Language and Linguistics: an Adult Learners Reading & Writing Skills - Case Study Example

Language and Linguistics: Case Study of an adult learners reading & writing skills Section Background The case study adult learner is referred to as A, a male student aged 30 born in the UK whose parents immigrated to the UK from Jamaica. A failed to complete his secondary education, leaving school at age 14. A maintains that his parents encouraged him to remain in school and registered concern about his truancy. However, he became disenchanted with his progress, claiming that while he was good in math, he was particularly unsuccessful in his English. Part of his difficulties with attending school emanated from the fact that other students mocked his accent. In fact, on occasion, teachers made disparaging comments about his accent often commenting that his writing was a reflection of the way he spoke. These comments were made in the presence of other students. Student A generally perceived an unwillingness to help him improve. Likewise A became increasingly frustrated at his inability to express himself properly and that as a result of these factors he felt a disconnect with the learning process. According to A, the cumulative impact of these factors was a lack of confidence which continues to hamper him today. A attributes his weak communication skills to the fact that he emulated his parents and they refused to alter the way they spoke. After leaving school, A naturally resumed his old habits particularly since his old communication habits were entirely acceptable in his home. In retrospect, A regrets discontinuing his secondary education as he now lacks appreciable skills and qualifications. It is obvious that A was comfortable within the family setting and found it relatively easier to subscribe to the linguistic modes practiced in the home, although he knew it was grammatically incorrect. While he was willing to conform to and learn correct grammar at school, help from his mentors was insufficient and at times discouraging. His teachers further alienated him by exposing his linguistic difficulties to his peers in a non-productive manner. These factors combined to sap A’s confidence and desire to improve his linguistic approach. Student A maintains that his literary skills are no greater than those of a seven year old. He attributes this to his truancy and partly a result of the school’s refusal to offer support. In the last 6 months, A has been attending literacy classes and upon initial matriculation his literary skills were assessed at E2 Established of the Literacy Core Curriculum and is currently in my Monday E3 class. Having reviewed some of his completed work, I determined that he appeared to be closer to an E1 characterization. He could not be placed in the other class because it had been filled to capacity. Although A did not complete his secondary education it is obvious that he appreciates the value of it and is determined to improve his grammar and linguistics in general. Section 2 Literacy/Reading and Writing Analysis A was not aware that the register (language and mannerisms) had changed, despite the fact that the interview was progressing. A became more relaxed and even laughed at intervals although the register remained unchanged. A’s accent is a cross between Jamaican, Scouse with a measure of RP often interspersed, although it does not appear that there was a conscious attempt to achieve this result. However, it appears to me that A draws on his Jamaican accent. a) Writing Prior to commencing the writing assignment, A was given 14 words from the assigned text. Of the 14 words, he misspelled four as follows: Chance/chanche Winning/it was not possible to decipher what the student wrote after “win”. Competition/competion. Scoring/scorring. A was particularly proud of his ability to get the “tion” suffix right in his spelling test since we had discussed his difficulties with that suffix together with the different sound variations of the letter c. This made him particularly pleased to get the word exciting right. Spelling is an important linguistic skill and does not rely entirely on memorization and motor skills. (Scott and Brown, 2001, 198) Articulation and phonological impairments are linked to phonological knowledge (Crystal, 2003, Ch. 28) and apparently affects student A’s spelling ability. His early speech development was greatly influenced by his parents who were of Jamaican descent. A’s phonological awareness continues to be influenced by a number of variables. The manner in which he spelled the word “chance” as “chanche” shows some confusion with the end sound which can only be attributed to his accent which in turn impacts speech sounds and phonological awareness. It is obviously not a confusion over the sound of the letter ‘c’ otherwise one might have expected A to misspell “chance” with “chanse.” A was asked to identify ten verbs in the assigned text, but it appears that he made a random selection of words, with no particular attention to the definition of a verb, despite the fact that we had discussed verbs previously. It appears that while A was able to retain his spelling memory, he was not able to retain the grammar. While A selected some verbs, it was clear it was a mere random selection since he selected a number of nouns as well. A chose as verbs the words, no, matter, football, game, goal, dream, team and chance. Dream is obviously a verb and goal can be a verb if used in the proper context although it was a noun in the context in which it was presented to A. Verbs such as getting, are, knows, was, could be (modal verb phrase), scoring (present continuous tense), has come, recorded, is, held, have made, said and are were completely omitted by A. This is problematic because verbs are significant for the correct formation of sentences. The ability to form proper sentences is achieved via social interaction through authentic texts. (Barton, 1994 and Kern and Warschauer, 2000) This can be done in the home and at school. Obviously, A’s background admits to a lack of either activity. He has never fully engaged in communicative scenarios in which reading, speaking, listening and writing with others were conducted in a productive way. A’s educational and social background suggests that his interaction in the classroom was counterproductive and discouraging. At home, his speaking and listening skills were entirely subjective. Student A was asked to write a half page narrative describing a football match he had attended. Instead, A wrote an informative narrative, basically comparing football today with football of the past demonstrating that he misunderstanding the assignment. A was also asked to write to Muline, a person he did not know by name, but was familiar with from the canteen. The task was to apprise Muline of his experience and progress with the course. All in all, a number of grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors were identified. The following observations were made: 1. Structure The sentences were generally fragmented and did not follow the grammatical form of subject and predicate. For instance in the football narrative, he writes “They would get. 20 pounds weekly. Now a days. They can earn up to a millions Pounds in Sponsorhip after wage.” This sentence discourse demonstrates that A is generally aware of pauses in the projection of the sentences but is unaware of the proper punctuation methods for affecting pauses. His confusion is evidenced by the placement of commas correctly when listing nouns or pronouns. For instance, when listing the names of football players, A placed commas to distinguish between the players, but when he came to the final two, he distinguished them by placing a period between them rather than using the word “and.” This demonstrates that A has no basic understanding of the use of conjunctions and putting thoughts together cohesively and coherently. This greatly affects his ability to string sentences together effectively and correctly. A’s letter was also poorly structured. While the football narrative was one paragraph, the letter made an attempt at paragraph separation but these separations came in the middle of a sentence. In both pieces of work the sentence structure were fragmented in some areas and run-on in other areas. 2. Register Register more popularly known as situation context in the meanings, “configuration of semantic patterns”, that are focused on in particular conditions, together with structures and words that are utilized “in the realization of these meanings.” (Halliday, 1978, 23) It connects language with social variations.(Crystal, 2003, Ch. 4) Throughout both writing assignments a number of social variations and language variations were identified. A’s Jamaican colloquialism was evident throughout in his use of words such as “dat” for “that”, “dis” for “this”, “dem” for “them” and “odder” for “other”. It is obvious that he can distinguish between these variations because there are times when he used the words correctly. For instance in one fragmented sentence in his letter he writes “I would love to learn dem but I find it hard keeping them in my head.” 3. Cohesion and Coherence Cohesion is used in linguistic analysis to accentuate in-text connections by virtue of references, substitution, conjunction, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 13) In other words, the interpretation of one factor depends on another. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 4) In both texts submitted by student A, it is obvious that he is unable to do this for the most part. For instance A writes: “Some name brands like Adidas, Nike.” Here A uses a comma rather than the conjunction “and” to form a cohesion between Adidas and Nike. There is a serious weakness with regard to his lexical and grammatical cohesion. Coherence on the other hand attempts to relate the differences within the text. Punctuation would be the best method for achieving coherence, an area that Student A struggled with throughout both written assignments. For instance A writes: “Since the great hay-days of greats like George Best, Boby more, Jack. Charlton.” While it is obvious A wishes to distinguish the listed individuals he fails to do so coherently and cohesively so that the reader does not know if Jack and Charlton are the same person or whether or not “more” is a proper noun. In both cohesion and coherence, student A had difficulties. 4. Choice of and Control of Lexis, Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Student A demonstrated a poor control of lexis, grammar, punctuation and spelling. Much of the grammar is infected by colloquialism in that he basically writes the way he speaks, although in other instances he reverts to the proper form of language. His lexis does not change in the two texts as there is no distinction between the way in which he communicates with the distinct readers. The punctuation and spelling are both fragmented. A’s punctuation reflects a basic confusion of markers in a sentence and the separation and grouping together of thoughts. A’s spelling also demonstrates a problem with phonetics which as notes is primarily influenced by his early childhood education and his background with Jamaican linguistics. These are factors impacting linguistic development. (Crystal, 2003) Even so, there is evidence that his phonetics is improving and while he can memorize spelling his ability to retain grammar is marred by his early education. A also showed a difficulty with the use of capital letters not sure when proper nouns required them or where they should appear in terms of sentence structure. Notably, he did capitalize the word “I” properly. There are various instances of poor grammar, for instance A cannot distinguish between the proper use of the words there and their, using there when the word their would have been appropriate. (See Appendix) Another grammatical error appears in the use of the word of where off was the appropriate word. (See Appendix) Most notably however, is the incorrect separation of thoughts so that sentences reflect truncated thoughts and are incomplete. (See Appendix) What can be gleaned from this analysis is that A’s social use of dialect often creates confusion for him when he attempts to use proper English and often interferes with his acquired learning and ability to learn. Since he is currently taking English as a second language, it is anticipated that he will be able to separate Jamaican dialect from proper English grammar. b) Reading This assignment was in two parts. First A was required to read the text aloud so that his lexical skills could be assessed. Next he was required to read the text to himself to test his comprehension skill by following up with five questions. A majority of the questions were referential, requiring a close reading. The following observations were made: 1. Although A recognized most of the words he resorts to guess work frequently. He primarily relies on the initial letter sound to create phonemes with other letters in order to identify the words. He struggles with reading however, in that he uses his forefinger to follow both words and letters and this slows him down. 2. A struggled with the suffix “tion” and had to be alerted to these difficulties. When he had difficulties with words like “coach” he would substitute it for an appropriate word such as “trainer” demonstrating fair collocation skills. A appears to rely too heavily on phonics which creates difficulty with pronouncing certain words, particularly the suffix “tion”. He is still struggling with x and c sounds confusing them with the k sound occasionally. For instance A does not recognize the x sound and omitted it from the word excellent pronouncing it so that the c took on the harsh k sound. This is also a manifestation of his inability to grasp the fact that when c is followed by e and i, the c takes on a soft sound. Likewise A does not realize that when c is followed by a, o and u it takes on the hark k sound. In other words A does not know when a soft c sound or a hard c sound is appropriate. The phonemic alphabet chart was helpful for identifying A’s difficulties with the soft and hard c sounds.(Roach, 2002) 3. His verbal response to the comprehension exercise was particularly good in that he demonstrated a good understanding of the questions and the answers they attempted to elicit, although he did not respond to the first question correctly with respect to identifying the text type. 4. When asked to identify some words that could be elongated by the addition of er and ed in the context of forming comparatives and superlatives, A pronounced more words under 3 syllables correctly. However, he often attached extra sounds where none existed. For example, long became longer and match, matched. This demonstrated an insecure phoneme and grapheme correspondence. (Crystal, 2003) In other words A is lacking in letter sound representations and while he has a phonemic awareness he is unable to combine it with letter-sound representations when reading. A is obviously aware of sound structure linguistically but does not have the ability to decipher phonological segments. 5. I directed A’s attention to punctuation and he agrees that he generally ignores them. However, in the rereading he tried to recognize them. A only recognized periods when they appeared at the end of a paragraph or page. His propensity to skip over punctuation causes comprehension difficulties because it makes the text more complex than it has to be. (Crystal, 2003, Ch. 8) Section 3 Lesson Plan I propose to take the following steps for further learning and development of A’s reading and writing skills: 1. Reading Engage in pre-read texts for the purpose of indentifying and deciphering difficult and complex words. Read a number of short pieces in a variety of literary genres. Engage in interactive reading by discussing the text with teacher and/or other students as a means of exploring and communicating thoughts. Discuss how comprehension questions should be approached but gradually withdraw from this exercise as time goes by. Draw attention to how clear and unambiguous sentences are formed. Focus on alphabetical ordering using CDs and DVDs as aids. 2. Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar Devise an individual spelling programme for review every third session. Focus more sharply on capitals with respect to proper nouns and sentence structuring. Full instructions on identifying and using common nouns and adjectives. Proper use of full stops and question marks in the context of declaratory sentences and interrogatories. Draw attention to the proper use of exclamation marks for construction exclamatory sentences. Moreover, focus A’s attention on the proper use of verbs and tenses. 3. Writing Start out by compartmentalizing complete and simple thought processes for sentence structuring. Distinguishing between subject and predicates so as to form simple complete sentences. Teach A the proper use and identification of conjunctions. Help him to identify and properly use the parts of speech, particularly nouns, verbs and adjectives in the proper construction of sentences. Help him to identify and use compound sentences. Example of a Learning Plan for Student A Target By when Achieved/ Date Not achieved Acquisition of Spelling skills Acquisition of grammatical and punctuation skills Learn how to use parts of speech Improve comprehension skills Learn how to create proper sentences Appendix The football has changed a hell of a lot Since the great hay-days of greats like george Best, Boby more, Jack . Charlton. In there days it was for the love of the games. They would get. £20.00 weekly. Now a days. They can earn up to a millions Pounds in Sponsorship after wage. Some name brands like Adidas, Nike. From Shirts, Shorts and Boots, so they look the Part for Their fans. But Back in1950s it was different Yes had dear fans den a few years down the line TV came about. Those how didn’t Attend Watched at home instead. Someuse to rember going see their favourit foot ball Player and Asked for there autograph so day kept for the To rember when day where at the foot ball match Or evenbetter they would buy a program de Game, the team, The player and manager of The team to sign So the Fan would be so Greatful for every one he saw dat day. Very Much the same today but different times. The foot baller has new Skills and Styles wher Playing on and of the Pitch. Idf that’s not all Today dem drive nice cars, eat in nice restirants Dress in nice suits and always out when meeting The Press. TV interviewer, and radio shows. And The foot ball scored a goal the calebrated With Champain They also can go world wide 91 Bryony Road London W12 OTD 13/5/09 Dear muline Hoping this letter Finds you in the best of Health as I am writing my memry take me back before I never start this Class. I was very nervus and wondring what to exept. I emagene it is going to be the same old school days but when I got their it was lucky dat I met you an you sed come in with me. What have I let Myself in for I was thinking!!. But when we started de teacher put us at ease strate away. The first day we had to interview one person and writ about him or her. I found dis hard at first as I could not tak notes. But everyone Was very nice and I enjoyed it. Also, I enjoy the writing about the hurricane and de nice book we reviewd. the worse sessions for me was defenately the punctuation with all dem marks but I would love to learn dem but I find it hard keeping them in my head. We discuss What we are going to do altogether I think I canfollow a A – Z map but I’d like to learnmore about maps and odder countreys like ghana and Jamaica and America I think the next few monts will be very intresting and I am quiet looking forward to it I can’t see me going to other class but just been able to spell is very nice. Mr A Works Cited Barton , D. (1994) An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Wiley-Blackwell. Chrystal, D (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of English Language. Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. and Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Kern, R. and Warschauer, M. (2000) “Theory and Practice of Network-based Language Teaching.” Cited in Kern, R. and Warschauer, M. (eds) Network-based Language Teaching: Concepts and Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press. Roach, P. (2002) English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge University Press. Scott, C. and Brown, S. (2001) “Spelling and the Speech-language Pathologist: There’s More than Meets the Eyes.” Seminars in Speech and Language, Vol. 22, 197-207. Read More