Blog #7- running records

I was able to observe a running record and miscue analysis on two children.  The first student is a second grade student that comes from a Polish speaking background.  The second student is a native Spanish speaker.           

The first student is fluent enough that I was unable to hear any miscues that seemed to be language related.  He was reading on grade level and during his running record did not have any miscues that disrupted syntax or semantics.  He did self-correct all but two errors both of them were graphophonic mistakes but did not change meaning.  I know from speaking with the teacher that most of his goals are in writing, so at this point I would keep making sure that the student is reading independently and continue to get him to read different content area material so that his vocabulary continues to progress. 

With the second running record the student had more miscues.  She had a combination of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic miscues.  Most of her mistakes were graphophonic and she made sense of the story but wasn’t using the letters from the words she read.  She did self-correct or try to self-correct many of the miscues and would go back to try the sentence again.  She made a lot of insertions to try and make the story make sense if she didn’t know the word.  I didn’t notice mistakes that were specific to being an English Language Learner.  I know that several letters in Spanish make a different sound than they do in English and I didn’t notice those mistakes.  I think that this student needs to read through the words.  She is using the beginning of the words but not looking at the middle and end of the words.  This is what I would work on with this child next.  Help her learn to not give up on the word but work through the word.  It’s possible that she isn’t as sure of specific vocabulary that was in the book because English isn’t her first language, however I couldn’t find a specific pattern. 

Both students that I observed are fairly proficient with English and it was difficult for me to find errors that seemed specific to being ELL students.  The next steps I would take with both of these students are steps or strategies that I would use with all students not just ELL students.  However, I know that ELL students may need more scaffolding as the content becomes less familiar and I would need to be careful not to assume that because they did well on the running record, that they are totally proficient.