tara's chapter 10 reflection

after reading this chapter, it kind of reminded me of what i did my first two weeks in field with my esl student. my mentor asked me to read these simple books with her to teach her to see words and pronounce words etc. if she said a word right, i would congratulate her because she still had a thick filipino accent and still didnt know a lot of english words. so i started with what she was doing well. she could read two letter words pretty well like it, is, at, an etc. but anything more than that she would have trouble. i guess from what the book says, i was doing shared readings with print features with my esl student. my mentor picked the books, not me. my job was to help her sound out letters, pronounce the letters and words correctly. basically my mentor wanted me to help her say the words with the correct english accent and not her filipino accent. that was a hard task because i couldnt get her to sound out the letters correctly without using her filipino accent. after two weeks she had some minor improvements, but still i was glad that she improved!

i had many opportunities to read with students one on one last semester because at the first grade level, they still read. i noticed from reading the chapter that i used a lot of semantic cues. i didnt even know that! if one of the students i was reading with said the wrong word, i would always say "does that sound right?" or "does it make sense when you read it in the sentence?" i didnt realize that i was saying semantic cues! most times after i said those cues, the student would read the sentence again and say no. then i would ask the student to tell me the word that would fit nicely in the sentence to make it sound right. not many students in my first grade class made graphophonic mistakes. the only ones that did were my esl students because they had a hard time recognizing words to begin with.

so what i understand is that children need the practice to be able to read fluently. of course practice makes perfect. i noticed that in my first grade students over the course of the semester when i was there. when i came in late august, they were just beginning with books with few words in them, but all of the progressed over the time period i was there and by the time i left, a lot of the students were reading books with many words in them! a lot of the students jumped more than 5 levels in reading! i was really happy because i had a part in helping them to jump so many levels! i even told my mentor that most of the students made signficant progress and she agreed with me. that was awesome to see!