Week 4.1: Running Records and Miscue Analysis for ELL Students

The first ELL student I administered a running record to was a first grader named Dianna. Her primary home language is Spanish. Dianna is a very bright student who loves school and especially loves to read! She read Ants by Mickey Darnonco and Lori Presti, Level 18 book with a 95% accuracy rate. Her miscues are shown below in the chart. I found it interesting that 88% of her miscues were graphically similar in the beginning of the word and 50% were graphically similar in the beginning and middle of the word. Only one of the miscues was self corrected which I believed has aided in her comprehension being so strong. She gave a very accurate retelling of the story. I feel she would have had a more difficult time with comprehension if she was consistently self correcting herself.

		Graphically similar?			Syntactically similar?	Semantically similar?	Self-corrected?
Text Says	Child Says	B	M	E
outside	inside		Ö	Ö	Y	N	Y
colony	call-	Ö			N	N	N
worker	workers	Ö	Ö		N	N	N
soldier	sold-	Ö	Ö		N	N	N
they	that	Ö			N	N	N
worker	working	Ö	Ö		Y	Y	N
antennae	ant-	Ö			N	N	N
shows	show	Ö	Ö		Y	Y	N

The second ELL student I administered a running record to was a first grader named Marko. Marko's parents are originally from Ukraine and have taught Marko how to speak Ukrainan. Marko also enjoys school and likes reading. He read Watch a Butterfly Grow by Shaundra Wenger, Level 13 book with a 94% accuracy rate. His miscues are shown below in the chart. Marko's miscue's were 67% graphically similar in the beginning of the word and 67% in the end of the word. Like Dianna, he only self corrected once. Even though his miscues were only 22% semantically similar, he still gave an excellent retell of the story. In fact, he provided many key details of the story including each of the four stages of a butterfly.

		Graphically similar?			Syntactically similar?	Semantically similar?	Self-corrected?
Text Says	Child Says	B	M	E
pupa	pipa	Ö		Ö	N	N	N
cabbage	cab-beige	Ö		Ö	Y	N	N
swallow-tail	swallow-till	Ö	Ö		Y	N	N
then	when		Ö	Ö	Y	Y	N
sticky	sticks	Ö	Ö		N	N	N
sheds	needs		Ö	Ö	Y	N	Y
the	then	Ö	Ö		N	N	N
swallow-tail	Snow-tail			Ö	Y	Y	N
types	tips	Ö		Ö	Y	N	N

Reflection:
Overall, I found it interesting that both ELL students miscues were graphically similar; incidentally in the beginning of the word and often times in the middle of the word also. These two students may automatically be looking at the beginning and middle of the word, and saying the first English word that is graphically similar. For example, the text read the and Marko said then. This would normally affect comprehension, but not for these two students. "Studies of reader miscues, in fact, show that struggling readers often rely too much on letters and sounds, while more proficient readers make greater use of syntactic and semantic clues as they read (Freeman & Freeman, p.137).

 Another thing I noticed is the pronunciation was sometimes very different. For example, the text read cabbage and Marko said cab-beige. I think he still may have understood what cabbage meant in the story but just pronounced it differently. However, if the pronunciation was making comprehension difficult, I would plan goals for the student that focus on pronunciation. (Freeman & Freeman, p.127).

One recurring pattern I found with Dianna is that three of her miscues involved the incorrect use of suffixes. For example, the text read worker and she said working. If I viewed Dianna's writings, I would guess that she is using incorrect suffixes. I would provide some extra practice for Dianna on using suffixes. Writing rhyming pages would help Dianna to become more aware of different spellings for a given sound. (Freeman & Freeman, p.139).  However, I would refrain from correcting her reading as long as it's not affecting her comprehension.

Miscues that are universal to all learners are the ones that are difficult for the student to sound out using phonics. For example, the text read types and Marko read tips. Marko tried sounding out the word and when that didn't work, he said a word that was most closely related. The is another word that phonics doesn't work on which is why its essential to teach and practice sight words with students."The key, then, is for children to build up a large number of known words" (Freeman & Freeman, p.142).

References

Freeman, D., & Freeman, Y. (2004). Second and Written Language Acquisition. In Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, and grammar (2nd ed., pp. 52-83). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.