Next: sight words. I tape recorded him reading forty words from flash cards. He read them faster than I could flip the cards without making any errors.
The spelling test was next, and based on his answers during the previous tests, I guessed that there would be some rough spots here. Typically, unskilled spellers have difficulty hearing short vowel sounds (especially ones that sound kind of similar like /u/ and /o/) and representing long vowel sounds that are formed with more unconventional vowel combinations (e.g. ai in wait; they always want to write "wate"). Miguel nailed each of the short vowel sounds I gave him. Predictably, he had trouble with about half of the long vowel words I gave him. Other problem areas for poor spellers tend to be blends (like, well, bl in blend or fr in fresh) and digraphs (like sh in shut or ch in coach). He wrote each blend correctly, contrary to my expectations, and was reasonably accurate representing digraphs as well, mixing up ch and sh once each.
At this point, I was starting to think that my initial impressions were way off. But after a moment's reflection, I decided that this shift sort of made sense. The assessment tests I gave him during the last session concerned mostly auditory processing, the way a person hears the sounds in language, whereas today's tests were all about knowing letter-sound correspondence. He may not hear sounds the way I would, but he was certainly showing me that he'd learned the rules, most likely by rote.
The next and last part of today's session were word lists; from these, I'm supposed to select reading passages for him so that I can assess his fluency and comprehension skills in our next session. I'd initially expected him to struggle with the first grade-level passage, but luckily I happened to have copies of each list. I started with first grade, just to be safe, then handed him second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and upper middle school. He wasn't perfect on the last few, but he was pretty close. Based on the number of words a client misses, the practitioner determines whether s/he should be able to read a passage at that grade level independently, whether it is at instructional level, or whether it will lead to frustration. Miguel tested instructional at an upper middle school level.
All of this is very unexpected and interesting, but I don't think I'll truly have a good sense of his abilities until the next session when I'll test his reading comprehension and his writing. When he was reading the word lists, I got the sense that, while he was decoding the words correctly, he wasn't always clear on what they meant. I'll be able to use his comprehension levels to test this hunch. We call these types of readers "word callers." They read accurately, but either don't pay attention to the words they are reading or else have such poor vocabularies that they can't make meaning out of them. Miguel doesn't seem to be too worried about the reading portion, however. He predicts that writing will be his worst area.
At the end of the session, we talked about the GED. He said he was enrolled in a preparation class for about a semester. Although he passed the prerequisite test to get into the class, once in he felt he was falling behind and after a semester, he dropped it. So GED prep will be our immediate goal. Screenplays will stay on the back burner for a while.
Just for fun, here is a sample of words from the upper middle school list:
-emulate
-infrared
-assimilate
-migration
-gravity
-persecution
-inevitable
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