Receptive language is always easier than productive language. This is why you can't string together a single sentence you learned in your high school Spanish class, but you can flip past a commercial on a Spanish TV channel and get a vague idea of what they're talking about. In some senses, Miguel's assessment results fit this generalization, and in other ways they've got me totally perplexed.
Usually, I can nail a client's instructional level in oral reading, silent reading, and listening comprehension in under an hour. But I was shooting in the dark with poor Miguel. I handed him passage after passage, eventually using up our entire 90-minute session. (He was a very good sport about it, and when I thanked him at the end for his patience, he thanked me for mine.) I started him off with a sixth grade passage to read orally, just in case; I knew he could decode words at a higher level than that, but I wasn't sure what his comprehension skills were and didn't want him to totally bomb the questioning section at the end and get discouraged. Also, speed plays a huge part in comprehension, and I had no idea what kind of pacing to expect. Perhaps he'd use up so many cognitive resources decoding each painstaking syllable that he'd have no space left to think about what he was reading... I needn't have worried.
(As you're reading the results that follow, remember that this is a guy who could not read at all when he was 19.)
He blew through the sixth grade passage, and after giving him a harder one I decided he was instructional at the upper middle school level. Silent reading was a little lower, in part because I gave him an expository (nonfiction) passage. Since those are always harder, I started him at fifth grade, but that was too easy and so we went on to sixth grade and I decided that was a good place to stop for the moment. It's typical for a person's expository reading skills to be a grade level below their narrative reading skills.
Now on to the really surprising part: Miguel had demonstrated an excellent memory for things we'd talked about during our sessions. One major characteristic of someone with dyslexia, which is what he supposedly has, is excellent listening comprehension, which contrasts sharply with their subpar reading comprehension (oral and silent). So I chose a high school-level passage, the first part of a novel about a child's experience living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and read it aloud. It was about 2 1/2 pages long. At the end, Miguel couldn't rememberany of it. He couldn't answer a single comprehension question or tell me anything that he'd heard in the story. He told me everything he knew about Vietnam and the Vietnam War, which was a surprising amount, and was able to define words like "convoy." But he couldn't tell me anything about the plot, setting, or characters. He said he tried hard to listen... I jumped down to a sixth grade passage. He did better on that one, but it was about Abraham Lincoln, about whom he knows rather a lot, so I'm not sure if he was answering the questions from what he remembered about the passage or based on his prior knowledge.
All that had us both wiped out, so I save the writing assessment for the next session. After I watched him stare at the prompt he had chosen for a few minutes, I suggested a few prewriting techniques. He made a few notes (two), then slowly began to write, word by word. Although I assured him that spelling did not count, he still asked me to spell just about every other word for him. Some of them, like "encourage" were tricky, and others, like "used" were not. His finished product had good and bad qualities. It was only a few lines long and contained a lot of spelling errors, despite his using me as a human dictionary. There was no punctuation and maybe one capital letter. On the plus side, the position he was arguing was clearly stated at the beginning, and he provided two justifications for his opinion.
We had about half an hour left in the session, so after glancing at the essay I told him that the lack of capital letters and ending punctuation were the first things that jumped out at me. He had no idea what I was talking about. He recognized a period ("the dot," he said) but not an exclamation point or question mark. He could not recall every seeing them before! And he had no idea what any of them were used for. I can't even remember a time in my life when I didn't know what a question mark indicated. It's strange to think about. We went over that stuff for a while, then we did a quick crash course in capital letters. He couldn't tell me a single instance when one should use them. I pointed out that he'd correctly used capitals for the first letters of his first and last name when writing his name on the release forms during our first session and asked him why. He had no idea, and finally said he guessed it just looked better. After some more thought, he said he knew that capital letters always started sentences. Goodness.
We spend the remainder of the time talking about capitals and when they should be used, and he seemed to be starting to get the idea. Today I've got a bunch of exercises prepared for him to test out how much he remembers. I glanced through the grammar/mechanics portions of the GED and found that capital letters and ending punctuation are so basic they aren't even on it. He's going to have to understand things like commas and semicolons.At least I won't run out of material for him.
No comments:
Post a Comment