Entry #7

I used the AIMSweb fluency assessment with two English language learners.  The first is Jim who speaks Russian as his first language.  He read smoothly and followed the punctuation cues.  He had a difficult time pronouncing words that had a silent e at the end and these errors indicate that he relied on visual cues that did not provide meaning. In the word determined, he pronounced the long vowel sound for i.  In gossiped he did the same thing and pronounced the long vowel sound for the i.  In the word dove (the bird) he pronounced the long sound of the o.  On the other hand, there were a couple of instances where he made self-corrections, which indicated that he was making meaning as he read. Other words he stumbled on were tulips, which he called tupils and the word though which he said thought.  It was apparent that Jim used meaning cues as well.  Some of his words were incorrect, but he still made the sentence meaningful (e.g. “the bird eagerly pecked at it” but he said “the bird even picked at it”).  The last thing I noticed was a few times he left out the articles the and a. Jim could benefit from direct instruction regarding the long vowel sounds. Also, he could benefit from teacher modeling how to self-monitor when reading to see if the words make sense.  Then, he can practice reading aloud and continuing to learn how to self-monitoring. Of course, in order to self monitor he will need to have some background knowledge to ensure he has the tools necessary to make sense of the reading.  When I asked him if he knew what tulips were, he had no idea so no wonder he didn’t try to self correct the word.

The second student I assessed was Ben whose first language is Spanish.  He read in a choppy manner and stopped to sound out larger words.  The larger words posed many problems, as he could not correctly sound them out and used visual cues to help him with the words.  For example, determined became detimed, and gossiped sounded like go-ship.  Ben also frequently substituted the /h/ sound for the /j/ in the word Jayto.  Knowing that this is the pronunciation in his first language is important to help him identify the differences between languages and become more aware of his pronunciations.  He also struggled with meaning miscues when he substituted thirty for thrifty, ace for ash and even substituted a nonsense word of morsey for morsel.  He also said the word how instead of saying who and instead of reading the word gave, he said have.  Some ways to help Ben would be to continue working with sight words.  I don’t think he was even trying to sound out the word gave or who.  Instead, he automatically substituted the same words repeatedly so I think he must have these confused. If we work on using verbal cues, it will help in with this area.  We will also continue to work on practicing the English pronunciations for /j/.