Analysis of Juliet as a Writer

Summary of stage

Juliet is, according to the writing stages put forth by Rubin and Carlin, somewhere between a semi phonetic and a phonetic writer.  They define the semi phonetic stage as when a student, “understand(s) that there is a relationship between letters and sounds, yet [is] not able to match all the sounds with the letters.”  (p 729). The phonetic monolingual English writer, on the other hand, “is able to match most of the phonetic sounds to letters.” According to the authors the monolingual Spanish writer at this stage of development begins to write one symbol for each letter, rather than one sound for each syllable. Carlin and Rubin also state that the bilingual writer can do both of these things at the phonetic stage, and additionally begins to notice that words are transcribed uniquely in either language.

Juliet demonstrated a fairly consistent letter: sound usage, and clearly knows that you can transcribe sounds with symbols. She still doesn’t hear difficult sounds (such as ‘coredo’ for ‘corriendo’), which Rubin and Carlin state to be typical in both the semi-phonetic and phonetic stages. In Spanish she is not using one sound for each syllable, but in English she is likely to represent sounds with graphemes that are not representative of the sounds she is hearing. The reason I don’t think Juliet is a transitional writer yet is that she still isn’t applying rules from either language to spelling patterns, even though she has some sight words (‘the’ and ‘is’) in English, and uses conventions more consistently in Spanish.

Self as a writer

Juliet sees writing as a way to notate stories drawn and told. She is very comfortable with the draw-speak-write pattern of interaction, which she clearly uses in class. She doesn’t see writing as a means for communication yet, however, in the sense that we may expand or edit ideas to make them clearer for the audience. She was more interested in working through each word than in working out the ideas or the sentence.  

Problem solving attempts at difficulty

After she speaks her story, Juliet will say the words slowly, syllable-by-syllable, to hear the sounds. She will write the sounds in order left to right, and tends to hear both consonants and vowels equally. 

She had trouble hearing or transcribing vowel sounds in English, and often added an ‘i’ for unclear reasons. In her first English writing she wrote all the words with phonetic beginning, middles, and ends, and when she got to the word ‘I’, she put down a lower-case ‘I’. But she stopped, saying, “Wait…that doesn’t sound right.” She changed her writing by scratching out the letter and putting down, “ai”. This is a closer approximation in the Spanish phonetic code of an English sounds for ‘I’.

Inter-linguistic transfer

Juliet relied primarily on the Spanish phonetic code to transcribe English words. She may not have been explicitly aware of the fact that Spanish and English words are written differently, but her oral development is such that she knew which sounds to transcribe. This again points towards a phonetic speller, with hints of semi-phonetic. Her spelling approximations definitely used code from across the languages. Her word-boundary confusions may be related more to the concept about print of spacing than the oral development of discreet words in either language. Her codes in both languages are phonetic and don’t yet rely on generalized rules or sight words, with the notable exception of ‘the’ and ‘is’.

Notes/  observations

Juliet is a very creative story teller, and very excited to someday ride a horse (just like mommy!). She loved her dog Cherry very much, and was sad when he had to go to the vet. She demonstrated no oral code-switching during our writing time in English, but did code switch during our Spanish writing time. Her code is definitely more active in Spanish for transcription than in English, and she has more concepts about print accessible to her in Spanish as well. When we discussed the ideas of ‘sentences’, she didn’t know what I meant, but when we talked about ‘frases’ she understood.

Juliet is in a Spanish-only literacy instruction DLI setting, and I think her primary code for writing is therefore Spanish. She has obviously been exposed to English text and print, however, because she has acquired some sight words in English.