ELL Case Study

Sarah Kovalenko

EDLI 635

Dr. Hsu

ELL Case Study

Dena is an adorable third grader at Gan Yeladim Bais Yaakov in Jerusalem. She is an Israeli, yet her parents are originally from the States, and moved to Israel before Dena was born. She grew up among Israelis and all her friends and teachers speak Hebrew, so Hebrew is her first language. However, it is very important to her parents that she speak English correctly and fluently. Therefore, they sent her to this specific school, since they cater to such girls; they have the proper staff, programs and tools to help girls like Dena learn the English language.

Dena is a quick and motivated learner. Over the past few years at Gan Yeladim, she picked up the skills to decode words, read with average fluency, and write age appropriate words. She can read a text given to her with minimal mistakes and she can write words and sentences correctly. However, Dena has great difficulty when it comes to comprehension. She reads, but cannot fully understand what she is reading. She understands some details, yet she misses important parts of the text because of her inability to comprehend the reading. She cannot identify the main components of the text, such as the storyline or main idea. After reading a story, she is unable to answer literal or evaluative questions.

Because of her comprehension issues, Dena has little interest in reading. She is not motivated to keep reading. She views reading as boring, since it is just a jumble of words that mean little to her. She needs the proper assistance so that she can build her comprehension skills. She must want to read so that she can get the practice she needs. She’s a good reader, and once her comprehension skills are strengthened, she will become a great reader.

Dena also has some difficulty with spelling. She is used to Hebrew, where words are spelled pretty much the way they sound. In English, the pronunciation of a word can be entirely different from the way it sounds, so she finds this new and challenging. For example, she often misreads words with the ‘gh’ since the ‘gh’ combination may be one of several sounds. When she hears a word that is a homophone, such as “through”/” threw”, she has trouble writing the correct spelling of the word.

A great benefit that Dena has is tremendous support from her parents and family. Since her English education is extremely important to them, they have a positive attitude toward her learning. Therefore, Dena displays a similar attitude; she strives to do well. Her parents are eager to assist her with any homework or assignment that she needs to do. They encourage her to practice and to excel. This factor plays a crucial role in Dena’s learning experience.

          Fortunately, I was able to interact with Dena one on one. This gave me clear insight about her strong points, her needs and struggles, and her progress. For a reading activity, I had Dena read an excerpt from the book James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. She had an easy time reading the story. She pronounced the words correctly, and read with decent fluency and expression. However, she had trouble decoding many of the words. After she read to me, I asked her to retell the story and this was difficult for her. She stated some correct details, but she missed the main idea of the story. She did not know the sequence of events that occurred, and she could not tell me who the main character was, or what the setting was. I did a running record and concluded that her phonics level was high, while her comprehension level was low.

          I noticed that in class, when the teacher is presenting material, or reading a book, she seems to be following along pretty well. I think that when she listens, rather than reads, it is easier for her to understand the language. She picks up cues that help her understand, such as the teacher pointing, her expressions, or pictures in a storybook. She is able to get the gist of what is going on even though she does not understand all the words. The teacher speaks clearly, with expression, and with visual aids to help students like Dena understand what she is saying.

I did a social studies worksheet with Dena, focusing on the differences in language, tradition, and foods of different groups living in the community. It was a worksheet that had lots of pictures based on what they learnt about aspects of different cultures. It required a little reading and writing, and mostly drawing. Dena did very well with this activity since she was able to understand everything by looking at pictures or reading simple, and few words. This gave her a chance to express her understanding of the lesson.

I had Dena read from her science textbook, about the parts of a flower. Although I helped her with some difficult words, she read fairly well. When she came across a word that she had trouble with, like “filament”, she sounded it out slowly, which is a great method.  However, when I asked her questions about what she read, she did not know. She had no idea what the functions of the parts were. I think that she finds textbook reading especially difficult since it is heavy reading. There is a lot of information in each paragraph. Also, the paragraphs and words are condensed which is overwhelming. owever

          I did some math practice with Dena in her math book. The class was learning multiplication, and Dena was good at the computations. We did some pages that had just number computations, and she had no problem doing the examples. Then we did word problems and Dena had a harder time with that. She couldn’t quite comprehend what the question was asking. She needed help with words like “twice as many”, “altogether”, or “in total”. Once we went through the word problem together and wrote it down in numbers, she was ok.

          Dena’s spelling is not on a very high level. When she writes, the reader can usually comprehend what she wrote, since she writes words the way they sound. The teacher introduces one spelling word at the end of each day. She writes it on an index card and hangs it up on a wall in the classroom. Throughout the days, whenever any of the spelling words come up, she practices it with them. She also reviews any rules of spelling that the word follows, and gives other examples. For example, when she teaches the word “photograph”, she teaches about the “ph” sound, and tells them words like “laugh”, and “paragraph”. Dena constantly refers back to these words, as they are commonly used words.

          According to the SOLOM ratings, Dena is in Phase 2, with a 15 as her score. Her comprehension skills are below average. Her fluency and vocabulary skills are not too high, and her pronunciation and grammar skills are better.

          I watched how she interacted with the teacher, and I saw that her comprehension skills are low. Then I watched her in a social setting, when speaking with her peers, since she is more relaxed when speaking to peers rather than when speaking to her teacher in class. I found that she showed more signs of increased comprehension when around her friends. She shows better fluency and vocabulary skills when around her friends too. Her peers have an easy time understanding her. Dena’s English is well enough to speak to peers on her level.

Reflection:

Dena’s reading is passable for her age and grade level. She makes a few mistakes in pronunciation and grammar, but it does not interfere with the listeners understanding. Over the time that I observed her, I saw her develop in areas of reading such as in recognizing vowels and consonants and identifying sentence structures. The area in reading where Dena needs to improve the most is in her reading comprehension. After reading a passage, Dena finds it hard to retell what went on. She may confuse characters, events, and places. Mostly, she doesn’t understand when imagery and personification is used, since she takes things at face value. Idioms, similes, and metaphors mix her up too. She has shown some improvement in this area as well, though. She has learned to identify major events and put them in order by asking herself “what happened first?” and so on.

Dena is below average in her reading and writing, but with steady help and learning of new techniques, she is showing improvement and is able to keep up with the class. When it comes to academic language, Dena is behind. She gets confused with new words, technical details, and grammar. It’s hard to engage Dena in literacy tasks. Since she feels that it’s too hard to learn, she has no motivation to work. When she is assigned a task, she will attempt to procrastinate before she starts. Then, she does the work listlessly and carelessly. While she may be able to do better work, her lack of motivation severely undermines it.

According to both the SOLOM rubric and the LEP/ELL rubric show that Dena is lacking in reading skills. Primarily, she needs the most help with comprehension. They show that she is below average in reading comprehension skills but in general her reading skills are promoted by her good fluency. Dena has a good imagination and loves to write, but sometimes teachers and peers find it hard to understand what she is trying to portray because of her weak spelling and grammar. She uses inventive spelling which means that she writes based on what the word sounds like. Her punctuation and sentence structures also hinder her writings.

Tone and sentence structure impede Dena’s oral and writing skills. When she interacts with her peers, she may phrase sentences in the wrong way, making a statement, a question and vice versa. When writing, her punctuation is wrong and she tends to write run on. She will pack her many different ideas into one sentence, leaving it to the reader to differentiate.

There is one specific and helpful transfer skill that Dena uses. When she is confronted with a long and challenging word when reading, we expected her just to give up, since that is what she tends to do when challenged. However, upon observing her, I realized that Dena uses techniques that we try to ingrain in our students, too. She knows what sound each letter makes. She will sound out each letter until it forms a comprehensible word. I noticed her do this when reading in her native language of Hebrew, too.

Dena is more animated and shows more progress when interacting with her friends. She is less guarded and is more likely to try new words. This may be that since she is in an informal setting, she feels more relaxed and comfortable. She is quite popular with her peers, due to her good looks and charming disposition. This confidence allows her to stretch her boundaries and try new things that she may not in class. This helps her with her writing skill since we noticed that she incorporated words that she learned from her friends into her assignments and worksheets.

Dena has a wonderful grasp of phonics. Her phonetic skills are the key aid to her relatively fluent reading. She applies different techniques to her phonics skills such as sounding out letters and syllables to help her read. She has good word recognition skill and many words that she reads are ones that she knows from being “sight words” or from being ones that she’s encountered a lot of times from her readings. Dena’s comprehension is what makes her lag the most. However, she has learned to implement strategies such as rephrasing paragraphs in Hebrew, and writing down short points of key ideas and events. These have helped her progress nicely in this area.

Dena has shown a clear preference to narratives as opposed to content area texts. She has an active imagination and needs a lot of stimulation. If she labels something as “boring” in her mind, she is highly unlikely to want to do something with it. That’s why it’s important for her to develop a love for reading and this for her, is through narratives, preferably ones that she can relate to and are not too difficult for her to read on her own. Content area texts are too monotonous for her and she phases out in middle and daydreams.

Strategies to help Dena’s oral language is having her learn with her peers. She shows a clear preference to interacting with her friends as opposed to one on one where she clams up. She needs to be in a group setting in order for her to express herself more and to be able to learn and absorb. For her phonics skills, Dena can implement strategies such as having flashcards with letters and practicing their sounds. Simple words, rhymes, and short sentences on flashcards can also help. For word recognition, a word wall and a word a day will help her learn commonly used words and how to use them in her oral language and when reading and writing. Overall comprehension can be improved with strategies that we have taught her such as drawing pictures to portray ideas in the story, rephrasing and paraphrasing, sequence charts, and jotting down short points.

The most important thing that I have learned from this experience and one that I will implement for my future students, is catering to the student’s whole character. Instead of just looking at the child, and saying “she needs help with grammar” or “his problem is comprehension”, look at the child and try to find what he or she is good at and play on that. If we nitpick on the negative, we are just airing out their dirty laundry as opposed to showing them how great they are. Children need to know that we respect them for who they are and we love them no matter what. By using their strengths to help their weaknesses we are showing that they can become something great by using their talents.