Reading

In observing Jorge’s reading awareness, I mainly focused on the two areas of Child as Reader and Concepts About Print.  While a few students in 4K are actually reading words and assigning the correct meaning and pronunciation independently of shared book reading, Jorge is not yet at this stage.  Since we are not teaching the students to read, per se, certain possible areas of observation for this week’s blog post were not as applicable to Jorge’s current stage of development in reading.  One of our areas of observation in the Gold Assessment is to record students’ stage of development in being able to read and retell and a story.  We selected several different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to read with the children during shared book time as well as provided a variety of mediums for students to read and tell the story (eg. Finger puppets, felt board with characters, story images with text for students to order, etc.)

I mention this because it is important to understand that not only had Jorge had exposure to the general version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears but he also selected these books to read with me, possible in part due to our current use of them.  We had versions of Goldilocks that were bilingual, as well as in only Spanish or English.  Both on the day I focused on Jorge’s Spanish reading development and on the day of English reading, Jorge selected a similar stack of books: several versions of Goldilocks, El conejito Knuffle, and Ten in the Bed, Las diez pequenas mariquitas, and Lola goes to the Library.  It is interesting to note that he did not appear to show any particular deference to the language a story was written in, even among Goldilocks, where we have multiple versions of each story available in each language option.  Also, Jorge’s enormous stack of books is very common for our 4K students when we ask them if they would like to read with us.  Jorge is also very familiar with all of the books he selected, which is another common pattern to 4K students selecting books to read.  Familiarity with a text seems to often trump any specific interest in a genre.  Jorge seems to gravitate to reading one-on-one with a teacher or in a very small group.  This may in part be due to the fact that he is more likely to have the teacher’s attention in Spanish if it is one-on-one, as no other students in the class speak Spanish.

As we read in Kathy Escamilla’s chapter this week, there are many overlapping areas between Spanish and English when assessing for Concepts About Print.  When “reading” in either Spanish or English, Jorge displayed the same understanding that books have a distinct beginning and end, a title and an author, words convey meaning and we follow these words in a linear pattern from left to right and top to bottom.  Although Jorge is not yet able to elicit a pronunciation and meaning for independent words, or, for that matter, understand each grouping of letters represents only one word, he does follow his finger along the text from left to right and top to bottom.  In “reading” in both Spanish and English to me, Jorge did speak in a louder voice when he came to a string of capital letters to show that a character was yelling or communicating in an amplified emotion.  In both languages, I did not observe an understanding in Jorge that sentences begin with a capital letter or that punctuation marks carry a specific meaning.  In class we have briefly discussed the significance of exclamation points and question marks when they come up in stories. 

As Jorge is not yet at the stage of development in his reading, differences in Concepts About Print in Spanish and English such as punctuation marks specific to Spanish (eg. Inverted question mark), guión quotation symbol, and the presence of accents) are not yet on Jorge’s radar when reading.  This is likely due more to the fact that he is four and is still in a pre-reading stage of development rather than because of a lack of understanding about reading in either Spanish or English.  While I used the Concepts About Print checklist as a guide to my observations of Jorge’s reading, I did not administer a formal CAP assessment, nor did I use the specific CAP books. 

When Jorge “read” me the story in English, code-switching was much more prevalent.  Although Jorge has been exposed to these books’ vocabularies in both English and Spanish he was much more likely to code-switch for a Spanish word during English reading than for a word in English when in reading in Spanish.  Unlike my observation of Jorge’s oral language, he often returned to the original language of speaking/reading after code-switching.  This was not the case in his English oral language analysis, where he would code-switch to Spanish while speaking in English and never return to speaking in English.