Kelsey Olson

Teaching Reading
December 3, 2013
Reading Case Study
For my reading case study I choose a first grade girl who is an English language learner.
She speaks Spanish at home and attends the thirty-minute EL intervention class held before
school each morning with other 1st grade English learners. She is social and talkative and has a
decent understanding of grade-appropriate conversational English. However, her reading and
writing abilities are very low. I have done phonics, reading, and sight word assessments with her
and observed her during writing and reading lessons in the classroom. During her final
assessment for the trimester before parent-teacher conferences she was only able to correctly
recognize eleven sight words out of a list of 102. This is an improvement from the beginning of
the year when she was only able to identify three: go, a, and I. In class they have regularly
been going over new sight words and each one has an accompanying song and hand motion. She
is sometimes able to remember the songs and hand motions, but usually only after she has been
told the word she is trying to read.
In addition to her low ability to recognize sight words, at the beginning of the year she
was also not able to sound out any phonetic words during her assessment. At the most recent
assessment she was able to sound out a few after being prompted that she should try to sound the
words out even if she did not know what they were. At a more basic level she also struggles with
letter name recognition and letter sounds. Like a lot of the other students in her class she
confuses the letter names p and q and b and d. She also did not know the names of n, j, g, u, and
e when being tested. She did not know the letter sounds for n, w, b, d (said b sound), i, o, a, u,
and e (said g sound). In addition she did not know the four consonant digraph sounds: sh, th, ch,

and wh. Understandably, given her letter and phonic knowledge she struggles a lot with reading
and writing.
This student scored 147 on the reading portion of the MAP test, which is considered
below basic. A score of 162 is considered proficient. She has told me multiple times that she does
not like to read. She also said that she is not read to at home. During my time reading with her I
have noticed that she is able to recognize some common words like a and will remember
names and repeated words later on in the story. She also makes guesses to what she thinks the
word might be rather than just staring at the page like some students. Her reading comprehension
though is not very good when she is reading. Since she does not recognize or know how to sound
out a lot of words when reading a new book her reading is choppy and slow with a lot of
involvement from whoever she is reading with at the time. In this class each student has a book
box that contains a few leveled books that they work on reading independently and to the teacher
during class. When I have listened to this student read from her book box her reading is much
smoother and she is able to retell the story to me afterwards. I was not sure how long these
particular books had been in her book box, but I found it interesting that they all had a picture of
the main word on each page above the word in the sentence. I do not think she was actually
reading these more challenging words like zebra, but was rather looking at the picture. She did
seem to know the story quite well when she was retelling and answering my reading
comprehension questions after reading so I got the strong impression that she had read this story
quite a few times before.
Recently this students teacher has begun teaching how to read nonfiction text and locate
the important parts in the reading. Each student has his or her own copy of the text and is
supposed to follow along as the teacher reads each paragraph at a time. The student I have been

observing put her finger to the page, but did not move it according to the words that were being
read. I placed her hand on the correct location multiple times throughout the reading, but she
continued to just move her finger through the reading at a constant pace that did not relate to the
teachers actual speed. After each paragraph was read the class would discus what information
they had just read and this student was able to answer questions and say important things from
the text. At the end of the reading the students were then asked to work in partners to answer the
questions about the reading. The tricky part was that they could not just write the answer, they
also had to highlight the relating part in the text. This student did a good job of verbally telling
me the answers, but was not able to find the answers in the text. She also had trouble writing the
answers down once her partner had shown her where the answer was located. I think that she is
able to comprehend information that is being read to her, but she is not able to follow along on
her own version of the text. She did not know where in the text her teacher was reading from on
her own, which I think made it challenging for her to later go back and try to find the answers to
the questions. She also struggles with writing, which makes it hard for her to respond to reading
questions.
I have very much enjoyed working with this student. Although she says she does not like
reading and thinks it is boring, she always says it with a smile, which I find interesting. I dont
think she necessarily hates reading and stories, I think she just realizes that this is something that
is challenging for her. It is much harder to enjoy reading when you struggle with recognizing and
sounding out words. She has a hard time comprehending what she reads herself when it is a new
book, which I feel must make reading seem boring to her. When her teacher or myself read a
story to the class she pays attention and is able to make predictions and answer questions. She is
clearly engaged when books are being read to her, but is not when she is the one doing the

reading. Her teacher has informed me that she considering holding her back at the end of the year
since she is receiving 1s in all subject areas (out of 4). Her parents were informed of this at the
parent teacher conference, which is the first step in the process. I feel that this plan definitely
makes sense for this student. First grade places a large focus on phonics, sight words, and
reading in general. A lot will depend on how she does the rest of the year, but at her current skill
level I feel she will get lost in second grade. She needs much more practice and support with
phonics so that she can become more confident and better with sounding out words. Her reading
would also be helped if she knew more sight words. I think it might be a good idea for her to
receive additional help in this area since she is so far behind other students in the class. Her
teacher has told me that she does not have much homework help support at home, which is
unfortunate. There are aids at the school that pull three students out of the class at a time to
review phonics and sight words. I question how much this is helping in comparison to her just
learning the words from being in the classroom. I think the situation might be better if it was
one-on-one help rather than a group so the other students would not be there to say the sight
words first. However, there are a lot of students who need help and only so much time so it is not
exactly practice for each student to receive one-on-one practice each week. In terms of her
reading skills, I think it would be a good idea to introduce shared reading to this class during
reading time. This student works well when placed in a pair so I think it would be to her
advantage to have another student whom she could discuss the main ideas of story with as they
read together. Currently the teacher is focused on individualized reading and this being a quiet
time. I think a lot of the lower ability readers could benefit more though if they were asked to
discuss the stories some of the days rather than always spending the time quietly looking
through their books individually. I really like that this teacher often incorporates group reading

into the day and places a large importance on asking comprehension questions to the class. This
student, as well as the other struggling readers in the class, needs continual support and modeling
during literacy activities to help build their knowledge and abilities.