“Ellis” is a 9th grade student. His first language is Spanish, and Spanish is the language spoken exclusively at home. I tested him on a 6th grade passage on earthquakes on which he scored at a instructional level. The 5th grade passage called “Shark Facts” was at his independent level. He had 20 errors out of 467 words, making his accuracy rate 95 percent. Three of his errors were self-corrected quickly – he read 30,000 as 3,000, “their” as “the”, and omitted “with” – and omitted three other words. None of these omissions interfered with meaning. He inserted “the” into the sentence “there are sharks in all the four oceans”.
Most of his miscues were visual – he tried to look at the words and either come up with a word that either contained similar sounds or just attempted to sound the word out, whether it ended up as a word he knew or not.
- “own-nee-kay” for “unique”
- “sar-ing” for “surroundings”
- “equality” for “actually”
- “unlike” for “unique”
- “quality” for “actually”
- “granitely” for “gradually”
- “especial” for “species”
- “plant” for “plankton”
- “ground” for “around”
He also made two structure miscues – “special” for “typical” and “have” for “are”.
It is interesting to note that Ellis did not make any meaning miscues, other than those that he self-corrected. It seems that Ellis is not making use of context clues as he reads, but is more likely reading word by word. I find it interesting that he didn’t know the word “actually”, since “actualmente” is a Spanish word that is similar in appearance and meaning (though the meaning is not identical). I have not ever received a straight answer on how proficient Ellis is in reading/writing Spanish (though I have asked many times), but this may provide a clue. Very few of his errors seem to reflect his first language, such as inserting the definite article before “all four oceans”, which I think indicates that he really does read pretty much word by word. His reading was slow and fairly halting in places, but would pick up in others. It took him seven minutes to read the passage. A huge thing Ellis seems to be lacking is vocabulary.
Ellis moved to the school district from Mexico in the fall of 2008, and his speaking skills reflect that he is still learning to speak the language, so it is not surprising that he struggles in his reading. He needs a lot of help in expanding his vocabulary, as the several of the words he read were unfamiliar to him. In teaching him this vocabulary, he should also be taught how to use context clues to help him figure out unfamiliar words, since he did not do so in his readings. He also needs work and instruction in fluency.
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