Instructional Strategy Implementation
Student Information
Lena is aged 14 years and is in grade 3. The student was diagnosed with Mild Dyslexia in early 2018. Lena started learning English in the EFL setting and received 1:1 English Language Arts (ELA). The system is a support system for English students performed two times a week for 20 minutes. Lena is an elementary school student in Alexandria, Virginia, and lives with her Arabic speaking parents near the school. She is learning English as a second language. Due to her mild dyslexia ergo, Lena is slow in her reading proficiency. The learning need is probably the reason she has delayed developing English learning proficiency at the same level as her brother. While she is good in arts, Lena has challenges in Math and English. She also loves to listen to others reading rather than reading by herself.
Lena’s Individualized Education Program revealed that her reading proficiency in monosyllables was 80% and 35% when reading multi-syllable words. She was able to decode single-letter words and digraphs satisfactorily. However, her mild dyslexia caused the low score in reading multi-syllables. In the EFL environment, her level of comprehension was lower compared to that of her peers. Since her diagnosis, Lena has been receiving support to improve her English reading skills, such as the placement in a specialized language training system. She has also received support under the Orton Gillingham (OG) approach, which is based on Multisensory, incremental, and cumulative series to help students in reading. A tier-2 OG system was found to be effective in helping Lena because it helped her to write spoken English words, decode sentences, comprehend the use of vocabulary, and read text with a satisfactory level of comprehension. Her performance in Development Reading Assessments (DRA) was also unsatisfactory due to her dyslexia problem. However, the specialized ELP intervention improved her performance in DRA. However, her reluctance to attend the tier-2 intervention proved to be a barrier in her active learning. Her score in the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) for Reading and Math was 380 and 430, respectively. Generally, Lena requires an intervention to improve her reading proficiency and comprehension.
Goal
The goal of the instructional support strategy is to improve Lena’s English reading proficiency and improve her score in phonological awareness and decoding of multi-syllables by the end of the school term. Lena is expected to get support to improve in different areas of her English language acquisition because of the identified weaknesses, such as the challenge in reading texts. By the end of the intervention, she should have improver her reading fluency through developing automatic and accurate word recognition. Besides reading, she should be able to spell words with a high level of accuracy. The teacher will give words using syllables that are relevant to her grade level to help her in becoming better at spelling English words. Besides reading and spelling, Lena should be able to understand the words that she reads and spells. The teacher will support her to develop comprehension of English words at her grade level. With time, she will also learn to write English words with a high level of accuracy. Therefore, the teacher should use a strategy that will help Lena to develop competence and proficiency in these areas and motivate her to continue learning English. By the end of the year, she should be able to read, write, and comprehend English at her grade level.
Strategy
The recommended strategy to help Lena to overcome her challenges in reading English should emphasize on the development of English language acquisition. The goal can be achieved through the use of phonological awareness and decoding of multi-syllables. Multisyllabic manipulation will help Lena to improve English reading and comprehension skills to improve her score in the subject. The strategy will involve the use of activities and charts of multisyllabic words, which she can read continually to improve her reading ability and comprehension of multi-syllables. The strategy will also involve the use of Multisyllabic Words Manipulation Game. The teacher will separate words from selected reading into syllables and write syllables on note cards. The syllables will be displayed for the student in jumbled order and will be required to arrange them to create the words. The teacher will use numerous Multisyllabic Words Manipulation activities to help Lena.
Instruction, Materials and Assessment
Instruction
The teacher will use separated syllables to give a chance to the students to rearrange them and form words. The teacher will also use separated-syllables read. The instruction approach involves writing words on the board or chart syllable by syllable. The teacher will leave adequate space between the word parts so that the student can see the syllable divisions and use syllable spelling patterns, such as consonant + -le, open syllables, or closed syllables to read the words (Wade-Woolley, 2016). In the process, the teacher will also teach syllable’s pronunciation and have the student explain the pronunciations. The goal of the teaching approach is to ensure that the student can decode multi-syllables. It will help her in spelling simple words and pronouncing them. Later, the student can also write the same words without having a reference, such as a chart.
Materials
The teacher will use a Common Syllable Frequency Chart with the target syllables to teach the student. One chart has the 100 Most Common Non-Word Syllables that the teacher will teach the student progressively and using formative assessments to test her level of knowledge development. As the teacher progresses with the intervention, another chart will be introduced with 322 Most Frequent Syllables. The chart will use the 5,000 Most Common Words in English to help the student to become familiar with more English words and learn how to read, write, and comprehend. The teacher will blend non-word syllables (222 or 69%) with word syllables (100 or 31%) to enhance comprehension (Holliman et al., 2017). The syllables will play an essential role in improving the student’s pronunciations. Since the teacher will use regularly and often used syllables, their knowledge will help the student to develop greater flexibility and agility when reading and writing multi syllables. The teacher will keep testing the progress of the student in learning and understanding the multi syllables and writing and reading words.
Assessment
The teacher will use formative and summative assessments to evaluate Lena’s learning progress. Formative assessment will be conducted throughout the intervention to assess the level of knowledge development and identify areas that require additional focus to improve (Deacon, Holliman, Dobso, & Harrison, 2018). On the other hand, a summative assessment will be conducted after the intervention to test whether the intervention has met the goal defined at the beginning of the intervention. It will be a structured grade-level assessment. The formative assessment will include Multisyllabic Words Manipulation, where the teacher will divide words from specific reading selections and create syllables out of them. The teacher will write the syllables on note cards, each syllable in a single card. The student will be required to bring together the syllables from the jumbled order to create a word (such as tas fan tic for fantastic). The teacher will also discuss the pronunciation and spelling generalizations with the student to enhance understanding. The teacher will assess the level of understanding and areas that the student requires further assistance.
The summative assessment will be a repeat of the Development Reading Assessments (DRA), which will be conducted to establish her progress towards reading, decoding, and comprehension after the intervention. The SOL assessments will provide results of her progress towards English proficiency. It will also reveal whether her score will have improved from the 2019 results. The teacher will use the assessment to test reading level, precision, eloquence, and comprehension. The actual test will be divided into fluency, phonemic awareness, and alphabetic phonics. The teacher expects that the student will have improved in reading, spelling, and pronunciation. The results of the assessment will help the teacher to determine any need for additional intervention in areas found to be lacking even after implementing the strategy. The teacher will also evaluate her readiness to continue with another type of intervention to continue developing English language proficiency.
Results and Data
The teacher will share the results of the assessment, which should indicate whether the original goal has been met. The teacher wants to establish whether the score of Lena in the identified English language has increased following the implementation of the strategy. The results will be organized in sub-topics depending on the targeted areas for improvement.
The DRA Test Score
The teacher hoped to improve Lena’s score from 26 in mid-year of 2019 to more than 30. Her current score is 32, which shows that the intervention was effective in improving her test score. The results also indicated that Lena had gained confidence in reading and writing some words that previously scared her. She gained more excellent proficiency in pronouncing syllable after syllable and even created and pronounced some related words. She also improved her reading from 380 to 410, which was a considerable improvement for Lena. The score indicated satisfactory proficiency, but there is a need for her to continue improving the score to reach a progressive proficiency level.
Another area that Lena was tested is multi-syllables, which she has struggled with since 2018. Although she was good in math, she had challenges in reading passages and comprehension. The intervention enabled her to improve her single letter decoding and vowel combinations to 85% accuracy. The area she experienced the most challenge was decoding multi syllables, whose previous score was 35% accurate. The teacher focused on this area, and by the end of the intervention, her score had improved to 45%. The score is still relatively low, but with continued support it will continue improving.
Fluency and comprehension
The teacher focused on helping Lena to improve her reading fluency and the level of comprehension of the words she made from the syllables. He scores of correct words per minute (CWPM) was improve to almost average. Her reading speed also increased. The results indicated the efficacy of the strategy that was used to support her reading fluency. Lena also learned how to improve her comprehension of the words that she constructed and read. Her comprehension, which was initially better than her reading, improved after the intervention. She could respond to more comprehension questions, and her score was still above average. The strategy was effective in addressing some of Lena’s weaknesses in learning the English language. The graph below shows the results and data from Lena’s intervention.
The graph shows improvement in all tests following the implementation of the intervention. However, the improvement is minimal, which creates a need for another type of intervention to achieve a further improvement, especially in areas with limitations.
Reflection and Recommendations
Reflection
The chart reveals the effectiveness of the intervention used to help Lena to improve her English proficiency and overcome the limitations caused by her mild dyslexia ergo. The data revealed that strategies to improve phonological awareness and decoding of multi-syllables are effective in helping students with limitations in reading, pronunciation and comprehension. Multisyllabic manipulation improved prosodic awareness and multisyllabic word reading and improved her overall performance in the DRA test. She can also read more fluently and comprehend more words in English than she did before the implementation of the intervention.
However, the analysis of her results indicated that she was still sensitive to the relationship between grammatical category lexical stress. She still takes long to make a judgment when words have atypical stress. Instead, she preferred to categorize non-words as noun-like or verb-like depending on the stress position. As a result, she still has challenges dealing with unfamiliar or new words. Her reading pace is still lower than average, which means that she still needs more support to improve in this area. She should also receive additional help to improve her reading, pronunciation, and comprehension of English words, especially new words.
Recommendations
Multisyllabic manipulation was effective in teaching Lena phonological awareness and decoding of multi-syllables. However, additional instruction strategies are necessary to provide her alternative channels to learn and improve the areas she is still experiencing challenges, such as reading and comprehension. The teacher should implement an additional strategy to continue helping Lena to overcome the limitations in her reading ability and become more fluent in reading and comprehension. The teacher could use another strategy, such as Speed Drills. The strategy involves quick-paced, timed drills, which are fun for the student.
They differ from multisyllabic manipulation, which is a more severe strategy. Lena could enjoy a more exciting and engaging strategy to help to gain proficiency in English. A single drill will have 20 randomly organized common syllables. It will help the student to arrange them to form common words in a more fun manner. The teacher should continue with the individualized learning to help Lena because her challenge is unique from others in the classroom. Therefore, although she will learn with others, the teacher will continue with the individualized learning to help Lena to learn English at the grade level. It will also give her the chance to attain a comparable level of English proficiency to her classmates and avoid repeating the grade.
References
Deacon, S. H., Holliman, A. J., Dobson, G. J., & Harrison, E. C. J. (2018). Assessing direct contributions of morphological awareness and prosodic sensitivity to children’s word reading and reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22(6), 527-534.
Holliman, A. J., Mundy, I. R., Wade-Woolley, L., Wood, C., & Bird, C. (2017). Prosodic awareness and children’s multisyllabic word reading. Educational Psychology, 37(10), 1222-1241.
Wade-Woolley, L. (2016). Prosodic and phonemic awareness in children’s reading of long and short words. Reading and Writing, 29(3), 371-382.
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