Elizabeth's Reading Analysis

Based on Elizabeth’s age and exposure to both English and Spanish, I decided to analyze her fluency, comprehension, and strategic behavior.

 Elizabeth read a few paragraphs regarding the history of the indigenous people of Paraguay, the Guaraní, and the Jesuit missions. We are currently starting to watch the movie “The Mission” so I thought it would be appropriate for her to read more about this topic in her dominant language. Regarding Elizabeth’s fluency in English, not only is she able to read words correctly, but also at a good pace. Her intonation is also accurate. At times, and as expected, when she encountered difficult or unknown words such as “sedentary” she would slow down her pace slightly. According to the fluency rubric from “Colorín Colorado,” Elizabeth scored a 4 in terms of her expressive reading. She “reads primarily in larger, meaningful phrase groups. Most of the story is read with expressive interpretation. Reads at an appropriate rate.”

In Spanish, Elizabeth read “El nacimiento de la col” by Rubén Darío, a beautifully written short tale. Elizabeth struggled a bit more than in English to get accuracy in pronunciation, especially with words she didn’t recognize. However, her pace and intonation were, for the most part, accurate. She read questions with the right intonation and differentiated among the different voices in the short story. I will focus more on her accuracy in pronunciation when describing her strategic behaviors and usage of her knowledge of the English phonetic code.

Regarding comprehension, I asked Elizabeth a few questions regarding the text she read in English and she was able to respond in full sentences and using accurate vocabulary and key information. Not only could she grasped the general message, but she could also summarize what she had read about in an articulate way. She recalled important facts and commented meaningfully adding information to my questions.

Regarding comprehension in Spanish, Elizabeth was able to answer general questions such as “who are the main characters in the tale? Where does this tale take place?” However, she struggled to answer critical questions that require higher order thinking levels such as “what happened to the cabbage?” “Why did this happen?” She read the text twice: once without any assistance and the second one with some aid from the vocabulary list provided by the textbook including some margins notes for clarification, synonyms in Spanish and some translations in English for those tougher words such as “tentarse” or “bellotas.”  The second time around, Elizabeth took more time to understand the meaning of the words instead of just trying to get through the text. Her pace slowed down as she glanced at the margins looking for those notes, clarifications, synonyms and translations. After going through some questions and answers and assessing her comprehension, I read the story to her in Spanish, pausing when I needed to clarify something and paraphrasing certain parts and rereading others to enhance her comprehension. I also used body language prompting Elizabeth to imagine what the text was saying preventing her from attempting to translate every word in her head. By the end of the third time, I noticed Elizabeth smiling. She had understood the story and had enjoyed it. I asked her further questions to check for comprehension and she succeeded at the task.

After reading both texts, one in English and one in Spanish, and having analyzed them for comprehension, I interviewed Elizabeth and asked her to explain her reading behaviors. In English, she said it was easier for her to understand the text because she could, without impediments, rely on making predictions as she read. Being exposed to English for her whole life, she has learned to predict what the next word will be before she even reads it. Even when she does not understand a word or two, she can rely on her previous knowledge and knowledge of other words to decipher the meaning of those tougher words. In Spanish, she said, the process of decoding the text was and usually is different for her. She couldn’t rely on predictions nearly as much as in English, especially when she encountered several words she didn’t know all within one sentence. So what then? She needed to rely more on previous knowledge like she did in the “El nacimiento de la col” with her general knowledge of the story of Adam and Eve and the evil snake. Also, she said that she heavily relied on the visual aid provided by the textbook, a picture of a cabbage with open “petals” resembling the shape of a rose. The other interesting comment that Elizabeth made regarding her behavior as a reader was that once I read the text to her, she focused her attention on imagining what I was describing instead of trying to figure the meaning of each individual word. She realized how much more helpful it would have been if she had applied that same technique when she was reading.

In order to solve new words, in English, Elizabeth relied more heavily on meaning cues, while in Spanish she relied more on visual cues. I noticed that Elizabeth applied the phonetic code of English when reading in Spanish but, as expected, not the other way around. Words like “Virginidad” were pronounced following the phonemes of English, pronouncing the “g” and the “v” like the “g” and “v” in the English word “Virgin.” Also, Elizabeth didn’t rely on accents marks in Spanish to guide her pronunciation. She pronounced the words “árboles” as arboles” and “acercó as “acerco.” Therefore, her accuracy in word pronunciation is clearly much higher in English than in Spanish. She relied more heavily on her dominant language, English, and applied her knowledge of the English phonetic code when reading in Spanish. I wonder if the reason why she mispronounced the accents in Spanish has anything to do with the high frequency of words in English that have a grave stress.