This is Juliet's Spanish writing sample. We did an interactive write, to tell stories about how Juliet wants to ride a horse. I drew the horse :)
This is Juliet's first English writing sample. She drew a picture of her dog, Cherry, and wrote "My dog got sick. I was sad."
I noticed that she wasn't using spaces or punctuation, and I wasn't sure if she was consistently using the 'i' sound as a Spanish grapheme. I asked her to write more, and this time we rehearsed orally first. I helped put in space markers.
Juliet said, "Cherry was a cute pup." I wondered if there was some inter-language transfer going on, so I asked Juliet to do a dictated writing.
I drew a flower, and asked her to write the sentence, "The blue flower is pretty". Her attempt is above.
Wow Gwen!
ReplyDeleteWhat a detailed and descriptive analysis of Juliet! I found all of your examples and explanations to be very interesting and clear. I have not read anyone else who is focusing their analysis on a student whose first language is English, so it was very interesting to hear how your insights might differ from other people's students.
I found it very interesting to see Juliet's strength in Spanish writing and as you mentioned, her strength in oral English. A very interesting combination of language acquisition.
Lastly, I found it peculiar that Juliet did not transfer spacing and punctuation from Spanish into English. Her 2nd English written analysis, which was simply a dictation, was much more accurate than her original when she had to come up with the ideas and conventions on her own. I would not have predicted that all happening.
Thank you for such an interesting perspective!
Julie
Hola, Maestra Gwendolyn.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing with us a little bit of Juliet’s journey to bilingualism. Your description of her willingness to engage with whatever language is presented to her shows the type of attitude that can really make the journey fun. I see a large part of that positive attitude as a credit to her teachers and school. Juliet’s ability to sound out her words syllable-by-syllable should also help place her in a very favorable position to move rapidly along her path to biliteracy. I find it interesting that Juliet relies heavily on her knowledge of Spanish phonetics when producing written English. Could we point to her DLI context with only Spanish literacy instruction as a reason for this?
Best,
~Terry
Thanks, friends!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you both-- Juliet is lucky to be in a friendly and well managed DLI program. She is developing simultaneously and along the way showing some interesting steps forward and backward.
As to the punctuation/spacing transfer, I wonder if she was so busy cognitively trying to hear sounds in Spanish, which she doesn't have a deep schema for, that she simply neglected the CAP stuff. I agree with Terry that this is probably due to her instruction in writing being solely in Spanish.