ELL Case Study - James E. Gentry, Ed.D.



ELL Case Study

By Maria L Le

CI 5644: Working with Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students in the Mainstream Classroom

Maria Le

CI 5644

ELL Case Study

David is a 1st grade, Spanish speaking student attending Pillsbury Math, Science, and Technology school in Minneapolis. He began at Pillsbury MST for the first time this school-year. Pillsbury has Native Language Literacy (NLL) program for Spanish speaking students. Had this program been unavailable, David would have qualified for ELL services. Spanish is the primary language spoken at home and among his Spanish speaking peers.

David’s NLL teacher has noticed little improvement in his literacy development in his native language. She has stated that David and his parents have very low literacy in both English and Spanish. This may play a major part of his very low reading abilities of the two languages. This one fact shows evidence that David has BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) for both languages, but surprisingly little to no CALP (Cognitive Academic Learning Proficiency) in Spanish as well as English not only for himself – but his parents as well. The NLL teacher, regular education teacher, and I (his student teacher) have speculated whether his parents have confused the NLL program to a Spanish emersion program.

In addition to the NLL program at Pillsbury, David’s regular education teacher has done many things to adapt the curriculum in the classroom to fit the needs of the Spanish-speaking students. The morning meeting (focusing on the calendar, morning message, and counting on the 100’s number chart) is primarily done in English with some Spanish. The Spanish portions include the days of the week, the months of the year, and counting by 10’s to 100. To help the ELL learners like David in the classroom, a pointer is used when reading the morning message to show one to one correspondence. Many visuals are additionally available with labels accompanying them – some of which are also in Spanish.

The challenges that David seems to face is his lack of comprehension of what is going on. When receiving instruction in English, he is often quiet and relies on his Spanish-speaking peers – his best friend especially – to help him through his work. Interestingly enough, the same behavior is seen when he receives literacy instruction in his native language. He typically gets two out of ten words correct on his Spanish spelling tests, and is often found copying word for word during message notebook time in the mainstream classroom.

When tutoring David, he often did not recognize site words in English and is unable to recall repeated words within the story. He does benefit from readings that include repetition and referring to pictures for context clues. I have noticed that he doesn’t seem to have phonemic awareness. According to his 1st grade oral reading assessments, David has shown very little improvement in letter sounds from the fall to the winter. For some reason, he performed lower in the winter than the fall in the phoneme segmentation portion of the assessment (please refer to assessments in the appendix). When asking David to stretch out the words with me, he is unable to identify the beginning and ending sounds of words.

Currently, David’s only known supportive resource outside of home and the classroom is the afterschool program that he attends at Pillsbury. He has been more social with his peers (as opposed to clinging to his one best friend) since he has been attending the after school program. He does prefer to spend most of his time with his best friend from class and often cries when his friend is not in school on a particular day. David also seems to be doing all of his math homework on his own at home – for which he has done an excellent job. He enjoys homework so much that he completes the homework in English in addition to Spanish – and it’s the same homework! The math homework is primarily visual which may be an aid to why he does so well with his work.

As an only child, David does not have any responsibilities at home. The NLL teachers states that he is “babied” at home. David tends to cry when upset for minor things (accidently saying someone else’s name during morning meeting). There was an occasion in which his school bus had a small accident on the way home from school. From then on, he refused to ride the bus and would cry to the point that his mother or father would need to leave work to come pick him up at school. It has been brought to my attention that in December, his family moved a few blocks from the school so that David would not have to ride the bus. He is now being walked home from school by a parent.

When language barriers arise when communicating with David, I have found that using hand gestures or acting something out has helped. Pictures are additionally a plus when working through a story. When we came to a word that he did not know, I would first try to get him to give me the beginning sound of the word (which he most of the time did not know), then I would then point to the picture of the word on the page. When he would get the word correct, we would read the sentence again. One to one correspondence was a must as well as modeling good reading when tutoring David.

David’s handwriting is also in need of work. Although he doesn’t appear to show any trouble with reversing his letters, he constantly needs to be reminded to leave spaces in between words, when to use upper case verses lower case letters, and to use a period at the end of a sentence. This behavior is also seen in many of his other peers, so David is not significantly behind his peers in his writing. Writing will be emphasized in our lessons more as I begin my student teaching this spring.

The primary difficulties that David faces when interacting with texts and written material is seem during assessments when he cannot turn to his Spanish-speaking peers for help. Even when given the assessment in Spanish, David has difficulty reading the words. What the classroom teacher and I have done to help with this particular difficulty is to read the directions out-loud (1-2 times in both languages) so that all students may benefit from hearing them. When we are able to, we will also point to the words as we are reading the directions so that David may follow along.

What David does do well is math work. He tends to work better with numbers than letters for some reason. This may be because the math work in the curriculum will represent number in written form as well as in picture form (i.e. 4 is represented by four boxes), whereas letters cannot be represented visually. David will typically perform better in all subjects when there is a visual.

David’s favorite activity to do is video games. The mainstream teacher had mentioned that his mother will occasionally threaten to take away his video games if he doesn’t get his homework done. We have not seen any issues with his homework not being turned in however. Other things that motivate David is the flip chart where a student is good on green, has a warning on yellow, and needs to be disciplined on red. He does try to please his teachers by being on good behavior and to receive the occasional candy treat for being good.

The information collected for this case study is helpful for my student teaching in that I am better able to understand what level David is at. He is showing great difficulty in literacy instruction in both languages because he severely lacks phonemic awareness. If he is unable to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of sound that differentiates meaning (phonemes), that is obviously difficult for him to read and write in any language. More intensive work on phonemic awareness is required in order for David to succeed in school. I might add more visuals with words accompanying them to handouts and board work to help David during whole-group instruction.

Reflection

What struck me most about David was how his behavior was the same regardless of whether instruction was in English or Spanish. I would have guessed that one language would have been more beneficial for him. When working close with him, I learned that English Language Learners don’t always require instruction in English. They might need instruction in their own language, or in David’s case, basic awareness of phonemes. ELL learners are no different from their mainstream peers in that there are various learning styles which require a teacher to be flexible with his or her teaching instruction.

What I took most from the course to guide my ELL tutoring was to not underestimate the use of pictures and dramatic play. These are far more universal means of communication that can benefit any kind of learner. After working with David, I have also seen how BICS and CALP can play a role in a student’s literacy development. Just because David speaks in English without an accent does not mean that he no longer needs help… there is so much more that needs to be done to allow greater understanding of this difficult language. As a future teacher, it is my responsibility to recognize these factors not only in ELL students, but all students.

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