This is a case study I did on a 7th grade ELL learner at University Park Campus School in the fall.
Case Study: Geyser Perez
Geyser Perez is the student that I have been keeping track of this semester. From an interview with Geyser and her friends earlier this year, I found that she and her family are from the Dominican Republic. I have not met Geyser’s family, aside from her father, who I have only seen pick Geyser up from school on occasion. Her immediate group of friends includes other Spanish speaking seventh graders named Brittany, Sherlyn, Marlene, and Suheiry. She ran cross-country and for a while was in the dance advisory too. From what I can tell, Spanish is the main language spoken at home. She is an L1 ELL learner and went to Sullivan Middle School before coming to UPCS.
After having read Guadalupe Valdés’ text, The World Outside and Inside Schools, I find myself drawing comparisons between Lilian and Elisa, the students in the story, to Geyser and her peers who attend University Park Campus School. Valdés’ story tracks two Hispanic students that went to the same high school, but wound up in completely different places in life. It explains how within one school, the support systems and a teacher’s practice can create completely different outcomes for the ELL student experience. Geyser seems to have attributes of Lillian because she is easily side tracked and chatty when around her friends. However, when it comes to talking in class on topic, she struggles the most and this makes it difficult for her to engage. She exhibits traits of the more academically diligent Elisa when the class is a more notes taking based one. For example, she can understand and answer questions from a video on the international space station but doesn’t participate in the class discussion during the period. Upon seeing her science notebook, I am more optimistic about her progress and development. A few of the entries that I have attached show me that she has really good handwriting, better than most that I have seen in the seventh grade. Beyond that, she seems to have improved her math skills since staying afterschool for tutoring. More importantly, she does write down a lot of information. She keeps her work organized and tends to fill up the page with notes.
One of Geyser’s strengths is that she can copy down work really well even though she can’t understand the meaning of what is being said. This is based off of an input from her science notebook where she had to describe how the Earth was formed. The explanation that she wrote was really advanced and clearly not written in her own words. When my mentor teacher, James, checked her notebook he asked her to explain what it meant and she was unable to. After that, James didn’t give her credit for the homework and she was pretty upset about it for the rest of the class. From what I have heard about Geyser from another MAT, who teaches English, her writing proficiency applies in other subjects. This tells me that her social and academic written language skills are not that far apart.
Among my goals were to help improve her support network through socialization. The rationale for this is in part because not all teachers speak Spanish and also for most of the semester, we have not had an ELL specialist. The practices James and I have relied heavily upon focus on developing effective group work skills and enabling peer support. These strategies have been fairly successful because she now has a core group of friends that she hangs out with. I am still unsure if her impression of the school has changed since the interview from when I first started working more with her. Geyser does seems to be well established in her social circles and for better or worse, she even seems to be getting into a little trouble along with others for causing drama. This surprises me because she hangs out with mostly Spanish speakers, and yet the girls involved in the drama are non-Spanish speaking. The teachers ended up having to arrange seats in classes so that Geyser sits apart from her friends in some classes, including Science.
One thing I discovered recently is that if I explain the answer to a question in Spanish, she is able to write it out in English on her own. I made this connection recently when I tried to explain the concept of a metaphor in Spanish and gave her time to process and write her own answer. We were trying to create metaphors in class about the scale of the solar system. I asked her what sorts of things she is interested in and she replied that she likes soccer a little. Then, I asked if she knew what a metaphor was and she said no. I helped her compare the planets in the solar system to the teams in major league soccer. She made a connection in her mind when I asked her if it made sense.
One of her issues is not being able to practice more often speaking in English. I imagine she is aware that her level of spoken English is pretty low. A recent conversation with a different eighth grade student made me aware that people with accents might be made fun of. I am unsure how pervasive or prevalent this issue is. Given our small school setting, it would be easy for most people to be aware of some sort of bullying going on. I think that in the classroom context, fear of embarrassment might keep Geyser from participating to her fullest in discussions. She does raise her hand in agreement in many situations where we address the whole class on a question. From what I can tell, she is not a victim of bullying, but based on interactions with other students, people with accents have been alienated by students in some cases.
Before coming to UPCS, she went to Sullivan Middle School. I am unsure if she was there for all the grade levels. One of the possible influences on her speaking development may come from the lack of focus on speaking skills there and English spoken at home (Valdés). I am curious about how the preparation at the elementary level might make it difficult for ELL students transitioning into middle school. There is definitely a stronger emphasis on written work in middle school. So Geyser seems well prepared to that extent. I know Geyser can speak some English, but her pronunciation is just not as clear. She knows a few phrases in English that let her explain how she feels but she rarely says anything in English aside from that.
The classes that she is getting A’s are in the following: Art, Music, and Physical Education. Overall, she is well liked by her teachers. She has a satisfactory rating on all academic aspects of class including her quizzes and tests. James even gave her a excellent rating for effort in Science, despite getting a C overall so far. The classes in which she has a B are English, Numeracy, and Pre-Algebra where academic language seems to be more of a barrier. For Social Studies and Science, she has a C, but according to Geyser, the only reason that she has a C in Social Studies is because she is missing 3 homework assignments. Oddly enough, I think she lost her science notebook, which may have affected her grade a little.
It goes without saying that she needs one on one support for English with our new ELL instructor. In terms of pedagogical recommendations, I would suggest that she get support in the classes where understanding written English plays a stronger role. For Science, part of the issue is that James is unable to support her linguistically but is able to provide other methods to help like grouping, hands on activities, and in note taking. Her notebook seems to have quite a lot of information from the class. Even some of her math skills show up here. Since the lab where we were measuring mass and density, she has been getting help afterschool for her math class. Even though she doesn’t have a good grade in Science, it is evident that she is trying really hard. Part of the reason for her C in Science class is due to James’ difficulty of explaining the concepts in terms that she can relate to.
Among my other recommendations would be to put her in situations where she can use the vocabulary more intentionally to pactice. I think that the exposure to these terms will help her speaking ability. This would expose her to more tier 1 words that would reinforce what she already knows. I think that activities where she has to make opinions, comparisons and analogies would be useful to her because they would help her in thinking in English.
I would continue to encourage Geyser to write in new words that she is learning. I think that looking back on her notes would help her keep track of her learning (Calderon). Providing support like this would be useful too, in finding ways to translate some of the assignments for her. In addition, I think this would complement the other strategies that are in place. The issue that I am concerned with is just relying solely on group and pier group support. What I have found is that grouping with Spanish speaking students doesn’t guarantee that she gets the support that she needs to participate fully in an activity. In some lab classes, group work has been counterproductive. I worry that her peers are limited in their ability to help her and could be a source of distraction rather than a source of help.
What confuses me is that in Peregoy and Boyle, they describe that ELL learners acquire basic oral language competence earlier than competence in reading and writing. Geyser doesn’t seem to fall within this pattern because of her stronger writing skills and much more limited speaking skills. Even though she has stronger written English than we thought initially, she still rarely speaks in English in class aside from a few short responses. Her grades would certainly suggest that she is a good student. I think then that the issue lies in social factors. “The social context of language use places different cognitive and social demands on speakers that may affect the quality of their oral language performance” (Gibbons). When I am on lunch duty, I notice that Geyser sits with her same friend group and is usually speaking in Spanish. Their conversations are lively, and most of the time, I cannot keep up with the pace of their speech.
Looking at her notebook for the entry 26R: Life in space, she seems to do well with the exercise where she makes observations about the video regarding the international space station. She asks great questions about the astronauts and seems very engaged with the activity overall. I think that it would be useful to develop a core set of sentence starters that are useful within a discipline and use them during group activity days.
Guided talk would be useful for her too, and there are many strategies outlined in Gibbons that could help support teachers who end up working with her. The project that we worked on most recently had dealt with using limited materials to try and build a boat that could hold the most rubber stoppers. She was in a group that managed to hold forty or so stoppers. What was interesting about the results of this lab is that the success of the teams was very lopsided. They either got the concept and built a wide boat and were able to hold at least forty, or they were just too small and held less than fifteen. I think that being in small groups like these have been greatly helpful for her.
The use of comprehensible output seems to really benefit her in these individual or group situations. To refine the help, I think it would be helpful to explain terms in Spanish that she might not know and then set up directions in Spanish too. After that, I would allow her to struggle with the work more. I hope that she is provided more opportunities to read aloud where it can lower her affective filter. It definitely is really high considering input from Laura and other teachers. She definitely doesn’t enjoy reading aloud, although she will read work not written by herself.
Seeing Geyser’s mid quarter report card showed encouraging signs that she is doing well in our school environment. I remain helpful for her speaking skills, and she seems to be able to get by with her writing skills. It will certainly be interesting to see how she develops academically by the end of the spring semester.
Works Cited:
Calderon, M “Teaching Reading to English Language Learners Grades 6-12 Ch.3 Vocabulary Development”
Echevarria, Jana, and Deborah Short. “Ch.2 Lesson Planning”
Gibbons, Pauline. “Planning Talk for Learning and Literacy” Heinemann, 2009, web.
Valdes, Guadalupe. “The World outside and inside Schools: Language and Immigrant Children.” American Educational Research Association, n.d. Web. 01 June 2014.
She has since opened up more to talking in class and even will give answers in class. I remember the first time she raised her hand on her own to answer a question. I remember looking back and forth Geyser and James and being utterly surprised. It’s an amazing feeling for sure.