to form the word. After a couple of sessions, Fernanda began to simply sound out words on her own which showed a significant sign of improvement in her reading.

            The passages I utilized with Fernanda were from the common core text book. I noticed that many of the novels consisted of repetition of words which I later found out was a technique for younger students to remember words. Sometimes when Fernanda read the passages, she would repeat an incorrect word that was similar to a word that she previously seen in the passage. The words would become a bit obscure and she would flip words however she would correct herself and reread the sentence to affirm her understanding of the text.

Activities

When I first met Fernanda, she was a bit shy and was very quiet and apprehensive of working with me. To ease her comfort, I called upon one of her fellow classmates to sit in on our session. Jacob also was an English Language Learner student; however, he is more advanced in the English language and reading than Fernanda. After our first session, she lightened up and looked forward to working with me and even suggesting various activities she liked to do upon completing a reading assignment. Her reading has improved tremendously, during one of the final activities we worked on, she was ecstatic to put together a written component to share with her fellow classmate what she learned. During the writing, she had a few errors but they were common errors that even native English speakers would struggle with. Instead of correcting her as she wrote the words, I allowed her to read the two sentences to me and ask her if she was sure about the spelling of the word. She would then read back the word and look at me a bit confused. I would ask her to sound out the word or I would sound out the word for her and she would provide me with the correct letters to work on developing the correct spelling.

Recommendations and Reflection

            When working with a ELL student, I think it is very important that after each reading lesson, students are sharpening their oral and written skill by completing a writing assignment. In respect to Fernanda’s future coursework, I would encourage the resource teacher and the lead teacher in the classroom to incorporate an increase of books to fuel her learning capabilities and expand her vocabulary. After chatting with her, I realized that she had an older brother at home in which she could potentially rely upon for assistance at home to read. At the charter school, a zip lock book method allows students to utilize the library and bring home books each night to read. In addition, a recent trip to the library with students encouraged students to go out on with family to look for books to read.

            In addition to encouraging book reading, I think it would be vital to incorporate additional lessons that adds the usage of flash cards to encourage student learning in a fun way.  After viewing the video on fluency recently, the professor in the video mentioned schools introducing students to poems. I believe poems and fables provides students a great opportunity to work on their phonics as well as expand their vocabulary while learning a lesson on integrity. When I chose various passages for Fernanda to read, I found that she was always drawn to pieces that illustrated common everyday lessons and things that were common to her experiences and her culture. It is important for us to be aware of the various needs of our students and finding ways to include everyone and making them feel like they are also celebrated in the classroom. Observing Fernanda made me aware of the challenges of students who are ELL students.