Solin's Reading Analysis

Solin’s positive attitude towards reading has helped him become the good reader that he is both in English and in Spanish today. He shared with me that he enjoys reading funny stories and books about monsters. When Solin reads he understands the left-to-right directionality and he identifies basic punctuation. Most of all, Solin is very ready and motivated to read. Solin’s reading abilities seize to amaze me. For being a student who is only in a half day Kindergarten group, his reading level is jumping by leaps and bounds both in Spanish and in English. For this assignment, I felt that administering a DRA would be the best choice to get the most accurate data regarding Solin’s reading level.

                Solin’s instructional text level in Spanish was a 3. This was as to be expected. He has great ability to decode, but at a DRA level 3 he is being challenged by a wider array of words he has to decode. He however had some trouble coming up with verbs to describe what the children in the book were doing. Rather than getting frustrated about not having the vocabulary to describe the main action in the page, Solin opted for choosing something in the page which he could describe. For example, the picture showed a girl sliding down a slide in the park, with a boy looking at her (the main focus of the picture). When he was asked to look at the picture and describe what was happening in the picture, he paused for a long time while he looked at the girl, and then looked at the boy, and decided to say that the boy was smiling (which he was). He understood that he had to say it in Spanish for it to count, so he did the best he could with the language background knowledge that he had.

                Solin’s instructional text level in English was a 3. This was shocking to me, considering the fact that Solin consider’s himself to be much better at reading in Spanish than in English. He has confirmed that he reads in English at home (he is being taught how to read in English by his mother). It was interesting to see that while reading in English, Solin did not use picture clues, unlike in Spanish. He was very focused and tried figuring out each word on his own. He had five instances where he came up with approximations (examples: said for side, the for they, dough for do).

                Overall, Solin showed that he would monitor his reading in Spanish, but not in English. When reading in Spanish, he would work through words, even if they were challenging.  But in English, he would just get frustrated and blurt out whatever came to mind that would fit in the context. I find that he finds reading in Spanish much more predictable and overall easier than reading in English, therefore he is more motivated to continue the reading process, rather than getting the reading done as soon as possible as he does with the English text.