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.