I recently had the opportunity to Give The DRA assessment to
my literacy class. I am thankfully pleased with the results but I have to admit
I was a little surprised by some of the results. I thought I had done enough
assessments along the way to know exactly what my ESL student’s struggles and
strengths lye. I was excited that reading fluency seemed to come easily for my
students however comprehension and meaning were not as strong as I had hoped.
One of my Spanish-speaking students consistently kept
switching words around in the sentence but corrected her by using the pictures
as clues and attempting to make meaning of what she was reading.
One of my Ethiopian students left words out of the
sentences, they did not use picture clues as well as some of the other
students, which made it a little tougher to sound out words.
Another one of my Spanish-speaking students read above grade
level fluently but comprehension was completely lost.
It is important to note each student has different cultural
experiences. The first Spanish-speaking student never went to pre-school and
spoke very little English coming into kindergarten. The other Spanish-speaking
student mentioned above went to pre-school but a Spanish speaking pre-school.
I believe it is important to be careful we do not intentionally
label our students into categories.
My next steps in teaching strategies will be to work on
vocabulary building to help with fluency and comprehension skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment