READ 4563Dr. Burke Remedios Puente

CASE STUDY REPORT

Introduction/Overview

Mauricio López is a 12-year-old Hispanic student. He is currently attending

McMath middle school as a 6th grader. Mauricio has been in the United States for only

two years and lives with both his aunt and uncle. He has older siblings who do not live

with him, and his parents live in Mexico. Mauricio’s first language is Spanish, he is

starting to acquire his second language, English.

Assessments

Interview (interests and attitudes)

Mauricio is an amazing student. It took him a while to open up to me, but we just

needed to communicate and understand each other. I started asking him the grand tour

questions I had prepared for him for our interview but he seemed to not capture what I

was asking him. Of course at the beginning I asked him the first question in English, and

he did not respond to my questions. I then thought that maybe Mauricio did not

understand what I was asking him, so I decided to ask him in Spanish. I was a bit scared

to ask Mauricio in Spanish since I didn’t want him to think I thought he didn’t understand

me, but after I asked him he immediately responded. I then came to the conclusion that

Mauricio didn’t understand English very well, so I decided to do the rest of the talking in

Spanish for the time that was left.

The grand tour questions consisted of 4 different questions, which were; describe

how you start your day, could you describe what you do after school, could you show me

what you bring to school, and could you draw how you feel today. He told me he just

wakes up, comes early to school to have breakfast, gets home after school and eats lunch

with his aunt, uncle and cousins, then does homework. He told me he didn’t feel any

certain way and that the only thing he brought to school was a binder and a few books he

checked out from the library. It interested me a lot that he would check out books to read,

since he didn’t understand English perfectly. He then told me he picks out books to read

because he wants to improve in his English language, which I thought made him more

than just an amazing student, he is brilliant.

Oral Reading Assessment

For the 3-minute reading assessment I administered to Mauricio during the second

week I could not really notice much about his comprehension or decoding patterns. Since

Mauricio has only been in the United States for two years it is reasonable to think that he

has much work to do when it comes to reading in English. Although it was a bit difficult

for him to read the passages, I still wanted him to give it a shot. From the four, sixth

grade forms I printed out for Mauricio, I picked out form D. Mauricio began reading the

passages, but of course he was struggling while reading it. I have to admit that I thought

certain words would be hard for him to pronounce, but I could tell he tried his best.

Mauricio’s Fluency automaticity was probably between 30 and 35 wcpm. Considering

that he had 3 minutes for this reading assessment I divided the 99 words he read by 3. His

word recognition was 92%.

As much as I wanted Mauricio to complete reading the entire passage, I think he

did well when it came to comprehension. As soon as Mauricio stopped reading I read the

rest of the passage for him. At the end of the passage I asked him several questions. One

of the questions I asked Mauricio was to tell me what the problem was in the story.

Mauricio kept repeating the same thing over and over again, but in his own words he

described to me what the issue was. When I asked Mauricio to describe the characters for

me, which seemed to be a bit easier for him. He told me that Ms. Banks was a very nice

lady, but that other people thought she was mean. We only got though reading one

passage in Spanish. I was asked to bring a few articles or books in Spanish. After the 3-

minute assessment was over we continued to read articles in Spanish. I printed out a few

articles in Spanish; those articles included topics such as, Martin Luther king, Abraham

Lincoln, George Washington and others. He was interested in reading about George

Washington; at the bottom of every article there were a few multiple-choice questions for

each biography. Mauricio did a great Job answering those; he got all 5 questions correct.

Mauricio seemed very comfortable with reading in Spanish, it seemed as if he was

enjoying it.

Spelling Inventory

Mauricio’s developmental spelling stage is in between syllabus and affixes and

derivational relations. In syllabus and affixes Mauricio scored under middle and in

derivational relations he scored under late. He got 4 words out of 31 words correctly. In

feature points he made 27 out of 68. For example, he wrote “switch” as “swich”,

“shaving” as “shavin”, and “knotted” as noted. In the Spanish language, most of the

words we hear are spelled just the way we hear them. Therefore, I believe Mauricio was

trying to spell out the words in English the exact way he heard them.

Strengths

Comprehension

Reading fluently in Spanish.

Knows where the accent marks go when spelling in Spanish.

Note taking

Gathering important information

Summarizing

Focusing

Staying engaged

Areas of growth

In summarizing and synthesizing assessment about Mauricio, I can say that his

area of growth has been in comprehension. He seems to find himself engaged in topics he

is interested in and being fluent in Spanish helps him with his comprehension in reading.

Since all of the lessons with Mauricio were done in Spanish, I would have to say that he

has done better in spelling. At the beginning I didn’t know if he was a little confused with

having to shift from English to Spanish, or if he just needed to be reminded of how the

words were spelled in Spanish. After remembering how to spell a word correctly

Mauricio seemed very happy. He just had to read the passage once and didn’t have to go

back to remember where the accent marks went. As a bilingual student, I have to say that

learning how to write in Spanish is way more difficult than writing in English. Of course

Mauricio is barely acquiring his second language so he will have some struggles

throughout his learning.

Goals and Instruction

Based on the assessments that were done to Mauricio, I had to identify two main

goals for him. What we did during those 4 weeks was done in Spanish. I tried to pick out

a topic that would be interesting to him and good for me to teach. Our Inquiry was about

planets. Even though Spanish is my first language, just like Mauricio’s, the difficult part

for me was trying to find adequate material for the topic. I searched on the web to find

articles and important information about planets in Spanish, so that I could print them and

read them with my student. The two main goals for Mauricio was to be able to

comprehend the information given in the article and also to be able to identity what

information was important to know.

For every lesson, I modeled to Mauricio before I asked him to complete his

assignment. I started by reading aloud and then jotting down what I thought was more

important. I printed out a graphic organizer, which would help Mauricio organize his

information and also list what he considered to be important facts. I used

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/planets/sp/, to print out Spanish articles about our topic. Our

goal was to collect what we thought was important information, but our inquiry consisted

of finding out what made a planet, a planet. The 8 passages were divided into two

different days. Therefore, the first day we only got through 4 planets. The way we

organized our information was by filling out the first 4 sections of the graphic organizer.

The first 4 planets were done in blue ink to be able to differentiate on the different days

we worked on it. Our graphic organizer was set as a circle, In the middle section we

wrote, Sistema Solar and in the circle around it we wrote all the eight names of the

planets, Mercurio, Venus, Tierra, Marte, Jupiter, Saturno, Neptuno and Mercurio.

Around those circles we listed the important facts about each planet, for example, under

mercurio, “Es el planeta mas cercano al sol pero no es el mas caliente”, which states

that, mercury is the planet closes to the sun, yet not the hottest planet.

For the second lesson, I had decided we would complete the graphic organizer

that was done the week before. For this week we wrote our information in green ink.

Before I asked Mauricio to complete the rest of the graphic organizer I printed out a

KWL chart. I used a KWL chart for this lesson, to be able to identify what Mauricio has

gained from the previous lesson and what he is still interested in knowing. For example,

on the what I want to know section he wrote, “Por que no cuentan a Pluton como un

planeta?”, which means, why is Pluto not considered a planet? This question helped me

figure out what we would be reading the next time we met.

For the third lesson I decided to answer Mauricio’s questions about Pluto by

printing out an article for him in Spanish from

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2006/08/24/ciencia/1156425985.html. In this website

we would find what caused Pluto to be removed from the list of planets making it only 8.

For this lesson I wanted to show Mauricio how to apply note taking when gathering

important information. I prepared a symbols sheet for notes for Mauricio. The symbols

sheet was titles, Simbolos para notas, and included, importante (*) vocabulario (----)

entendido (✔), palabra familiar (), no entendido (?) and sorprendido (!), which means;

important, vocabulary, understood, familiar word, not understood, and surprised.

This symbols helped me to easily determine how Mauricio labeled every piece of

information. For example, there was a section he did not understand; at the end of the

sentence he wrote a question mark with a marker. At the end of the reading we would go

back and go over everything Mauricio had a question on. At the end of this lesson, I was

happy, because Mauricio and I learned to have a very good communication about our

inquiry. On the last day I decided to buy a card for Mauricio, thanking him for letting me

work with him this semester. I also wrote him a few words, trying to motivate him to

never stop speaking Spanish. He was a bit afraid to do the lesson in Spanish because he

did not want other kids laughing at him, thinking Mauricio didn’t understand English. I

told him that being Bilingual is like having a gift that no other person can steal from him.

Overall, I learned a lot from these lessons. Working in Spanish has helped me to

understand that reading is a great thing to do in any language. The more we read, the

more we know.