Writing Assessment

Assessment of José’s writing in English and Spanish:

I assessed two samples of José’s writing:  One was a rough draft of  a paper he wrote for his language arts class.  In this writing, José came up with his own “traditional story” to compose.  The story was to take place many years ago and creatively describe why a certain natural phenomenon exists in the present, similar to a folktale or a fable.  In José’s Spanish writing sample he details a recurring dream that he remembers vividly.  The Spanish writing sample was done after school in about a half hour while the English sample was a rough draft that he spent much more time composing.

Looking at his writing samples, I would place José in the Conventional Stage of English writing as a few words were misspelled, possibly due to fact that they had multiple homophones (e.g. use of their in place of there, use of your in place of you’re) and certain verb tenses were not consistent (e.g. If your(you were) close you can(could) see that their(they were) basically hard rock formed into a slopy(sloppy) circul(circle)).  In terms of discourse patterns, José does tend to write long sentences using word such as because to extend thoughts.  This might be evidence of transfer from the longer sentence patterns in Spanish discourse.  Overall, his writing in English was generally correct and included complex sentence structures. 

José’s writing in the Spanish sample contained many more errors due to difficult letter-sound relationships (e.g. g/j, silent ‘h’, q/c, b/v) and negative transfer from his English language knowledge.  For example, he often spelled words such as cuando as quando, omitted the ‘h’ from words such as he, haciendo, hacia, and hasta, switched the ‘g’ and ‘j’ in dige and enogaron, exchanged the ‘b’ for ‘v’ in iva, and switched the ‘z’ for ‘s’ in ise and poso. 

José’s Spanish writing also showed signs of transfer from his English language in syntax and in discourse patterns.  In one sentence he writes, Por ejemplo quando estoy en un lugar aciendo algo, de repente estoy en otro lugar que nunca e estado en.   José also chose to use the preterit form of ‘estar’ when describing a series of events instead of the imperfect ‘estaba’: Despues estuve yo caminando acia la puerta que aparesio en la oscuridad y entre a una selva tropica. 

José seems to fit the mold of a native Spanish speaker who has been educated in an English-dominant school setting with fewer opportunities to develop his writing in Spanish.  Although his discourse is descriptive and easy to follow in Spanish as well as English, he uses a linear style of writing in Spanish to describe the chain of events that occurred in his dream.  He has a clear beginning (Quando me duermo, yo sueño varaias cosas que en realidad no le entiendo), then proceeds by giving a clear example followed by supporting sentences describing the dream.  Often, José will begin a sentence with Quando or Despues to enumerate the series of events.  He does not go off on related tangents, as one might expect with a Spanish-dominant style of discourse, but sticks to the main point of the dream to show a clear connection to his opening line.  Due the these observations, I would rate José as being in the transitional stage of writing but at risk for developing more discourse and spelling habits from his increasing use of English and decreasing use of Spanish.