I am over halfway done with fieldwork, and I am starting to focus a lot more on my case study student, Adriana.  Adriana is originally from Mexico and was adopted into an English speaking family when she was in first grade.  Though she has been speaking English for 4 years now, she is still an ELL as she originally spoke Spanish.  Her biggest area of struggle is in comprehension because she just doesn’t know what a lot of words are or what they mean.  I decided to do a Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI) with Adriana, and I started out with a second grade level reading.  Even though this is two grades below her, she struggled a lot with this reading.  She scored a 54% with the concept questions which assess her prior knowledge.  This tells me that she was partly familiar with the concepts, but not completely.  While read the 304 word passage, Adriana had 25 miscues, putting her at the lower end of an instructional reading accuracy. She was at an independent level when it came to meaning changing miscues.  This showed me that her fluency is not that bad, but I was very curious as to what she was able to recall from the story.

When I asked her if she could tell me what happened in the story in her own words, she started to complain a little bit.  She knew it was going to be hard and she didn’t want to do it.  She was only able to recall one idea before I told her to tell me anything that she remembered; it didn’t have to be in the same order.  This seemed to help her a little bit, but she still was only able to recall 10 of the 52 ideas in the story.  When asking her questions about the story, she still struggled, often commenting “This is hard” or “Uhh. I don’t know.”  She was only able to answer five questions correctly, putting her at the frustration level for the comprehension section.

Luckily for me, Adriana wanted to do another one.  Despite her frustration she found them fun.  This time, I gave her a first grade level reading.  She seemed to enjoy this one better, partly because it had pictures to go along with it.  Her prior knowledge score was much higher this time, with 78%.  Her miscues were cut in half, having only 12 in a 264 word passage.  This put her toward the higher end of the instructional reader for fluency, much better than the last passage. When it came to recalling events that happened in the story she still struggled, only recalling 13 of 50 ideas.  When I asked her questions about the story, she was able to recall 3 of 6 questions, again putting her at the frustration level for comprehension.

I asked her which story she liked better and she said the second one because it was easier, and she still wanted to read another one.  Adriana is an interesting, though not uncommon, case.  She has a very good fluency level and is able to read the words on the page, but she does not understand what she is reading.  It is hard to determine how to accommodate for this child because you don’t want to give them words that are way too easy for them because they will feel undermined, but if you give them something harder to read, they won’t understand what it is saying.  I have worked on a min-unit built around comprehension which I will post in a few days, and I hope to be able to teach the first lesson to a small group of students.  In this unit I focus on using a lot of visuals and graphic organizers to help with comprehension. I am interested in seeing if Adriana will benefit from these types of strategies.

During this fieldwork visit, I was also able to just talk with Adriana a little bit and interview her.  I learned that she was adopted when she was in first grade and has been at Estabrook since then.  She is not a fan of reading mainly because she comes across big words that she doesn’t know.  She doesn’t mind writing and says that it is a lot better than reading.  When she writes she can take her time and use words that she knows.  She sometimes reads at home when her dad makes her, but she said that her favorite books are The Cat in the Hat and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? by Dr. Seuss.  It is my guess that these books are easier to read because of their rhythm and rhyme so she enjoys them more.

This fieldwork visit was very beneficial for me, and I learned a lot about Adriana from this visit.  There will be more to come in the next two weeks as I finish up my fieldwork and work more with Adriana.