Final Project

Reflection of Student's Biliteracy Development

            A strange thing happens when a student speaks one language and is taught in an academic setting in another language. Even if a student comes to school with some exposure to the new language, the strong connection to the first language is ignored and the child is expected to have the exact same capabilities to learn to read and write as his native English speaking peers. Such is the case with the student I have been working with. He came to kindergarten speaking some English, his second language. Because of this previous exposure to English, he was placed in a minimally supported classroom. That and the fact that he attends a monolingual school left his strong oral language skills in Spanish to the side, being unused in his development of reading and writing in English. Now that he is in first grade, this student has shown the results of his L1’s lack of involvement in his academic learning, while still showing great progress in literacy that is being taught in his second language.

            When assessing his speaking abilities, this student clearly showed stronger abilities in his L1. Although some speech issues existed, they were determined to be separate from any language issues. He mostly has problems pronouncing the /s/ in both languages. He continues to receive support for this issue. Otherwise, his oral language skills in Spanish are what would be considered fluent for his age. The only possible gap is in academic vocabulary. As he continues to learn content solely in English, his use of vocabulary and academic language will increase in English and may surpass his speaking ability in Spanish.

            This student’s speaking skills in English are fairly high for his age and exposure to English. I still see some evidence of a stronger basis in Spanish, as he does do some code switching, but his English skills are catching up, and with a lack of instruction in Spanish, I foresee his oral English skills surpassing his oral Spanish skills.

            Writing and reading for this student follow a similar pattern. Obviously, since he has been taught to read and write only in English, he is much more proficient in English. He has a strong sense of phonics in English, and this has helped him become fairly proficient in reading and writing. However, I do see some issues with reading, because his English background is not quite at a level where he always notices meaning and syntax errors in his reading. He mixed up words, such as run/ran (present/past tense verbs) and third person singular verbs leaving off the final –s. Luckily this hasn’t affected his ability to find meaning in the texts as he has been able to recall details of stories and make deeper connections to the texts. In Spanish, this student struggled with simple texts. He used picture cues to read some of the text, but did not pick up on the pattern of high frequency words, even when I gave him the initial sentence that set the pattern for the text. He also made guesses at words and sentences that didn’t match any of the letters of the text, but did go along with the theme of the story. This tells me that he really focuses on reading strategies he has learned in English and is transferring that knowledge to Spanish. He just hasn’t had the specific phonics instruction needed to read in Spanish.

His reading abilities in English have transferred to his writing in English, and to an extent, in Spanish. He can write high frequency words correctly, such as I, see, the, big, and is. He has a good sense of approximated spelling for the words movies, so, funny, and wish. He spelled them movs, sow, fne, and wesh, respectively. He did show some code switching. He used see instead of watch in the sentence I see TV all the time. He also dictated The Wishing Rock it’s so funny although he wrote The Wishing Rock is so funny. Both are examples of Spanish grammar being used in his English writing.

Because this student is a highly proficient Spanish speaker, he has the language skills necessary to write meaningful stories in Spanish. He has learned to use his knowledge of letter sound correspondence, which was taught to him in English, to record some of the letters sounds in his writing, but he doesn’t know any of the letters that have different sounds in Spanish, such as the vowel sounds and the /j/ in the word jugando. This gap has made it difficult for an outside reader to decode his writing, and it has affected the student’s motivation to write.

Like most ELLs, this student has the capacity to do as well as his native English speaking peers. Unfortunately, even though he first learned another language and now speaks two languages, without formal instruction in Spanish he may not reach proficiency in both of the languages throughout all the domains.

Instructional Plan

            It is difficult to develop a plan for a child who has only been taught literacy in his L2. Fortunately, this student possesses many literacy skills that he has tried out when I observed him reading and writing in his L1. The areas where he is lacking are fairly small gaps that can be filled in with a little instruction. If this student was in a dual immersion setting, the focus for this student in Spanish would be phonics development and spelling patterns. In English, the focus for this student would be oral language development. Although he is doing well with his oral language development, his reading and writing will improve with more background knowledge in English.

            In the literacy block, this student would have extended focus on phonics work in Spanish. Specifically, I would work on the Spanish syllables and spelling patterns. From the article, Teaching Literacy in Spanish, I would create a personal word wall for this student based on frequently used words and words illustrating initial consonant and vowel sounds. This will give him a jump start on the basics of Spanish phonics. I can see this student quickly being able to connect this work to reading and writing. As this student is working on the beginning phonics of Spanish, I would give him comprehension lessons in Spanish with read alouds. Since he has such a high level of oral proficiency in Spanish he is capable of reaching deeper into texts that may be beyond his reading level.

In English, I would continue with the current path of instruction that he already receives. He is at a transitional level, and is receiving instruction that focuses on comprehension and decoding longer words. In addition to this instruction, I would add read alouds to enhance his oral language skills, because according to the article, Teaching for Comprehension and Language Development of English Learners: Insights from Reading Recovery, choosing a text with a purpose is crucial to students’ language development. Therefore, this will give him the background knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary necessary to fill in the gaps of meaning and syntax that he had shown to have some trouble with in English.

To work on this student’s writing in Spanish, I would start with modeled and then interactive writing to show him the spelling patterns in Spanish, especially those that differ from English. Since he already knows how to record as many sounds as he hears in a word, it will be a matter of connecting the phonics work he does in reading to writing. This can be done with writing work that directly goes with his reading, so in addition to a writing workshop setting, I would focus some of his reading instruction on writing about the text he just read.

In English, this student is doing really well with his writing. He is progressing at a normal rate compared to his peers. I would continue the same type of instruction as he is receiving now, which is developing story structure, adding details, spelling snap words (high frequency words) correctly, finding all the sounds in a word, using capitals and punctuation correctly, editing, and revising. The code switching he does is minimal and does not interfere with the meaning of the text, so I would have a discussion about the differences in English and Spanish

            After working with this student for almost 2 years, I feel I really know him, but I wonder how well it would work out for a student at this grade level to go to a bilingual or dual immersion school. Would he be able to catch up to his peers who have been in this program since the beginning of kindergarten? Would he be discouraged by being one of the few students at a lower level of academic Spanish?

            Because this student is not in a bilingual/DI program, if I had to make a plan for him right now, I would involve his parents. Knowing that this student struggles with his parents to do homework at home, I would suggest to his parents that they take a more fun approach to teaching their child to read and write in Spanish. Instead of drilling and forcing him to read books or write in Spanish, they should read books, songs and poems to him in Spanish and play games that can build phonemic awareness. I would make a book with the songs and poems in Spanish from the Ciento venticinco poemas and Songs in Spanish documents. I would also make games from the Spanish Word Study Games document, altering a couple games to fit the needs of this student, such as making the Lotería or Patas Contentas game to reinforce letter sounds.

            It is very unfortunate that students such as the one I have been working with don’t always have the option of being in a bilingual or dual immersion program. This student has the capacity and motivation to thrive as a bilingual student. I plan on presenting his parents with the information I have gathered about biliteracy, and I hope that I can help them work with their child to give him at least a minimal amount of instruction to help him become truly biliterate.

Reading Analysis

I have seen a lot of similarities in this student’s reading and writing. For him, speed is equivalent to skill. In most aspects of his academics, he loves to be the first one done with an activity. In both his reading and writing, a major teaching point has been slowing down. We praise him when he takes his time and he can see that slowing down creates a higher quality of writing and reading. Because he can see this, I haven’t thought of this as a problem until I had him read in Spanish. He reads very little in Spanish. He does own a few picture books in Spanish that he can read, but I wonder what he is actually reading and what he has memorized. The books I chose for him to read were fairly low leveled. Our school does not own leveled books in Spanish, so I tried to match his level in English to a similarly difficult text in Spanish, or a lower level. This is where I saw him use his speed to read. Although he was able to read very few words, such as mi, el, los, the majority of his reading consisted of him making up sentences that sometimes fit the story or other times matched the first letters of the words on the pages. The wonderful thing about this student is that, even though he had a difficult time reading the books, he pushed forward and insisted on keeping these new books in his book box, where students keep their books for their reading class.

In English, this student is at the transitional level (level 11 at our school). He has come a long way since the beginning of the year. He gets really excited to read new books and he does well reading in small groups, one on one and independently. The only problem is that he does not like to read at home. We send students home with a book or two that they have been reading at school, and from talking to his mother, he is very reluctant to read at home and it has become quite a battle. I find this odd, since he does like to read, but I feel that it has more to do with a power struggle between him and his parents rather than his attitude towards reading.

This student has a good grasp of the meaning of the texts he has read. In English, he is able to recall events of the story and go beyond the literal meanings. He has a good sense of inferring. In Spanish, because he was unable to read most of the story, but being it was a picture book, he was able to give a short recall of the story with little detail.

This was interesting to observe. For a student at level 9 (current instructional level), he is really getting to the point where fluency becomes more of a goal, because he is able to decode texts at a much faster rate. In English, his desire to read fast helps the pace, and his accuracy is fairly high. I noticed that he kind of uses a monotone voice when reading, but it isn’t much different than his regular speaking intonation.  I have noticed that he sometimes speaks with a robotic tone and that transfers to his reading. He does attend to punctuation and can reread a sentence with some inflections of his voice. In Spanish, he read with the same fluency as in English, although the accuracy was very low.

Since we have known about this student’s need for speed, we have really been having him work at slowing down and checking for meaning. He does notice when he has made an error that has caused the meaning to be compromised. He tends to skip errors that are minor. His persistence and his love for speed actually help him in his reading. He doesn’t get stuck on a word and linger. He continues to read, and when he notices he made a mistake or if he has figured out the word he skipped, he goes back and reads the whole sentence.

In Spanish, he used two noticeable strategies. He used meaning clues. Looking at the pictures, he read words that would match the pictures. Other times he read words that began with the same letters as what he was saying. I look forward to coming up with a plan for him, because he was so excited to have Spanish books and if he could get a start on some basic phonics of Spanish, I know he will be able to use the other reading cues to successfully read in Spanish.

Writing Analysis

This student is developmentally higher in his L2 than in his L1. This is obviously because of the writing instruction he has received in English. Having worked with him for two years, though, I have seen how he has transitioned in his writing. He used to use a lot of Spanish words in his English writing, but as he learned the English vocabulary, he has stopped using Spanish words. His grammar, although fairly simple as many 1^st graders’ work can be, sometimes comes across as Spanish-like.

In Spanish, he was very reluctant to write, since he was unsure of how to write many words. He doesn’t have a bank of high frequency words like he does in English, which made the process much longer and more frustrating to have to stretch out every word. When working with him, it was difficult to get him to plan his story in Spanish. He wanted to tell me his story in English, and when I asked him how he would say it in Spanish, he took some prompting to talk about his story. In English, he told me his story was about going to the park and playing Frisbee in a building with his cousin. When he retold the story in Spanish, he would only say, “Yo jugaba con Jessica en el parque.” I tried to get him to talk about the Frisbee and the building without giving him the vocabulary, but he was unable to give more details to his story.

In English, this student has some great skills that make his writing fairly easy to read. He knows many sight words and his invented spelling conveys most sounds in a word. I noted some code switching in his writing. He used see instead of watch, when talking about watching TV and movies. Also, when he read his writing to me, he read a sentence as, “It’s so funny.” He pronounced It’s like /is/ and it seems like he is combing Spanish and English because he dropped the subject and pronounced it almost like the Spanish word es.

It was difficult to assess this student’s organization of his writing. At this grade level, fairly simple stories with one or two sentences per page are expected. What is expected of first grade writing is to have the concept of writing a story (usually a personal narrative) that includes a beginning, middle and end. Also, because of the simplicity in his writing, it was difficult to gauge the discourse, but one could argue that his use of simple sentences is characteristic of English. However, when prompted to write more, he wanted to make all of his writing flow into one sentence.

Student's Oral Language

After meeting with this student and having worked with him for over a year, I have been able to get a lot of good background knowledge of his language development and I have continuously assessed his oral language proficiency.

            Because of this student’s issues with speech that had been identified at an early age, he has been participating in Head Start since he was three years old. Head Start was conducted in English, so I could consider him to be a simultaneous bilingual student, although Head Start was only a few times a week for a couple hours, so he may not have had enough exposure to English at that age. He did come to school speaking and understanding English. Up until the beginning of this school year, he did a lot of code switching. He mostly used y instead of and, but a lot of vocabulary that wasn’t commonly used in school would be spoken in Spanish, such as abuelo/a and tío/a. After meeting with him this week, I didn’t see this type of code switching. Right now, he is still dominant in Spanish, although he does speak English with nearing fluency. What I did see during our meeting is that he does do some copying. Although technically correct in English, when showing possession, he sometimes showed it by saying, “I went to the house of my cousin, Jessica.” There were times when he did form the possession correctly in English. He did say, “…Jessica’s mom.”

            In Spanish, he speaks with the fluency of a monolingual Spanish speaking student at his grade level. There were times when he did some code switching, though it usually occurred when talking about school related topics. One example from our conversation about what he likes at school was: “Me gusta recess y gym.” Since he learned these words in an English only setting, it makes sense that he would use the English word.

            As far as use of either language, this student usually speaks English at school. He likes to speak Spanish with me when we discuss non-school related topics. He also speaks Spanish with his good friend, who is also a Spanish speaker. There are two other Spanish speaking girls in the class, and he sometimes speaks Spanish to them. I have noticed this from observing him in class and out at recess.

            This student’s overall oral language skills have shown much improvement since the past year. His most recent ACCESS scores from being tested in December of 2009 as a kindergartner show him to be at a 3.8. This was lower than I had expected him to be at, because he came into kindergarten speaking English pretty well. I wonder if his speech problems were a source of his lower score, though. Now, though we don’t have the scores from the ACCESS test yet, I expect him to be much nearer to a 5 or 6. This is because I know what the speaking portion of the test is like and it is not too difficult to achieve a high score. What I do see, however, is that he most closely matches a level 4, possibly 5, because his level of complexity is not quite at a proficient level. He is getting really close. When asked about his writing, he was making a How-To book about making raisins. He used simple sentences in the present tense (We put out the raisins. Then, we leave them in the sun. And then we eat them.) He did use transitional words, and the grammar was correct. The meaning of this topic was never an issue. I did ask him to explain more about putting out the raisins. He wanted to say that they put out the grapes, which he does know, but he was having a hard time explaining that they need to be lying flat, so they could dry evenly. This is a complex concept for a first grader to explain, but he did get through it using some Spanish.

            This student’s level of oral proficiency in Spanish is at a 6. He had no problems or hesitations when he was telling me about a party he went to. Although, he didn’t use too many long or complex sentences (I had to prompt him for more information as he was telling me the story), I felt he was talking at a level that is appropriate for a first grader. 

Introducción de mi estudiante

            El estudiante a quien voy a observar es un niño del primer grado. Seleccioné este estudiante porque su familia me mostró interés en enseñarle leer en español en casa. Al terminar las observaciones, crear las lecciones y crear un plan para este niño quiero tener algo que puedo dar a sus padres para que puedan enseñarle leer y escribir en español. El niño tiene experiencias en hablar inglés e español en casa porque su padre y otros parientes hablan inglés pero su mamá habla poco inglés. Entonces ella casi siempre habla español con su niño. Este niño asiste una escuela monolingüe pero tiene muchos amigos con quien habla español. El asistía al programa de Head Start porque tenía problemas en hablar español. Se graduó del programa de habla y lenguaje al final del año pasado. Algunos de los intereses de este niño son, jugar con sus amigos, jugar en la computadora y asistir fiestas con su familia. Tengo muchas ganas de trabajar más con él porque trabaja bien y tiene mucha motivación con sus estudios.