Running head: MELONY MAYA CEBULA’S CASE STUDY

Melony Maya Cebula’s Case Study

Megan Muzljakovich

Spring Arbor University

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For my ELL case study, I spent three hours each week since the beginning of the course

with Melony Maya Cebula, a six year old first grader. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan at

Bronson hospital and has only one sister that is three years old and her name is Maya. Melony

attends Tobey Elementary in Vicksburg, Michigan. In this time, I worked with her on reading,

spelling, writing and mathematics. I administered over ten assessments including oral, reading,

and writing assessments. I also used a fair amount of self-assessments to measure her

proficiency in the four language areas. In addition to the assessments, I was also able to meet

with her kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Anderson to discuss Melony’s strengths and weaknesses.

Melony was very energetic, blunt and has a passion for Poland because that is where her family

lives.

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Her favorite subjects are English and Art. She enjoys mystery, horror and suspense. To

grab her attention I would talk about animals, TV, swimming or her grandmother that lives in

Poland. These topics were helpful for us to begin our assessment and become comfortable with

one another. However, my job was to assess her proficiency levels in the four language areas,

and over the two hours I spent with her I discovered that she is at a Level 2, Early Intermediate

(speech emergent) proficiency level, as described by the Michigan English Language Proficiency

Standards.

To start off the assessment, I used a holistic oral language scoring rubric from Authentic

Assessment for ELLs to see how she faired in casual conversation throughout our meetings

(O’Malley & Valdez Pierce, 1996, p.67). The rubric had ratings from one, least proficient, and

six, fluent. I used this because it was faster and easier to use, since the components of language

are described in each rating. We talked about her likes, dislikes, her family, hobbies, movies and

books during our time together, and I assessed her in the language categories of Listening and

Speaking. On the scale from 1-6, 6 being Fluent, I gave her a 3 because she initiated

conversation sometimes but mainly relied on me. She retold stories excitedly but struggled to

find some of her words and they were usually simple and short. She left words off and used

limited vocabulary. Although she did understand me most of the time, she still required

repetition, explanation and asked questions to form her answers.

I gave her several self-assessments throughout the two months that I met with her that

helped her with oral language. The first two were for academic language functions (O’Malley &

Valdez Pierce, 1996, p.71) and general oral language (O’Malley & Valdez Pierce, 1996, p.70),

and they covered the areas of Listening and Speaking. These assessments were similar because

there were grids with a question on each line about the student’s ability, and next to the question

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the student is asked to check a box for “Not Very Well”, “Okay”, “Well”, and “Very Well.”

Some of the questions for the academic language assessment included, “I can describe objects

and people,” “I can describe past events,” “I can state an opinion,” or “I can summarize a story.”

Some questions for the oral language assessment included, “I can ask questions in class,” “I can

understand television shows,” or “I can talk on the phone.” In both of these assessments Melony

answered “Very Well” to most of these questions with equal amounts of “Okays” and “Wells.”

Based on her answers to each question, Melony is communicative. She loves to talk and spend

time with her friends. She watches TV and listens to music. However, when it comes time to

comprehend and retelling a story, she struggles. She does not have any confidence in her ability

to give an oral report, opinion, or summarize a story.

The other two self-assessments that I used in oral language were similar to the first two.

The first one was for communication strategies in oral language (O’Malley & Valdez Pierce,

1996, p.72), but the questions were similar to the first two self-assessments. The second

assessment I gave Melony was a self-assessment of speaking ability (O’Malley & Valdez Pierce,

1996, p.73). This assessment asked the student who they used English to communicate with

during the week. Then it asked students to mark on a line from “Disagree” to “Agree” their

response to statements about the interaction such as “I think I was successful,” “The person I

spoke to understood me,” or “I felt comfortable speaking with another person in English.”

Melony wrote that she spoke with her teacher and friends, and based on her answers, it was a

good fit. She strongly agreed that she was successful and that each understood each other, but

she was in the middle about her ability to be successful again or about her comfortableness

speaking English with this person. Following these statements, there were two other ones that

Melony had to answer with writing. The first one was, “When someone doesn’t understand me

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I…” which she wrote, “I am upset”. I had to help her with her word choice because she only

knew the word in Polish. The next statement read, “When I don’t understand someone I…”

which she wrote “feel confused.” Based on these self-assessments I think Melony has a less than

intermediate grasp of speaking and listening. Many of her answers do not support one another.

She says she understands what I’m saying, but I wonder if she really does.

For her reading assessments, I used an assessment that involved both listening and

reading components. I took a story called, “Whales and Fish” (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011, p.223)

that was at level three and I read it to her. After I asked Melony to tell me what the story was

about she only remembered a detail or two. She said, “It was about how whales and fish live in

the water and how they are alike.” I then proceeded to ask her some questions about the story on

page 224-225. I asked her to answer eight comprehension questions. For example, “What is the

passage mainly about?, According to the passage, how are whales and fish different, according to

the passage name another way that whales and fish are different, etc. She could only answer two

out of the eight questions and seemed to get easily distracted by her surroundings, even though

we were in the library. She could tell me that it was about how whales and fish are alike and how

they both live in the water. This supported my findings that she understood little about main

ideas from a story at this level. She might understand the words but she cannot put them

together to remember a story, which helped me realize she was definitely a level 2 reader.

This leads into Melony’s reading assessments. Her teacher told me that she was at a

Kindergarten reading level, but I only had the 1st grade level passage for that day so I used it to

perform a miscue analysis. I had her read it out loud to me, but I had already read it aloud to her

once. I was surprised that she read it pretty well. She ran sentences together and got stuck on

certain words, but she got through it at a good pace. I then asked her to retell the main points to

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me. Even though she had heard it before and was able to read it, she still could not tell me a lot

of new details about the story. I did mark on my own copy the words she stumbled on but there

really were not that many to make an educated report on. Having heard that she was a

Kindergarten level reader I was confused because she had read the passage very well. After

seeing that she could not tell me a lot about what she read, I understood. She reads through

things fine, but she does not understand them well or is not able to put them into her own words.

After meeting with Melony three hours a week for a month I personally believe she might be

anxious or nervous, which causes her to not give her full attention. Melony knows that she is

getting timed so she starts concentrating on the stop watch instead of the passage. After I hid the

stop watch Melony seemed to do a lot better.

Having found out that Melony loved mystery and suspense after I talked to her teacher,

Mrs. Anderson I made sure to find a story at her reading level for the next time I met with her. I

used a story and its questions from Jennings Informal Reading Assessment, which is an informal

reading inventory developed by Dr. Joyce Jennings. I had a copy of the passage on which I

marked the number of errors Melony made while reading out loud. If she substitutes, omits,

inserts, and/ or mispronounces a word as well as struggles with a word for more than three

seconds, then I record this as an error. After Melony has finished reading the passage, I asked her

to retell the story in her own words. While she was retelling the story, I wrote on the running

record exactly what she included in her retell such as the title of story, characters, setting, plot,

etc. In addition, I asked Melony a set of comprehension questions pertaining to the passage she

read. From this form of screening assessment, I was able to see if the errors made while reading

the passage affect her overall comprehension of the story when she retells the story in her own

words as well as when she answers the comprehension questions. Also, the errors and the parts

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left out of the retelling section of the running record determined which comprehension strategies

I will need to teach during our tutoring sessions.

The story I chose from Jennings Informal Reading Inventory was called, “Ted’s

Camping Trip”, it was nice and short (Jennings, 2001, p.440-441). She read it aloud to me and

finished it very quickly. My suspicions were correct when she could only answer a few of the

questions about the text. When she could only tell me a little about the story in a retelling, I

asked her questions like, “Why did Ted and his family think the campsite was perfect?” or

“What did the brothers see when the storm was over?” Melony was only able to answer the

questions with 1-2 words. She needed my help to remember the plot of the story. I ended up

allowing her to read the story again but she only remembered a few things. Even a simple

question like, “What was the loud crash that Ted heard?” made her pause and then she said, “The

storm or thunder.” She did not even know what a campsite was. Those were important details of

the story that were necessary for comprehension, yet, she could not grasp them.

On the first day, I gave Melony two read self-assessments to see where she was at or

where she thought she was at. I also sought to see what her interests were in reading so that I

could bring more materials the next day we met. The first assessment was for emergent readers

and involved seven statements such as “I read every day for 30 minutes,” “I read many different

types of books,” “I read during free time,” and “I like to read” (O’Malley & Valdez Pierce, 1996,

p.101). The student reads the statements and circles one of three emoticons that mean “Usually”

(Smiley face), “Sometimes” (Emotionless face), and “Not Much” (Sad face). Melony reads 30

minutes a day, but her mother said that most of their books are in Polish. Melony looks at

pictures for new words, and pays attention when the teacher is reading a story. She goes to the

library and picks out books. I’ve realized she will only pay attention to the teacher if the story is

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interesting. She usually reads different types of books, but always enjoys mystery, crime, and

horror. She usually likes to read, doing so in her free time, and telling others about them when

she’s done. Based on this self-assessment it seems she likes to read in English and in Polish, but

the level of books she is choosing are at a fairly easy level. On a related, undocumented note, I

had her read a few short, easy paragraphs in Polish from a book her mother brought to show me

the various types of books they read at home. She read a lot faster in Polish. She stumbled on

some words, but overall her reading level seemed a lot better in Polish. She seemed to not make

easy connections between cognates.

The second self-assessment also provided statements about reading habits and asked the

student to check whether they did that action “Most of the time,” “Sometimes,” and “Not very

often” (O’Malley & Valdez Pierce, 1996, p.104). In an overview, Melony reads most of the

time, and does it at home. She said that she reads a lone because her parent’s do not know

English, which surprised me. Finally, she enjoys drawing pictures about the books she reads.

I did three assessments for the writing section: a cloze passage, a dialogue journal, and a

writing prompt. The dialogue journal was merely a formality since we did it the second time we

met. After explaining what we were doing she grasped the concept quickly. We talked about

our favorite movies, TV shows, places, music artists, people, colors, books, food, and

restaurants. I ended the journal by asking her if she liked writing and she said, “Yes, but I’m not

very good?” Through the journal it seemed like she preferred short answer writing instead of

long paragraphs. It takes her a while to gather her thoughts and translate her primary language,

which is Polish into English. However, she did punctuate well and she wrote in complete

sentences, for example, “My favorite movie is Charlotte’s Web.’ What is your favorite TV

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show?” She did miss marks in contractions like “whats” instead of “what’s” but overall she did

well.

The second writing assessment was the cloze passage I obtained online. I chose one that

was not too easy or too hard (Watson, 2011). The one she used was for a first grade level and it

had virtually 13 lines, with a maximum of two missing per line. There was also a word bank of

the words at the bottom which she would cross out as she used them until she read the directions

that said, “Some words are used more than once.” Melony seemed to have a lot of fun with it.

Overall, she did well. She would have done better if she remembered that she could use one

word as much as three times. I did have to help her on a few of them by giving her tips, clues or

strategies to figure out the answer. For example, for one of my strategies I had Melony try out

each word in the sentence as a whole and ask her if it made sense. One that made her pause was,

“If you are____ to people, they will be_____ to you!” The two choices she had were “nice” and

“funny.” This assessment showed me that she could perform adequately at the level because she

chose the correct answer, which was “nice”.

The final writing assessment I gave Melony was a writing prompt. I found a short

prompt in the book I used for my reading 424 class, “ Elementary and Middle School Reading

Problems”. The book is called, Qualitative Reading Inventory-5 and the prompt I chose was

“Where Do People Live?” The prompt read, “People live in different places. Some people live in

a city. Others live in the country. Still other people live in between city and the country. They

live in suburbs. Why do people live in these different places?” I chose this prompt in hopes that

what Melony wrote would give me some insight on who she is, where she wants to live, her

family in Poland and what she loves about Poland. After about seven minutes she had written a

couple sentences. She had written, “People live in all different areas. My grandpa and grandma

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live in Poland with my aunts and uncles. They have their own market there. I live in Vicksburg

because my dad has a job at Pfizer, but he might be losing his job in a month.” I proceeded to ask

her, “Would you like to move to Poland?” I thought it would take her time to grasp the idea, but

she immediately nodded her head and said yes. This activity helped me realize that Melony does

not see Vicksburg as her home and there must be a lot of stress and concern at home since her

father might be losing his job.

After administering these numerous assessments and analyzing the results, I could see a

picture of what Melony’s abilities were in the areas of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and

Writing. As I said in the introduction, from what I gathered Melony was a Level 2, Early

Intermediate English speaker. In the area of Listening, she can understand short, simple

conversations about topics she knows something about like music, TV or popular culture. In the

classroom, she can understand discussions when there is some repetition or clarification. She

needs unknown topics to be rephrased or broken down into simpler terms. The problem with

Melony; however, is that she will not ask for clarification at times when she should. She does

not want to feel embarrassed. She wants to be like other kids and not stand out. Getting her

attention to listen simply requires reading something that interests her that includes mystery and

suspense. One of the problems here is that she cannot understand long stories with higher

vocabulary. She might understand individual sentence but she does not recall the information

that well. She gets lost as the information of the story adds up. She might remember a few

things to get by if she is asked, but overall it is too much information for Melony to consume.

Another problem is that if you read her a story at reading level 2, which is considered her level;

those stories are usually not what she is interested in. She wants mystery, murder, and crime-

solving. To help her understand what is going on in a story, I would suggest letting her watch a

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movie about it or have her draw a picture. Images, action, and adventure will help her understand

the story more.

In speaking, Melony seems to do pretty well. In fact, it is one of her best areas. She can

get excited about something and talk for a while about it. In one of the assessments she was

asked if she had any hobbies and she replied back by saying, “No”. However, I pointed out to her

that she always enjoys drawing pictures. She can initiate conversation a lot, although she did not

when we first met. It took a couple weeks for her to warm up and start sharing her thoughts with

me. In my opinion, Melony seems to have a lot of friends because she is very outgoing and

social. She uses repetition and pauses to correct herself or think of what to say. With all her

hesitations and tendency to sometimes leave off words or endings, her message still comes

across most of the time, and that is indicative of an intermediate level proficiency. In class, I

would give her time to speak and let her form her ideas. If she stumbles, as her teacher I would

help her out with a few ideas or words of my own. When I did this, she would say, “Yes, I

meant that word.” When doing presentations in front of the class I would recommend Melony’s

teachers to allow her to use a PowerPoint or notecards.

Reading is not one of Melony’s strengths. Her teachers put her at a reading level 2 based

on reading scores and I would have to agree with them. She can read basic narratives and

instructions for an assignment, but she relies on contextual and visual cues to understand what is

going on in a story or figure out what a word means. When she reads, she reads out loud and

silently to herself. Although she reads independently, I question how much she understands and

what level of books she chooses. If she does not understand complex sentences she will guess at

the meaning so that she has an answer. If she has to read something that is above her level, she

will get nervous and not pay much attention to the main ideas or events. She will be more

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concerned with getting through the reading instead of enjoying the story. This issue should be

taken into consideration on ELPA tests. If she does not understand what she has to do when she

reads then she will not remember much from the story.

In her future instruction, I suggest spending more time on reading strategies before,

during and after a reading. Practicing the “SQUEEPERS” or think-aloud methods on a regular

basis would give her some support in reading. Teaching her to recognize cognates would also be

a huge help when she cannot understand something in English. I would keep her readings short

and interesting. Melony reads out loud fairly well. She does run sentences together though,

which probably comes from the anxiety of reading in front of others. She will also leave some

small words out or stumble on new words. Melony reads a passage quickly or at least pretends

to read it quickly. Her comprehension of the material is low though. Breaking down large

passages and asking questions about them would help her comprehension. Making sure the

material interests her is also important. I would help her choose books that match with her

interests and at her level. Teachers should keep track of the books she reads in her portfolio and

if a book report is assigned, help her formulate it properly. Teachers need to give her the

strategies to succeed. The goal for Melony’s reading is increasing comprehension.

Melony’s writing is early intermediate as well. She is in a development stage where she

writes simple sentences and uses easy vocabulary. She has trouble with apostrophes, commas or

capitalizing words. I saw these things when we did our dialogue journal and the writing prompt.

It is common to see errors at this stage, but her errors do not interfere with understanding the

message. The journal was relatively easy for her, but when it came to writing creatively and

thinking about how to write her ideas down, she had trouble. In order to write, she writes with

simple sentence structures and repeats herself or the question being answered. For example, in

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her dialogue journal she wrote, “I love to swim. I love visiting my grandma and grandpa in

Poland. I love animals.” For future instruction, I would continue working on dialogues and

writing prompts with Melony. She needs to practice the strategies and characteristics of different

types of stories. Teachers can teach her that there is a formulaic approach to each style of

storytelling (plot, characters, conflict, climax, resolution, etc.) Once she has practiced including

these things in her stories, I believe teachers will see a more potential in creativity from her.

The assessment tools that I used were very helpful and easy to use. I used most of my

assessment tools from the book called, Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners

since I felt comfortable on using a lot of the samples in the book. I then contacted Melony’s

teacher Mrs. Anderson and she gave me a lot of information over the phone on Melony. Mrs.

Anderson sent me a folder with all of Melony’s records in it. The records helped me discover

what Melony struggled on and needed to review before moving onto first grade. I aimed at

making sure I had materials at her level and of her interests that did not involve too many

complicated steps.

For the oral language portion, I preferred the holistic oral language scoring rubric to the

analytic type. This way I could see all of the important differentiating criteria in one space.

When I saw one that she most closely resembled I circled the rating next to those criteria. It was

just simple and easy to use, and it was an effective tool to measure proficiency in casual

conversation. The same could be said of the three self-assessments I used with Melony as well.

Each of them were user friendly and Melony enjoyed them. I liked the self-assessments because

she was able to have the information right in front of her. As we went through each one, I helped

her understand what the questions or statements were asking of her. It also gave us an

opportunity to talk about her answers individually instead of just having her fill it out by herself.

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The reason I gave multiple self-assessments was because I wanted to see if she contradicted

herself in one of them, which she sometimes did. The other reason I gave her three oral language

self-assessments was because each one was different. They were for everyday oral language,

speaking, and academic language. These assessments were fun for her and they worked out

great.

The first story we used for listening and reading was “Whales and Fish.” The problem

with this assessment was that it was at too high a level of reading for her. I think the story just

had too many details for her to keep track of. When she could not answer most of the recall

questions or retell me what happened, I knew I should have brought a better story. On the

positive side, I did get a good out-loud reading from it. If I was to judge her on her ability to

pronounce and read at a decent pace she would have been fine, but she struggled with

comprehension. The other story she read was called, “Ted’s Camping Trip”, which was from

Jennings Informal Reading Inventory. She struggled on answering the comprehension questions,

but was able to read the passage very quickly.

The next day we met I brought in a new story called, “Cats: Lions and Tigers in Your

House” that I found in my Qualitative Reading Inventory-5 book. It was at her reading level and

it was the right length. It also went with her interests, which is animals. Melony still had trouble

recalling the main details and answering questions about the text, but overall she did a lot better

on answering the comprehension questions. I just have to remember to pick the right level of

difficulty.

For much the same reasons that I liked the self-assessments for oral language, I also used

two self-assessments for reading. Once again they were easy to use. One required checkmarks

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in boxes and the other circling a smiley face (or emoticon). We were also able to go through

these at a steady pace; making comments and discussing what she answered.

When I planned to do a cloze passage, I found one online that was at her level. It

involved phrases that any kid her age would say in class or at home, and it gave her a word bank

to choose from. The only obstacle with this passage was that Melony was confused by the

amount of times she could use each word, for example certain words were used three times. This

experience taught me that I needed to go through the assessments myself before I administer

them. We as teachers need to make sure that we explain instructions clearly and in detail because

children can get easily confused. Overall, this assessment was a success, and it gave me a lot of

insight into how she estimates her answers.

The dialogue journal was a great activity because we talked about our favorite things, and

Melony was able to open up to me more. The only potential problem with this assessment was

my timing of it. Since we had casual conversation to begin our assessment, I put off the dialogue

journal until the next day. You usually want to do dialogue journals to ease the tension of

meeting someone new or not being embarrassed by poor language skills. Nevertheless, I think

this journal was just as successful as it could have been in the beginning. We still had plenty to

talk about, and I was able to see her form her answers as she answered or asked questions. This

was a great experience for both of us because we were able to learn about each other’s’ cultures.

The final assessment was the writing prompt, “Where Do People Live?” At first I

thought I would simply create one myself, but I decided to use one from the book called

Qualitative Reading Inventory-5. The prompt was a thought-provoking one that asked her why

people live in different places. I expected her to say because of family, but she brought up how

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they moved to Vicksburg because her father got a job at Pfizer, but now he might be losing his

job. She has a passion for Poland because most of her family lives there and she would love to

move there.

During the case study and tutoring sessions, I feel as if I have learned a lot from this

experience. I learned about the importance of screening, progress monitoring, and outcome-

based assessments. These are various types of assessments that show a readers strengths and

weaknesses as well as growth in an area of reading. Also, I have gained a better understanding of

what it means to be an English as a Second Language teacher. As an ESL teacher, I understand

that I need to plan my reading instruction based on my students’ needs.

References

Jennings, J. (2001).Jennings informal reading assessment.

Leslie, L., & Caldwell, J. (2011). Qualitative reading inventory-5 (5th ed.) Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

Michigan department of education (2004). English language proficiency standards for k-12 schools. Retrieved from Michigan Department of Education Web site: http://michigan.gov/documents/English_Language_Proficiency_K-12_Standards_103705_7.pdf.

O’Malley, J.M., & Valdez Pierce, L. (1996). Authentic assessment for english language learners: practical approaches for teachers (1st ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

Watson, S. (2011). Cloze worksheets for dolch word lists. About.com: 1st grade, List 1-12. http://specialed.about.com/od/literacy/a/cloze.htm.

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