General Information
Lyla’s mother claims that the girl likes to talk about anything. She also likes to read, colour, draw, dance and spend time with her dog. Some of the places that the child visits often are the park, her grandparents’ house, and the beach. Lyla speaks English but she is also spoken to in Italian and can understand basic phrases. Different languages that members of her family read and write are Italian and Greek. Mother reads with the child everyday, and the girl also engages in independent reading. Lyla sometimes plays games with her brother, but the parents try to limit her using the computer and other digital devices.
Lyla loves animal stories and especially books about dogs. She enjoys reading the Pig the Pug series, as well as the Cranky Bear series. The child sometimes reads TV advertisements or shop catalogues if they have things that are of her area of interest (e.g., LOL dolls). Lyla will engage in writing and drawing without being asked. She will often write people letters or make them cards. According to the mother, the girl tries her best with everything: she is definitely more able in the literacy area than numeracy, and has excellent verbal skills.
Reading Interview
During the reading survey Lyla tells the she likes to read Pig the Pug (Hill, 2012). Her favourite books are the ones about dogs because she has a dog herself. She mentions that her mother and dad often read to her but she also enjoys reading on her own. The girl says that most of her family members engage in reading.
Writing Interview
Lyla thinks that people, including herself, write to practice their handwriting or spelling. When she writes outside of school, it is mostly her homework. The girl also makes notes to remember something; Lyla finds writing tricky (Fountas and Pinnell, 2001). She learns to write from her school teacher. The girl agrees that she indeed have learned some things about writing from books her parents have read to her, and from books that she have read herself. Lyla’s favourite book is Pig the Pug; she likes the story because it is interesting and admits that she is capable of writing exciting stories herself. When her schoolteacher asks students to write stories Lyla succeeds in creating a piece that her classmates enjoy listening to.
Reading Skills
Accuracy Rate
Lyla has a high accuracy reading rate: the girl reads almost without distortion. In most cases, her reading correctly conveys the syllabic composition of the word, grammatical forms of the word, and allows a small number of omissions and permutations of words in a sentence. It can be argued that the reading of Lyla is smooth, there are no distortions affecting the meaning of the text being read. Correct voicing of graphic signs ensures understanding of individual units of the text (Virtual school bags, 2012). In her reading, there are almost no omissions, substitutions or distortions of letters, syllables, or endings. In this regard, it can be argued that Lyla has developed accurate ideas about the images of letters. According to the test results, the girl revealed a high level of correctness of reading, almost without errors.
Number of Self-Corrections
The mistakes that Lyla makes in most cases relate to visual perception errors. She immediately notices and independently corrects the replacement of endings, syllable permutations and word distortions. However, the girl does not immediately notice the omissions of reading units and repetitions of a syllable or word when reading, but when she does, she quickly adjusts them, too. Lyla also makes intonation mistakes, but does not always pay due attention to them. Periodically, she chooses the wrong intonation at the end of sentences, or makes unjustified pauses between phrases. In some places, her reading can be called monotonous, without pauses at the end of a sentence (Hill, 2012). However, she does not always re-read fragments of text with corrected intonation.
Use of Meaning
Lyla’s understanding of texts is based on the following structure. First, one of the characters of the work is memorized, and the plot line is built. The girl is able to retell the plot; in this case, she uses an appeal to reproduce the material of existing knowledge, using the operational mechanisms of abilities. Secondly, she tries to understand and explain the actions of the heroes, highlight the distinctive features of speech, tries to describe the heroes not only by external signs, but also by character. Thus, it is worth paying attention to the techniques of understanding the text that the girl uses when working with the proposed works (Hill, 2012). First of all, this is due to the fact that parents regularly read a variety of literature with their child, which formed her experience of conscious reading.
Use of Syntactic Cues
Use of syntactic cues helped Lyla determine what the purpose of statements is, and what intonation should be chosen. Moreover, the fact that the girl successfully established a connection between words in a sentence indicates the competent understanding of syntax. Focusing on syntactic cues, the girl correctly determines the end and beginning of the thoughts of the author of the text (Hill, 2012). Mastering this skill allowed the child to form such knowledge, skills and abilities as the selection of phrases from a sentence and the construction of her own. Using use of syntactic cues, Lyla determined the type of sentences by the purpose of utterance and intonation. She has formed the ability to apply syntactic units in accordance with the communicative attitude.
Use of Visual Cues
Competent reading of Lyla is largely connected with the fullness of her visual perception. Using visual cues, she correctly perceives letters, syllables and words. The child successfully performs many visual reading operations. For example, a girl perceives letter symbols by elements or holistically. In addition, she successfully passes the process of identification based on comparison with the standards of letters, syllables, and words available in her memory (Fountas and Pinnell, 2001). Lyla sequentially scans the graphical information along the line from left to right and moves from one line to another. In the process of enriching the perceptual experience, the child has developed an individual ability to analyze and synthesize visual information, due to which a connection is established between real objects and letter symbols.
Reading Comprehension
Recalling Main Points
As a result of the conversation, after reading the texts and answering the questions for understanding, it was revealed that Lyla has the ability of a person to rely on her own ideas about the world, which allow her to navigate the situation described in the text and complete it. The girl’s understanding of the literary text proceeded in the form of a complex process of highlighting structural semantic elements in it, accompanied by emotional empathy with the author, dialogical in nature (Fountas and Pinnell, 2001). This allowed Lyla to come to the construction of a projection of the text with a special emotional background in her mind. She identified personally significant meanings and outlined the boundaries of a single semantic field with the author. This was especially clearly shown when the girl was able to name a similar situation from personal experience.
Literal Understandings
The literal interpretation of the text for Lyla has a denotative character. During it, the child, as an interpreter, fixes in exact accordance with the direct meaning of the text some content containing information about specific events, states, actions. The girl correctly identifies the main characters – the boy, his friend and mother, and the fact that events unfold at the school fair. She also identifies the items that are sold there. In this case, knowledge of individual words is enquired, and the literal interpretation is carried out on the vocabulary of the child (Writing map, 2013). Lyla easily copes with interpretative activity after direct reading of the text. The literal understanding is not associated with the interpretation of this text depending on the personal characteristics of the child.
Interpretive Understandings
The interpretative understandings of the text of Lyla are also expressed quite well: she demonstrated the ability to adequately perceive and evaluate the information she read. The girl has developed the ability to perceive images holistically, see the dynamics of events, their emotional content, evaluate the characters and their actions, and make certain decisions for herself. For example, she successfully determines that the main character is experiencing sadness. The child also correctly establishes the causal relationship of these emotions. The correct answers to these questions provided quickly indicate that Lyla has the ability to interpret understanding (Virtual school bags, 2012). Reading a literary text in this case was associated with a complex mental activity of the child: perception, interpretation, disclosure of the meaning of the text, communication, and understanding, i.e., its interpretation.
Inferential Understandings
Lyla successfully managed to decode the meaning of the text, master the content, and experience the state of mind that the characters of the text felt at the time of its creation. Having mastered the new content, the girl was able to include it in the system of established ideas. Inferential understandings presuppose the ability to interpret an alternative development of an event and apply the information received to personal experience. The child was able to answer the question of what could have happened if the boy’s mother had not approached him. Lyla also transferred the situation that happened to the hero to personal experience, and was able to recall a situation when she also forgot some important thing (Kamler and Comber, 2005). Substantiation of the applicability of the text to the specific case under consideration proves the child’s ability to inferential understandings.
Writing Process
The spelling of the English language is based on the phonemic principle. However, Lyla uses a phonetic principle when writing: she writes the sounds she hears, for example, in the word money in the second syllable she wants to write a. The child does not realize that each morpheme (root, prefix, or suffix) is written the same way as possible, despite the fact that its pronunciation may be different in different positional conditions (Hill, 2010). Despite this, the girl has knowledge of some rules: she knows that names are written with a capital letter, and scribbles the name of the hero of the story as Luke.
Writing Skills
Written Language
Lyla’s written speech lacks the structural complexity of writing. In the process of elementary written utterance, she does not expand, refine or improve her thought. The girl has a long time of preliminary thinking and internal verbal outline of the thought. Her written speech is understandable to others, but is of an undeveloped nature (Fountas and Pinnell, 2001). The child’s written speech is dominated by simple common sentences. At the same time, Lyla uses complex sentences more often in oral speech; this suggests that in terms of the composition of syntactic constructions, the girl’s oral speech is ahead of the written one. However, the written phrases of the child as a whole are logically and grammatically more ordered, the level of coherence of speech is higher.
Ideas
Lyla’s written speech is coherent, she has the skills and abilities of competent construction in the content, logical and linguistic plans of an independent coherent written statement on a given topic in accordance with the conditions and purpose of natural communication. The distinctive features of the transmitted ideas are the predominance of narration, insignificant representation of dialogue, the presence of subjects of speech and clear transitions from one part to another (Virtual school bags, 2012). According to the semantic load, the text written by the girl is reproducible, since it requires her to reproduce the studied textual phenomena based on the perception of this text, and is aimed at the zone of the child’s closest development. It does not require Lyla to have the maximum degree of independence and creative freedom when writing her own text.
Text Conventions
Lyla has not yet fully formed a graphic skill: she writes letters clearly and legibly, but she has a slow pace of writing. The child begins to write letters in the right places, correctly makes rounding and sharpening (Kamler and Comber, 2005). The girl observes the proportions, sizes, directions and shapes of letters. Despite the fact that she has developed the correct form of letters, the child does not have a single slope in the letter. Her writing has clarity and accuracy, it is easy to understand and read. However, when writing a sentence, the points of the beginning of movement and the end of movement are not parallel: the letter changes its trajectory, and Lyla writes at an angle.
Reference List
Fountas, I., & Pinnell, G. S. (2001). Writing interview.
Hill, S. (2010). The millennium generation: Teacher-researchers exploring new forms of literacy, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 10(3), 314–340.
Hill, S. (2012). The development of writing.
Kamler, B., & Comber, B. (2005). Turn-around pedagogies: Improving the education of at-risk students, Improving Schools, 8(2), 121–131.
Virtual school bags: Socio-economically disadvantaged students and the development of literacies in school (2012). Department of Education Training and Employment, 1, 41–42.
Writing map of development. (2013). WA: Department of Education.
Appendix A: The School Fair Unmarked Running Records
Lyla’s body language shows that the girl is nervous and in a state of excitement. She exhibits a behavior called biased activity. The child uses motor acts for self-satisfaction, swinging her legs in the air. In addition, a sign of anxiety is the girl’s constant looking around; in addition, she makes a large number of movements with her hands. Most likely, Lyla’s anxiety is caused by an unfamiliar environment. Lyla looks shy and tries very hard to please the woman conducting the experiment. From the outside, she looks like an ideal child: a quiet, obedient and compliant girl. However, the characteristic appearance (lowered head, hiding eyes, hunched shoulders) shows that the child is shy. Therefore, if a teacher asks her for an opinion, Lyla often doubts her answers, even if they are correct. Lyla has a conscious, correct reading of whole words with observance of logical accents. She reads words of a complex syllabic structure by syllables. The child’s reading rate is at least 45-50 words per minute, which is fluent. With sufficient speed, the girl understands what she has read.
Lyla’s fluency is related to her wide field of reading and the length of stops she allows during the reading process. During these stops, awareness of what is captured by the gaze occurs. The girl effectively carries out word recognition and their comprehension. Since all the words and phrases that are being read are familiar to her, she makes a small number of stops. The girl makes many attempts to self-correct. She notices errors in the reading technique, but her attention is not focused on errors in reproducing the emotional side of the reader. Trying to exceed the average speed, Lyla periodically makes mistakes due to inattention. The child immediately notices them, returning to the incorrectly read word, and re-reads it correctly.
Appendix B: Harvest Mice Unfinished Running Records
Appendix C: Questionnaire for Parents Analysis
Lyla’s mother claims that the girl likes to talk about anything. She also likes to read, colour, draw, dance and spend time with her dog. Some of the places that the child visits often are the park, her grandparents’ house, and the beach. Lyla speaks English but she is also spoken to in Italian and can understand basic phrases. Different languages that members of her family read and write are Italian and Greek. Mother reads with the child every day, and the girl also engages in independent reading. Lyla sometimes plays games with her brother, but the parents try to limit her using the computer and other digital devices.
Lyla loves animal stories and especially books about dogs. She enjoys reading the Pig the Pug series, as well as the Cranky Bear series. The child sometimes reads TV advertisements or shop catalogues if they have things that are of her area of interest (e.g., LOL dolls). Lyla will engage in writing and drawing without being asked. She will often write people letters or make them cards. According to the mother, the girl tries her best with everything: she is definitely more able in the literacy area than numeracy, and has excellent verbal skills.
Appendix D: Reading Interview Analysis
During the reading survey Lyla tells the she likes to read Pig the Pug (Hill, 2012). Her favourite books are the ones about dogs because she has a dog herself. She mentions that her mother and dad often read to her but she also enjoys reading on her own. The girl says that most of her family members engage in reading.
Appendix E: Writing Interview Analysis
Lyla thinks that people, including herself, write to practice their handwriting or spelling. When she writes outside of school, it is mostly her homework. The girl also makes notes to remember something; Lyla finds writing tricky (Fountas and Pinnell, 2001). She learns to write from her school teacher. The girl agrees that she indeed have learned some things about writing from books her parents have read to her, and from books that she have read herself. Lyla’s favourite book is Pig the Pug; she likes the story because it is interesting and admits that she is capable of writing exciting stories herself. When her schoolteacher asks students to write stories Lyla succeeds in creating a piece that her classmates enjoy listening to.