*For Zeek* Case Study Paper

Fieldwork Journal Week 2

Introduction: To begin, Mrs. Peterson’s second grade class has about 17-20 students in it. A majority of the students are girls with only a few boys. She has about 3 or 4 “EL” (English Learner) students and over half of her class are lower reading level and lower performing students. Her class is also a “SpEd” combo which means that some of her students have IEP’s (Individual Education Plans) alongside her English Language Learners. On the agenda for January 24th, 2019, I observed Mrs. Peterson begin class with high-frequency word practice. After, the students broke into their reading rotations, and then onto STAR testing. For high-frequency words, they were given a worksheet to complete during rotations. Some of the high-frequency words the students were focusing on included: above, different, few, they, which, began, enough, grow, were and why. On the back of the worksheet, the focus was on phonics, specifically the vowels “oi” together.

Student Observations/Miscellaneous: I sat down with a student named Zoey to work on high-frequency words. We worked on the sentence: “The small plane flew above our town”. She had to sound out the word “small” after originally pronouncing it incorrectly. When finding the blank for the sentence “The man ____ to run after that big dog growled”, she took her time on the word “man”, especially sounding out the letter “M”. Anna was reading a chapter book called “The Kidnapped King”. She reads extremely well at this level and is reading at a very fast pace. However, she got stuck on the word “touch” for “touch football”. I learned that Anna is a student who graduated out of “EL”, she did not speak English before. I would have never guessed. A student named June is from Japan, so English is completely new to her in speaking, reading and writing. She was writing words that begin with “L” on a piece of paper and speaking them to Mrs. Peterson. One of the words she had the hardest time with was lɛts. She kept pronouncing it as lɪts. She also got stuck on the word “looking” and would say the root word first, then the suffix and put them together to sound it out. She also learned for the first time what the sound “f” made.

Mispronounced consonant sounds: wɪf/instead of wɪð, rɑ/instead of ɑr, gʌt/instead of ɪŋg, laɪt/instead of laɪf, kaʊtɜr/instead of ˈkwɔrtər, wɔrɛfk^h/instead of wɜrk, sɪns/instead of ˈsaɪəns, snɪflɛs/instead of ˈsnɪfəlz, dɜr/instead of ðɛr

Mispronounced vowel sounds: tərɔrs/instead of ˈtutərz, plæn/instead of pleɪn, oʊər/instead of ˈaʊər

Sentence-level problems: Working with June, an EL student, I found many sentence formation issues. However, most of the other students in her class had them as well. These included:

“More harder” instead of “harder”, “What a big noise those drum makes” instead of “What a big noise those drumS make_”, “teached” instead of the past tense “taught”

Speaking habits: Most of the EL learners had troubles with their “s” consonant sounds. Instead of using their tongue to pronounce the “s” sound, a lot of the time they would pronounce them using the “ð” sound for many words like books, small, etc.

Reflection: One common problem I noticed within this class as a whole was pronouncing their “S” sounds at the end of words when it is used as a suffix. Most of the time, the words with “S” as a suffix would be pronounced as “th”, almost like speaking with a lisp. The students also struggle with past tense vocabulary and regularly use present tense when speaking or writing. Overall, they seemed to make progress when corrected by Mrs. P.