Reading Assessment and Intervention

Reading Assessment and Intervention

Introduction

Sara is a six-year-old who joined the first grade at the beginning of the year. Sara lives with her extended family which includes her grandmother and two older cousins who are both in the 10^th grade. At home, her family communicates mostly in Arabic and they rarely converse in English. Sara loves reading and her favorite books are fairy tale story books. She likes reading the stories out loud but her inability to read words correctly has lowered her confidence. When she is not reading her fairy tale books, her grandmother reads them to her. The main problem that Sara has is incorrect reading of words. The purpose of this case study is to find out what strategies can be used to aid Sara improve her reading skills.

Methodology

Pre-assessment

The objective of this study is to find out the reading skills of Sara. In this case, I will assess her phoneme recognition ability by use of various methods. First, I will ask her to read some words out loud so that I can assess her phoneme reading skills. The words I will ask her to read will include boot, put, bat, bad, pat and bird. Secondly, I will use a picture book to find out whether she can match the pictures to the words and this will enable me assess her recognition skills and see whether they are different from her reading skills. Thirdly, I will give Sara a simple dictation in order to determine whether her reading skills affect her spelling. The words I will use for the dictation will be do, to, big, pig, food and foot.

Analysis and discussion

This test has proven that Sara indeed has a phoneme reading problem which has in turn affected her spelling skills. When using the picture book, she was able to match all the pictures to their respective words. This means that Sara understands what the words mean and therefore her problem was not in understanding what the words mean.

When reading the words out loud, I saw that Sara could not differentiate the various phonemes in the words. She read the word bird as bat and the word pig as big. When I dictated words for her to write, Sara made simple spelling mistakes such as writing the word to as do; she also wrote the word big as pig. This implied that incorrect reading had affected her spelling skills

Literature review and strategy

The problem that Sara is mostly because of the little practice of the English language. As such, I have decided to use strategies that tackle the problem both from home and from school. According to Grover and Christopher (1998), a natural environment can impede on a child’s reading. This is the case of Sara because in her house, they use Arabic and rarely communicate in English. As such, Sara cannot practice pronouncing English words correctly and it affects how she reads them. In this case, I will encourage her family to communicate more in English in order to give Sara the opportunity to practice away from school.

Secondly, I will look for alternative ways for Sara to read her favorite books. In line with Monique and Jo-Anne (2002), children are introduced to reading and writing at an early age through home literacy. Similarly, Sara was introduced to reading by her grandmother who reads her fairly stories and as such, it is highly likely that she contributes to Sara’s poor reading skills. Therefore, I will introduce Sara to the audio version of the books she loves. Through these audio books, Sara will identify the words by using the printed book and learn how to read them correctly. After listening to the audio books, I will give Sara some words from the book to read and assess whether she can read them correctly.

Thirdly, I will use cards with individual phonemes and ask Sara to make simple words and their meanings. Inability to write properly can be associated with reading problems (Marieke, Marie-Therese and Jean-Luc, 2005). After communicating in English at home, listening to audio books and sessions of reading the words from the same books, I will now asses whether her spelling skills have improved. I will give her cards with letters such as b, f and oo and ask her to form words from them. I expect her to form the words foot and boot from the given example. I will then ask her read them out loud and this will help me to assess her reading skills further.

Results

Sara confirmed that her family has embraced communicating in English which has helped her understand the language more. From constant communication with her mother, I learned that Sara has been reminding her family to communicate more in English in order to help her understand different words. This is evident by her new willingness to read words in class even though sometimes she reads them incorrectly. Sara can now differentiate words such as bat and bad when reading them.

Also, our routine of listening to audio books is also working. This is evident by the way she reads words from the stories. She used to read the cover of the book as, “The little red writing hoot” and write it that way too but after listening to the story a few times, Sarah reads the title as, “The little red riding hood” which is correct. Seeing that this method is working, I recommend that Sara should be given more audio books to help her improve her reading skills gradually.

Analysis and discussion

Sara has shown a lot of improvement compared to when we started working on her reading skills. She can now differentiate between /b/ and /p/ when reading as opposed to earlier. She still has minor problems and difficulty to pronounce words when reading them but this problem can be eliminated by listening to more audio books and then reading the same story thereafter. Her improved reading skills have restored her self-esteem and she now volunteers to read out words as well as spell them out. Sara has showed great interest in gaining reading skills and her willingness made her an attentive student.  The table below shows her progress before and after I implemented the strategies mentioned above.

Fig1. Assessment table showing the progress Sara has made.

fig 2. Sara reading the print story book after an audio book session.

Conclusions and recommendations

Reflection: I learned that poor reading skills can directly affect a child’s writing skills. Since Sara understood most words, improving her reading skills was easier compared to that of a child who does not understand word meanings. I did well when I encouraged Sara to converse in English both ant school and at home. However, I would have increased the audio books sessions because Sara enjoyed them. I would recommend the usage of audio books to help children with poor reading skills. After listening to the book, the child can read the same book out loud to see whether they can read better. The main problem one can encounter is the child cramming the book and pretending to read, but this can be tackled by using different books in a spontaneous routine. I would like to learn whether incorrect pronunciation of words affects reading and writing skills through the same procedure I used with Sara. When I become a school teacher, I will use the audio book strategy on students with poor reading skills since it has proven to be effective.

In conclusion, it is important to carry out a reading assessment tests on students who seem to have difficulties in reading. After identifying the major problem, the next step is to identify an effective intervention method that will help the child improve their reading skills. The intervention method is only effective if the reading skills of the child improve.

References

Longcamp, M., Zerbato-Poudou, M. T., & Velay, J. L. (2005). The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing. Acta psychologica, 119(1), 67-79.

Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five‐year longitudinal study. Child development, 73(2), 445-460.

Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child development, 69(3), 848-872.