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.