Personal Experience
For the personal experience of conducting running records, I wanted to practice with a different grade level then I normally test. I pick a first grade classroom that is very diverse and has multiple English language learners. I conducted the oral reading fluency for the whole class and also conducted the nonsense portion for the ELL students using DIBELS. I kept track of errors to be able to do an analysis on the miscues for meaning and syntax.
The whole experience was very different compared to testing and analyzing fifth grade data. The younger student made many more errors than the older students. Some of the ELL students were difficult to understand at times because of their pronunciation of some of the words. Endings were a common error among the ELLs and differentiating between the different vowels also was very prevalent in the results.
In Class Observations and Instruction
The in class observations with our guest speakers was also very enlightening. Many of the same findings from my personal experience were the same as the ones observed in class. The pronunciations varied greatly depending on the individual students. All the students also had the same errors with ending sounds and vowel combinations. A lack of background knowledge was visible in the observations for class. Students did not have the vocabulary to support their understanding of the text, which interfered with their fluency.
Recommendations
To build background knowledge and vocabulary, a teacher could use picture cards with the word and the picture on the card. A lesson would need to be done to explain each word, its meaning, and examples. If the word can be related to a word in their culture, that would be very helpful. Practicing segmenting words would help with the ending sounds. Students need to practice reading the whole word and segmenting and blending can help with this. A vowel lesson on rule and practice with lots of repetition will be very valuable for the vowel errors.
No comments:
Post a Comment