Writing

Assessing Jorge’s writing this week was much more challenging than assessing his oral language.  Almost all of our students in 4K are still in the preccomunicative stage as referenced in the article we read this week by Rubin and Carlan.  Jorge is able to write his name and some of the letters in his classmates’ names.  Jorge’s writing in both Spanish and English are currently in the precommunicative stage.  His writing is very distinct from his drawing.  He understands that words provide a message.  He is not yet to the semiphonetic stage where he is associating letters with sounds, even with the letters in his own name.  During class, we frequently pronounce the sounds of the initial letters in names and then associate that sound with the name of classmate (eg. “B makes a buh, buh, buh sound for Brian”).  Jorge (and many of his classmates who are also in the precommunicative stage with writing) will often see a letter that begins a classmate’s name and repeat the previous example to describe the sound and name that letter matches.  This appears to be representative of the students’ memories of the entire phrase and not because they have internalized the sound a letter makes independent of the context of a classmate’s name.

This week at school we introduced the post office center, which provided a very natural context within which to encourage student writing.  I sat down with Jorge and we wrote letter s to then put in envelopes and mail to a few of his classmates.  I found it very interesting that in both Spanish and English, Jorge followed the following order of events as he wrote: first he would write the classmate’s name, using a model of the classmate’s name to copy from, second he would draw a picture of what he wanted to say, third he would try to write a message, and fourth he would sign his name.  The third and fourth steps came with my encouragement, as he quickly became very frustrated with his inability to write correctly.  I found it interesting, though, that the classmate’s name and drawing always preceded his written message.  His written message did describe something captured by his drawing.  The classmates’ names and drawings did not show much variation between his “English” and “Spanish” letters/notes.  However, his written letter-like lines and symbols did.  His letters/notes written in Spanish were much longer in the sense that they had many more symbols/letters/ “words” than his English message.  This may have been indicative of his greater fluency, vocabulary, and comfort in speaking Spanish rather than English.  Nonetheless, I was very surprised by this pattern.  Also, even though neither Jorge’s Spanish nor English writing was written with correct letters or had any type of relationship between symbol and associated sound, Jorge became much more frustrated much more quickly when writing in English than in Spanish. 

Jorge can easily become frustrated when he feels he isn’t completing a task correctly and writing in each of the languages was yet another example of his frustration.  This being said, it was interesting to me at how much more quickly Jorge became frustrated with himself when writing in English.  I tried to talk through his frustrations using a tip from the end of Rubin and Carlan’s article of discussing with students “how they write and how they know what to write.”  When I asked Jorge why it he could write so many more letters and words in Spanish, he responded, “porque yo sabo[sic] que mi inglés no es correcto.”  This was heartbreaking for me to hear a four year old already express this type of negative sentiment regarding his own language abilities.

Lastly, on page 729 of this excerpt, Rubin and Carlan discuss a situation of a young girl in the precommunicative stage describing her writing.  She writes her story (in precommunicative abstract lines and symbols) in Spanish and then when asked how she would write that same story in English responds, “Igualito que aquí.”  I was very curious to see what Jorge’s response would be to a similar question when I was observing his writing.  When I posed this question to Jorge at one point during our writing time, he shrugged and then wrote a new set of letter-like symbols and lines. 

This week’s writing observations on Jorge confirmed again to me that Jorge naturally gravitates more to Spanish than English.  His opinions and confidence toward these two languages also support this imbalance.  While I was saddened by Jorge’s statement that he feels his English is incorrect, I feel grateful that he shared this feeling so that I can incorporate it into future interactions with him.