"I Get It Now"-but Does She?

Description of Learner:
Jane is a positive and cheerful 65 years old African-American woman. Her last grade completed was the 4th grade in a racially segregated elementary school. For the last six months, she has been the first to arrive at the learning center, and her optimism is contagious, as she works well with any adult in our group. Jane's scores were 2.1 in reading and 3.3 in math on the TABE (Tests of Adult Basic Education: CTB/McGraw Hill). She post-tested after approximately 50 hours in the learning center with TABE scores at 4.5 in reading and at 4.2 and in math.

Challenge Faced:
Jane has multiple-related language challenges. She has great difficulty pronouncing words, writing basic sentences, and comprehending most readings. Her difficulty with pronunciation and reading is quite evident as she mispronounces words with more than two syllables and often modifies the endings of words. This contributes to her confusion with meaning. Sometimes, she may modify several words in one sentence. Jane has difficulty with writing as well, especially when her response is more than a long paragraph. Her page may be filled with a list of incomplete sentences that lack organization. When correcting a word with her to make sense of the content, she'll readily say, "Oh, I get it; I get it now." Sometimes I think she does, but as evidenced by subsequent work, there appears to be little or no transfer of the 'learning.' She continues to have problems with reading essays, news articles and stories.

What We Did:
I asked Jane to read more in class. She has not hesitated at any time. I correct her pronunciations when the words are key to the meaning of a sentence and when she is trying to pronounce the 2nd or 3rd syllable with great effort. Her oral reading has not improved significantly. I checked Jane's short writings and saw problems with her overall written language. She has the ideas in mind and will discuss these ideas, but there is a lack of organized thinking. I began giving her very narrow topics and asked her to write 2 or 3 sentences. This approach included the following: Do you take things too seriously? Explain your answer in 2 or 3 statements. Jane said, "Yes I do. For example, education; it's important for many things in life." With a narrow focus, Jane does better with her writing.

Recently, I asked Jane to work with writing basic sentences; she thought that was a good idea and worked very slowly with the introduction to writing. After doing work on a couple of pages, I asked her what she thought about this work, and she replied "I think it's good; I'm getting this."

Then, to focus on (silent) reading comprehension, I selected short contemporary readings that were followed by questions to test comprehension. I checked Jane's work as she started one of her readings and she said "I can get this part real good, but these (pointing to comprehension questions), are hard." The easy part for Jane was a list of definitions that matched explanations from the reading. Jane did that well, and I complimented her work with defining key words.

Analysis:
Jane appears to have multiple cognitive problems dealing with oral language, reading, and writing basic statements. A basic introduction to writing might improve her writing skills, and she is agreeable to this approach. Her responses in writing to narrowly defined topics include some that are fragmentary, but have shown improvement over time. Reading passages from a news article or story is difficult in terms of her pronunciation of words. Other strategies to correct her problem of discriminating sounds and syllables would be helpful. Jane's comprehension of her oral readings is hampered by her difficulty in reading and sounding the words as well as knowing these words.

What I Learned:
Jane has shown limited success with narrowly stated topics for writing. She enjoys this format, but she struggles with oral and written language in general. The pressure of reading in a large group may contribute to her mispronunciations as she ends words incorrectly. Her work with basic sentence writing is working albeit very slowly. However, she tackles this task with enthusiasm and has acknowledged the importance of learning how to write complete sentences. Jane's multiple learning problems require strategies that are balanced in some way to address her problems.

Jane, Group Discussion:

In your narrative, it sounds as if Jane is making limited progress, but her TABE scores indicate a respectable increase. How do you account for that?
Jane does homework regularly. Over time, her practice is helping.

Have you tried the approaches you suggest or other approaches for writing such as graphic organizers?
We have presented several approaches to writing paragraphs and essays. The emphasis became paragraph writing. Mind-mapping strategies, graphic webs, and the like have been introduced, but not yet fully developed.

It's been said that language is a gift from family; considering this, how have you dealt with correcting Jane's pronunciation?
Jane reads willingly in class; she practices this way and by coming regularly, she may improve more over time. Given her age, I don't think her pronunciation will greatly change. Other strategies would likely be employed for a younger learner.

Summary:

Director's Comments:

While Jane's age is against her in terms of changing pronunciations, a goal may be to help her hear the correct pronunciations, so she can comprehend the words she reads. Instruction with specific word analysis strategies, including syllabic rules and pronunciation conventions, seems quite appropriate for Jane. Because she struggles with oral language in general, it is difficult for her to associate meaning of written English to words she knows but pronounces incorrectly. In addition, her basic vocabulary knowledge is low. As you state, to expect correction of life-long pronunciation patterns may be unreasonable, and the added pressure of reading in a group appears to contribute to her mispronunciations. Thus, I believe having recordings of reading material whereby she listens several times to the content while following the print would be helpful before reading in a group. This could assist with pronunciation and help build reading confidence. Also, individual word practice with a Language Master on words that are consistently challenging for her could provide the intensive instruction needed to help her hear the words correctly even if changing long-lived speech patterns may be less productive.

While writing simple sentences is slowly showing improvement, once she is well-grounded in the noun-verb requirements for sentence construction, her progress should show faster gains. Two strategies are recommended for improvement in writing simple sentences. The first, Sentence Writing, was developed at the University of Kansas under the direction of Don Deshler and Jean Schumaker. As part of the strategy, students learn formulas for sentence construction. In Jane's case, she may need mnemonics that will help her remember what nouns and verbs are and how to construct sentences following the NV formula. In brief, NV means that something or someone does something (Jane speaks.) The formula patterns move to a more involved sentence using NVV (Jane speaks and writes.) or a NNV or NNVV sentence. From there, a compound sentence formula can be taught.

The second approach is called Sentence Popping and it can be used with the above strategies. To introduce sentence popping, bring in some popcorn and chat with Jane about how the kernel starts small and pops into larger units. As above, the sentence pops from Jane speaks to become more and more complex (Jane and Jack often speak and write about their trips and adventures. NNVV+ a compound prepositional phrase.)

Since Jane tackles her tasks with enthusiasm, it seems important to do more to capitalize on this positive characteristic by ensuring that as she develops specific skills, she can see her progress growth on graphs or in learning logs. By taking approaches such as these, Jane is apt to sustain her eagerness to learn and will continue to progress.