Running Records

I administered the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency assessment to two of my fourth grade ELLs:  "Stephanie" and "Jade".  Both students are native Spanish speakers, and both consistently score in the Strategic range (100 words per minute or more) on weekly progress monitoring.  Their miscues were analyzed for meaning, syntax, and visual errors.  I noticed a distinct pattern with both students; they both tended to drop the ending consonant blends of words, pronounce some contractions as two separate words, and insert words. 

First, "Stephanie" was given a passage entitled "A Train Ride to Gran's House".  She was able to read 112 words per minute, with a total of 9 miscues.  Her miscues were fairly well distributed among syntax and visual.  Many of her miscues were the result of her dropping the ending consonant blends or single sounds.  For example, as seen below, "Stephanie" pronounced "conductors" as "conductor", leaving off the final /s/.  Another miscue "Stephanie" made often was pronouncing contractions as two separate words.  As seen below, she pronounced "don't" as "do not" more than once. 

When "Jade" was given this same passage, he read 116 words per minute, with a total of 11 miscues.  Although his mistakes were strikingly similar to "Stephanie"'s, he tended to miscue by dropping the ending consonant blends and single sounds much more than he did on the other areas.  Of his 11 miscues, 7 of them were of this type.  "Jade" tended to drop the "ly" and "ing" syllables at the ends of words, which at times did change the meaning of the passage.