Blog #7

Blog #7 RUNNING RECORD MISCUES ANALYSIS

I observed an ESL class in an elementary school.  The majority of the children in the classroom spoke Spanish as their home language.  There was one girl who spoke Russian and one boy who spoke a Chinese dialect.  I observed a reading lesson.  The class is taught in English, with many visual and auditory cues given as needed.  The children have attended this school for over a year, so they are becoming much more comfortable with the English language, but as I observed, I was able to identify a few errors.  I noticed meaning errors, syntax errors, and visual cue errors. 

I noticed that overall, the children made more errors in syntax and visual cues than they did in meaning.  I noticed that the Chinese speaking child made several syntactic errors, mostly with tenses.  When reading, the child would tend to read words in the present tense.  I noticed that this child struggled with tenses even when speaking.  The Spanish speaking students struggled more with the visual errors.  I noticed that words that began with “B” or “D” were often misspoken.  I could attribute this to the difference in the pronunciation of letters in the Spanish alphabet and that of the English alphabet.   Words with vowel teams and diphthongs were also more difficult for the children to sound out. I would expect this error from most children at their age (1^st- 2^nd grade).   One of the more fluent speaking students in the class made some meaning errors.  The child would miscall a word in the sentence, but the sentence would still make sense.  During the lesson, the children were reading a story about owls.  The child miscalled the word owl, and replaced it with the word bird.  The book did not have pictures, so the child had created enough meaning to understand what the story was about. 

Because most of the errors were syntactic or visual in nature, I would wonder if the children are making much meaning of what they are reading.  I would not worry too much about the child making meaning errors.  The child is reading with errors, but the errors are not changing the meaning of the story.  In fact, the child is gaining enough meaning from the words, that that child is able to switch words and still keep the meaning the same.  As the teacher, I would focus on helping the children making visual errors.  These children are at the basic level of sounding out words.  Because the children are so focused on decoding, and still making errors, I would imagine that very little comprehension is taking place.  As the teacher, I would start teaching strategies such as skip and reread, rather than sound out each sound.  If the child can skip the word they don’t know and gain enough meaning to fill in the gap, they will gain the needed comprehension.  After they have an idea of what the word should be, they can go back and figure the word out.  For example, “The _____ rises in the east and warms the earth during the day”.  Even without the word in the sentence, most students could figure out what was missing based on the meaning of the sentence.  I would recommend the teacher focus on comprehension strategies rather than spending so much time trying to decode each and every word.

For the students making syntax errors, I would repeat what they had said, correctly.  This way the children are hearing the correct usage of the verb tenses.  I find this error hard to correct, but I find setting a good verbal example to be one of the most useful strategies.  For example, I heard one child read “The owl flewed over the field looking for food”.  I would have repeated, “Oh so the owl FLEW over the field . . . What did the owl do?”  The trick is to be consistent, but not make a big deal about the mistake.  The child needs to hear the write tense several times before it clicks.

Overall, the teacher had some really good strategies in place.  I admired the fact that all children in the class were participating, and even though they were all making different errors, she was able to generalize and support the children as needed.   My biggest recommendation would be to focus more on comprehension.  I felt the children were focused on reading the words correctly, but when the teacher was asking questions about the reading, all the children struggled.  I still believe that decoding is very important, but I think comprehension is the ultimate goal, and needs to be addressed at an early age as well.