Jimmy Hunt

30052409

A S S E S S M E NT 2

PART 1

Ella is a grade 2 student in a mixed grade class of grade one and two students. She is always

eager to participate in class discussions and share strategies and information that may help

other students. She is prone to getting distracted, however, by her own imagination more than

by other students. Perhaps due to these lapses of concentration, her literacy is slightly behind

that of her grade two classmates.

Ella really enjoys literacy. On top of her daily reading at home required for class, she likes to

read chapter books by herself. She enjoys books containing humorous storylines, and

particularly ones with abstract, silly humour. Her sense of humour may attract her to these

books, or the books may inspire her sense of humour. Evidence of this is her slippers she wears

in the classroom – they are shaped as big, furry monster feet with sharp looking claws. She

enjoys when people pretend to be scared of them, and she provokes them playfully. The books

she reads the most are fiction books, either humorous or sometimes feminine such as those

featuring princesses and lead female characters.

In the classroom, there are countless daily uses of literacy. Current writing tasks are generally

autumn-themed, and range from single-sentence tasks to multiple paragraphs. Recent weeks

have seen the students write single sentences using similes, metaphors, personification,

onomatopoeia, rhyme, and the power of three. One longer task had students write a story with a

clear beginning, middle and end. A planning worksheet assisted the students in doing this,

which helped the students select their characters, settings, problems to occur, resolutions, and a

word bank. The also wrote cards to their mothers for Mother’s Day.

Reading is very prevalent in Ella’s class. Learning intentions and success criteria are clearly

written on the board and the students are advised to read them, along with the daily class

schedule. Reading time is allocated daily in which students may read independently, and are

often called upon to read aloud to the teacher or teacher’s aide. Each student has a goal when

reading, based on their weaknesses. Guided and modelled reading occur regularly.

Most classroom instructions are verbal, so adequate speaking and listening skills are vital. Ella

seems to concentrate reasonably well when instructions are being given, but tends to lose focus

during reflection-based discussions. Perhaps she does not see reflection as essential like

instructions, or perhaps because reflection is at the end of a lesson and instructions are at the

start, she reaches the end of her concentration threshold and is mentally exhausted at that stage

in a lesson.

Outside of the classroom, Ella has a functional literacy skill set. She reads chapter books

regularly at home, going above and beyond her required reading for school. She is competent at

using an iPad to browse the internet, watch videos and play games. Her favourite game is an

older Pokemon game which requires a reasonable amount of reading. She enjoys writing cards

and letters for family members and friends. Her only sibling is a baby brother, so the majority of

her oral communication is with adults; her parents and her grandmother who she sees once or

twice a week. Ella occasionally challenges her mother to spelling competitions, which she

proudly claims to win every time.

It is possible that Ella’s frequent oral communication with adults rather than children helps her

reading and writing skills, as ‘being able to hear language, perceive differences in meaning and

articulate difference is crucially important in learning how to read and write’ (Hill, 2012, p. 20).

Ella is a competent reader in many ways; even when she struggles to read some words in a text,

she is able to comprehend the meaning. This shows that she is an adequate meaning maker

despite obstacles as a code breaker (Luke & Freebody, 1999). This may be due to her capacity to

regularly communicate verbally with adults, giving her a greater understanding of more

complex aspects of the English language when compared to her classmates who communicate

more with other children. She is able to follow written instructions even when some of her

classmates cannot, which demonstrates her capacity as a text user (Luke & Freebody, 1999).

I witnessed Ella undertaking a running record recently (see Appendix A for Running Record).

Before reading, she was reminded of her reading goals which are focused on code breaking; to

use chunky monkey, stretchy snake, and similar strategies for students who struggle to read

words. Setting a purpose for reading such as this motivates and guides the reader (Tompkins,

Campbell, Green & Smith, 2015).

She read a book she had not read before, The Rainbow Cat by John Parker. Ella read 65 words of

this book and made 13 mistakes, showing that the book is too difficult for her at this stage. All

but one of the mistakes were visual mistakes, meaning she failed to read the whole word and

instead likely used her word knowledge to determine what the word is rather than reading it

entirely (Tompkins et al., 2015). Most of the incorrect words she said were similar to the actual

words in both spelling and meaning, so she was not aware that she had made mistakes. After

reading, Ella was able to describe the story in her own words, showing that she was able to

comprehend the text well as she read. Also notable was that most words were read

expressively, without breaks in between, indicating that she could understand and anticipate

the storyline and dialogue of the book despite never having read it before.

Ella’s writing is strong in some areas and could use some improvement in other areas. Her

sentences can be creative and descriptive, and she is able to successfully achieve the goals of

classroom writing tasks. Her sentences also follow correct grammar conventions, which is not

present in all of her classmates’ writing.

Ella is great at drawing, and her drawings show details and proportions that her classmates are

not able to replicate. It is possible that this penchant for drawing allows Ella to imagine things in

visual detail before she writes them, which would make her a better writer (McKenzie, 2011).

Her handwriting would be described as early writing, as spellings of words are often invented,

upper and lower case letters are distinct, and spaces between words are consistent

(Department of Education and Children’s Services, 2006).

An area for improvement in Ella’s writing is spelling. In a writing task from last term (see

Appendix B for Writing Sample) she wrote 75 words and misspelled 14 unique words.

Some of these misspelled words suggested she knew the letters in the words, but placed them in

the wrong order. Specifically, she misspelled ‘one’ and ‘eat.’ Both of these words are in Ella’s

spelling list which she is required to practice with multiple times per week at school. This

spelling list is based on the Oxford Word List as seen in Bianco, Scull & Ives’ report on the words

(2008). This suggests that she may be using her memory to recall the letters in the words but is

not rereading them once she has written them to ensure they look right and sound right when

read aloud.

The words ‘day’ and ‘member’ are almost spelt correctly, except that the letter b is written as d.

This issue is also apparent in her writing of numbers, as the date for this writing has a

backwards number three. Handwriting in the Victorian Curriculum does not feature the letters b

and d being mirror images of each other as they typically are in print (State Government of

Victoria, 2017), so this problem may be due to reading and viewing typical print fonts as

opposed to modern handwriting as is seen in the Victorian Curriculum.

Other words misspelled, such as chocolate spelled ‘choklet’ and amazing spelled ‘imasing,’ are

likely simply to be words Ella has not encountered many times yet and thus she does not know

how to spell them. Notable in these mistakes is that phonetically they sound the same as the

words they are supposed to be, suggesting that she understands and follows the conventions of

spelling.

Despite these misspelled words, the writing is grammatically correct for the most part. Clauses,

comparisons and repetition all feature in this short piece of writing, and are used effectively to

create a descriptive and interesting text.

In summary, Ella does several things well in her reading and in her writing. Her reading is

strong in understanding both meaning and typical features of a story book, while her writing is

similarly well-structured. An important area to focus on with her reading is closely reading

letters rather than just assuming words based on contextual meaning. Her spelling leaves room

for improvement, although phonetic awareness is quite good.

PART 2

The aims of the Victorian English curriculum include the core functions of the English language,

and expand into appreciation of the language’s capabilities, and understanding of how it

combines with non-linguistic elements to create meaning (State Government of Victoria, 2017).

As a grade 2 student, Ella is of course in the early stages of this but certainly shows signs of

progress in all areas.

In the Luke and Freebody (1999) model of literacy roles, Ella is a competent text user; she can

navigate an electronic device, read story books for entertainment, and follow written

instructions. As a text participant, she is able to relate elements of stories to her own life and

compare them with other stories, such as when she compared a character in one book’s

imagination of events to a character’s imagination in a book she had recently read. She is at the

basic level of being a text analyst; she can recognise when an element in a story is designed to be

scary. And to achieve those three roles, she is an adequate code breaker, although that is a role

with obvious room for improvement.

Ella’s running record showed that she had trouble with some words without realising – she

failed to examine words closely enough and used her comprehension skills to assume meaning

and make educated guesses as to what these words were. Her writing errors were mainly with

spelling, although most of these incorrect spellings featured phonetic accuracy. She also

displayed a tendency to write the letter d backwards as b. All other letters appeared to be

written correctly, as did the same letter several times, but this issue was also present in writing

the number 3.

Ella is competent in many areas of literacy. While leaving room for improvement, her reading is

effective for multimodal electronic and printed texts. Her listening and speaking skills are

strong, possibly due to verbally communicating with adults more than children. Her writing

shows understanding of grammatical principles including capitalisation, punctuation and

sentence structure. The two areas I believe require attention are spelling and reading.

Ella’s spelling is phonetically sound, so phonemic, basic phonetic and similar strategies would

not be suitable. Rather, it is longer words, some high frequency words, and the letter d that

cause problems.

The New South Wales Department of Education and Training (2007) makes several suggestions

for consideration in teaching spelling. These include encouraging students to select spelling

words, providing daily practice, guided writing, maintenance, and education of authoritative

spelling sources. I would allow Ella to create a list of spelling words which may overlap with her

school spelling words, based on words she misspelled recently and other words she encounters

in her reading. Since she enjoys spelling at home, and always completes her daily home reading,

I would encourage her to practice spelling at home each day, including scheduled revisits of

previous spelling words. A children’s dictionary would benefit her while writing. Guided writing

sessions may be possible in focus groups during class writing activities. These sessions could

bring attention to letters written backwards, knowing when to find correct spellings, and

knowing how to find correct spellings.

An over-arching strategy Ella could employ for spelling is decoding by analogy; associating

words students are unclear about with words they know (Tompkins et al., 2015). Thus when

trying to spell a word such as cookies, she could be encouraged to think of similar words,

whether for the entire word or single syllables. For example, the ‘cook’ in cookies sounds like

‘book’ so the spelling is likely to be similar – avoiding at least some of problem when spelling it

‘cokiys’. Similarly, no words end in ‘iys’ but many end in ‘ies’ so she could be encouraged to try

several spellings and see if any look right. Her syllabication is adequate, as evidenced by her

phonetic spellings, so this approach is within her capabilities.

To assist in Ella’s recommended daily spelling, taped spelling is an activity suggested by the

New South Wales Department of Education and Training (2007). In this activity, the student

reads spelling words to an audio recorder, hides the words, and then plays the recording and

spells the words. This activity may be more beneficial than the class’s current self-tested

spelling activity where each word is sighted then spelled with no separation. Similarly, a buddy

while at school, or a parent while at home, could read the words for Ella to spell without her

sighting them.

Sounding out the beginning sound and guessing the word is a common trait of struggling

readers (Tompkins et al., 2015). Ella appears to use meaning to clarify her guesses, but this

strategy alone is inadequate and her aversion to examining words closely may be holding back

her spelling. This may be helped through guided reading as described by Tompkins, Campbell,

Green and Smith (2015), and the reading strategies ‘chunky monkey’ and ‘stretchy snake.’

In guided reading Ella could be prompted on which words need to be examined more closely,

since she tends to substitute words with similar meanings and thus is not aware when she

makes errors. The teacher, parent or other helper could also encourage her to slow down to

ensure she examines each word carefully. This is when chunky monkey and stretchy snake

could be employed. These strategies force the reader to break the word down into syllables or

even phonemes, and I believe that once these strategies become habits, Ella’s reading and

spelling would see substantial improvements.

REFERENCES

Bianco, J., Scull, J. & Ives, D. (2008). The words children write: research summary of the Oxford

word list research study. Retrieved from

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/school/teachers/teachingresources/

discipline/english/oxfordwordlist.pdf

Department of Education and Children’s Services. (2006). ABC Handwriting in the South

Australian Curriculum. (2nd ed.). Adelaide, Australia: Department of Education and

Children’s Services.

Hill, S. (2012). Developing early literacy: assessment and teaching (2nd ed.). South Yarra,

Australia: Eleanor Curtain.

Luke, A. & Freebody, P. (1999). A Map of Possible Practices: further notes on the four resources

model. Practically Primary, 4(2). Available from

http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.federation.edu.au

McKenzie, N. (2011). From drawing to writing: what happens when you shift teaching priorities

in the first six months of school? Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 34(3), 322-

340.

New South Wales Department of Education and Training. (2007). Writing and Spelling

Strategies: Assisting students who have additional learning support needs. Retrieved from

http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/schoolsweb/studentsupport/

programs/lrngdificulties/writespell.pdf

State Government of Victoria (2017). Handwriting. Retrieved May 14, 2017, from

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/

Tompkins, G., Campbell, R., Green, D. & Smith, C. (2015). Literacy for the 21st century: a balanced

approach (2nd ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Pearson Australia.

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B