About MR
MR has been a student in my 9th grade biology class since the start of the school year. In class she has always been amazingly energetic, very talkative, and easily makes friends. One of my main focuses with this project aside from bettering my pedagogy and her writing skills was to get to know more about her and form a closer relationship. To do this, prior to our first tutoring session, I scheduled an interview with MR where I could ask her deeper questions about her childhood and education as well as find out more about her personal interests and goals.
MR is 13 years old and was born in the Dominican Republic. There, she went to school for five years and learned the basics of english. Her school never taught her to speak full sentences; she said that their main focus was teaching students english vocabulary words. In 2014, when she was eight years old, her grandmother that was living in Rhode Island became very sick and so her family packed up and moved here. MR does not have her U.S. citizenship nor does anyone in her immediate family.
At home, MR speaks mostly Spanish. She is raised by a single mother that packs pens at a factory and she has a four year old brother that she often takes care of. Her brother has yet to start school and his english is not very good. Her favorite thing to do at home is to go on youtube and listen to Korean music groups. She listens to their music in Korean and is trying to learn their language through a variety of smartphone apps. She has been doing this for about three years now. In terms of MR's english, she speaks and listens to the language very well in my class. She often helps the other emergent bilingual students by orally translating for them.
When I asked MR if she reads at home, she had to think for a second but then responded that she did. I asked her if it was in english or spanish and she emphatically said english. When I asked why, she told me that she barely learned how to read and write Spanish when she was in the DR. MR said that her school there mostly taught orally so she can listen to and speak spanish very well but that is it.
MR was very excited about the opportunity to partake in this project with me. She acknowledged that her reading and writing needed a lot of work and was extremely appreciative of the personal tutoring opportunity.
MR's English Language Development
I set a meeting with our english learner teacher before starting the tutoring project to get further insight into how MR has developed their english skills thus far. This was extremely useful for me because although I have MR in my classroom, I teach Biology and do not do implement nearly as much reading and writing as I would like. This EL teacher spends most of her day with MR, and had valuable insight into how she best learns and where she needs the most growth. The EL teacher also shared MR's access proficiency scores with me. From looking at them, it was clear that MR was very good at listening to English (level 5), but needed to grow in the areas of reading (level 2) and writing (level 3). From this data, I decided to make these two areas of growth my focus for this tutoring project.
Pre-Assessment
Just prior to beginning this tutoring project, students in my Biology class had completed a first draft of their bioremediation lab report introductions; I saw this as a perfect opportunity to assess MR’s reading and writing skills. The introduction was based on an experiment the students had conducted in class where they grew two different green bean plants; one was grown under "normal" conditions, and the other was grown with chemicals being added to its soil. The idea was for students to see how various chemicals that leak from electronics in waste sites and be absorbed into the soil and alter plant growth.
In order to complete their introductions, students were given an outline of what needed to be included within them. They were also given instructions to read through various articles I had sent them and pull out important information that would be included to support their argument. Without additional help or support, this is what MR produced. I scored it a 1.5 on the rubric. No sentences contained perfect spelling or grammar. No information was included from the provided articles. Some writing served as evidence for a vague main idea.