Juliet's Reading Analysis

Child as a reader

Juliet loves to read. When I found her in the nurse’s office, on her way home ill, she was curled up on the cot with a pile of books. She had pulled them from the nurse’s stash and they were all in English, but she was busily searching through the pictures and inventing text/decoding what she could. She clearly knows that text carries meaning, and views books as tools for information and entertainment.

In her classroom Juliet is an active reader, and is equally likely to respond in small group, whole group, or 1:1 with a teacher. She often, as seen in her oral language sample, responds in a code-switching manner, intersentetially and tagging flipping between her English and Spanish channels. 

Proficiency level

All of Juliet’s literacy instction in Kindergarten is provided in Spanish, and so are her classroom assessments. When Juliet entered school she scored a 4 on the Concepts About Print assessment (conceptos del texto impreso in Spanish), and referred to quotations marks as “mystery clues.” By January she had met the end-of-year goal for the CAP of 18. She was able to instructionally read the SPLAA level 2 in November and by January was reading a level 3. 

I read with her in both Spanish and English, and noticed that she is reading at a Rigby Benchmarks level 3 or 4 instructionally in Spanish, and a level 2 or 3 in English. While she could comprehend and decode at these levels instructionally, she was much more likely to get frustrated on English language texts, and to insert or invent text. In Spanish she was more likely to attempt using a variety of cues and strategies, and to miscue on words she didn’t have orally. In English she was more likely to miscue on words with irregular phonetic transcription, even if they were very common words she had access to. I think this is because Juliet hasn’t done much learning in English literacy, and therefore only relies on meaning and structure to solve difficulties in English. She has fewer “fix-it” strategies in English, and monitors less consistently, even though her problem solving strategies are transferring between both languages. 

Strategies/cues (Comprehension, decoding, and linguistic resources)

In Juliet’s reading she often has a self correct rate of 1:3, which is good but not excellent. This reveals that in both languages she is consistently monitoring herself for meaning, especially because almost all of her Self Corrects (SC) relied on meaning and structure and not visual cues. Conversely, her errors tended to be based in Visual (V) information that was missed or misread most commonly. In English, however, this was due to not having the code for some phonics, especially initial consonant blends. One example was while reading the word “shoe” in Meg’s Messy Room, Juliet attempted as such: “/s/-/h/-/o/”. Likewise, when reading the word “on”, she attempted: “/oh/-/n/”, using the Spanish code for the ‘o’ vowel sound. In this instance, however, she was able to use meaning and structure to figure out that the word must be ‘on’, and self correct. Because she had no clue that s+h sounded /sh/, she wasn’t able to do so in the first attempt with “shoe”. 

Interestingly she not only applied the Spanish phonetic code to her English reading, but also Spanish words. When she arrived at the word “said” for the first tim, she guessed “saltó”, even thought that wouldn’t make sense within the context of the sentence, “Look at my messy room, “ said Meg.

In her Spanish reading Juliet was much more likely to error on gender and agreement visual cues. She often said “está” instead of “están”, and “manzanas amarillos” instead of “manzanas amarillas”and so forth. This shows me that her oral language code is still immature, although she uses multiple sources of meaning to problem solve text. She was likely, also, to decode a nonsense word in Spanish while over-relying on the visual cues. This tells me that Juliet knows that she can consistently solve words in Spanish with her phonics, and suggests that she is aware that sometimes Spanish words won’t make sense to her. For example, instead of reading “cuerno” (horn) she read “cu-re-no”, which isn’t a word. She was able to talk about what the pencil drew on the goat (a horn), but didn’t know that word. 

Juliet is a generally fluent reader, but more so in Spanish than in English. I could see her transferring her skills into her English attempts, but it was also clear that she has a stronger visual code and skills in Spanish, and this assisted her fluent and expressive reading in her second language.