José's Writing

José read to me last week from two separate fiction novels:  Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers (English version) and Hoyos by Louis Sachar (Spanish version).  Given that José is an 8^th grader who is literate in both languages, I chose to focus my analysis of his reading on his concept as a reader, his comprehension, his fluency, and his strategic behavior.  In terms of formal Reading assessments, his English score from this fall’s SRI is 931, his 2011 ACCESS reading score is a 4.9, and his 7^th grade WKCE reading score is a 3. 

Child as a Reader

When I asked José in which language he prefers to read I was surprised by his immediate response that either one was fine with him.  After hearing him read and noticing that his English reading fluency was much greater, I expected him to say that he preferred English.  He did admit that he reads more frequently in English but said that if he were given two options on a book (textbook or novel) he would read either one readily.   He told me that the majority of the reading he does in Spanish is done at home or at his aunt’s house.  His aunt runs a daycare business and José helps her out in the summer an often reads children’s books in Spanish to the other kids.  I was excited to hear that he gets additional reading practice over the summer, especially since he is modeling these habits to younger kids!  However, this also speaks of the need to provide students like José access to more challenging texts in their home languages.

Fluency and Strategic behavior

José is a student who is thorough with his work and takes extra time to complete assignments.  His reading behavior reflects this work ethic.  He does not rush through a text but instead is very deliberate to read/pronounce each word honor punctuation marks.  He exhibits this thoroughness when reading in both English and Spanish but reads at a noticeably slower pace in Spanish.  His Spanish reading is also choppier as he seems to take more effort in decoding.  I noticed that he uses a re-reading strategy in both languages when coming across a new word or to clarify the meaning of a sentence with multiple clauses.  In Spanish, this happened more often with single words such as arrancó  and hombro (which he pronounced arcotró  and  hombre) and in English with longer sentences that contained multiple commas.  My hypothesis is that his reading in Spanish is choppier due to fewer opportunities to practice - he has been in an all-English academic setting since Kindergarten.

Comprehension

Despite some of Jose’s difficulties in decoding with Spanish texts he still was able to accurately answer comprehension questions.  He was also able to give me longer, coherent responses to some of the more open-ended questions that I asked.  His responses to the questions about the English text were slightly less accurate but he was less familiar with this text and greater context around the selected text was necessary to expect accurate answers.  He showed solid understanding of what he had read when asked more open-ended questions.