Second Observation of my ELL student

On Tuesday March 9, 2010 I had the chance to observe my ELL in her regular classroom setting albeit for a very brief period of time (20 mins). The class was working on English Language Arts subject matter, specifically on the strategy of being able to use contextual clues from a story to determine the meaning of multiple meaning words. The teacher performed a read-aloud on the book entitled "Rocks In Your Head" which was a story about a man who loved studying about rocks so much that they were always on his mind ( or as the story says "In his Head". The classroom teacher (Ms. Herring) had each child read aloud from the story and she stopped frequently to ask students to reflect on what was read. My ELL (Cesi) had to leave at this point in the lesson because she was attending some sort of field trip but I decided to stay for the remainder of the lesson to see what was done. Upon completion of the lesson that day, I stayed for a few minutes and discussed my ELL students reading level with the teacher and we went over the SOLOM matrix as well as the ELL Observation matrix. I also was able to obtain some writing samples that were performed by my student from Ms. Herring which I later analyzed. Based upon the information provided by Ms. Herring as well as what I was able to observe so far Cesi's SOLOM matrix scores demonstrated that her comprehension was a 4; fluency a 4; vocabulary a 4
(she sometimes uses incorrect words); pronunciation a 3 and grammar a 3 ( she makes errors which occasionally alter the meaning of the context. Using the ELL observation rubric, we determined that Cesi's listening was at the mid stage at the intermediate level; speaking was at the low stage of the intermediate level; reading was determined to be between the mid and high stage of the beginner level and writing was determined to be at the low stage of the intermediate level.