Jessica is a Mexican American student who lives with an older brother, two older sisters, and her mother and father in a small apartment in Middleton. The family speaks Spanish at home, although all of the children speak English and converse with each other in both languages. Her parents do not speak English and are immigrants from Mexico. Jessica and one of her sisters were born here in Madison and the other siblings were born in Mexico. Jessica is a second grader in a mono-lingual school who has been in English-only classroom environments since attending Head Start at age three and four. In all of her classroom experiences, Jessica has always had an assistant or teacher who speaks Spanish, but English has been the language of instruction. Due to her type of schooling and her family/home life, I believe that Jessica is a simultaneous bilingual, who has been surrounded by both English and Spanish throughout her entire life. Obviously Spanish was Jessica’s initial language with her family, but having grown up in the Madison/Middleton community and having three older siblings in schools without bilingual programming, Jessica has been surrounded by English in the community, in her home, on the television and eventually throughout her schooling.
In terms of the three language domains for our case study, Jessica’s oral language was the most balanced between her two languages. In her oral language, Jessica fits more into a general level 3-4, with some areas being stronger than others. Jessica’s linguistic complexity fits a level 4 in both English and in Spanish, as she was able to give many details and variety within our conversations in both languages. Jessica’s language control appears slightly stronger in Spanish than in English due to some irregular plural nouns and verb mistakes during our conversation in English. For example, she referred to the “fishes” that she saw at her cousin’s house and said that her cousin “runned” very fast during a game that they played together. I did not notice many language control mistakes during our conversation in Spanish. Lastly, the area that was most challenging to Jessica was that of vocabulary usage. In both languages her vocabulary usage fit best into a level 3 developing. In Spanish, Jessica did not appear to have enough specific vocabulary to continue to add the level of details that she desired, and I have found this to be the case in her Spanish reading and writing as well. Her general Spanish language is strong; it is only when it comes to a specific word where she pauses or after a few moments will say the word in English instead. In English, I feel that she has a higher level of academic vocabulary, mostly due to her instruction in English throughout the years. There were still words that she did not know when describing a specific activity, such as canoeing on a lake, but she often had enough other vocabulary to talk or demonstrate with a movement around the unknown word. For example, when she was telling me that she saw people on the lake canoeing, she did not know the word “row” or “canoe” and instead used the word “boat” and then showed me the action for rowing by using her hands and arms to demonstrate. Throughout both of our conversations, I was able to thoroughly understand Jessica’s main idea and most details in both languages.
In terms of code-switching, the only times that Jessica used code-switching was during our oral conversations in Spanish. She never misread a word in the other language and never used a Spanish word or vice versa during any of our writing sessions. She also never used code-switching while speaking to me in English, even though she knows that I also speak Spanish. The only type of code-switching that Jessica used was the intra-sentential code-switching, as defined by Karen Beeman. Jessica would say things like “el Saturday fui con mi cousin…” and “sí, más durante el summer….”. In both of these sentences, I know that Jessica knows the Spanish words for Saturday, cousin, and summer, as I have heard her use them before. Therefore, these are perfect examples for the idea that code-switching should not be viewed as a deficient or a negative in one language or the other. Most likely, Jessica was speaking fluently in Spanish and just used the word that first came to thought. Each time that Jessica used code-switching, she always used a word with the same meaning for her sentence, so every code-switch made sense to someone who is also bilingual. I have also heard Jessica code-switch often with her mother. Although her mother speaks only in Spanish, Jessica will use a combination of Spanish and English when speaking with her mother. At times, I believe that Jessica is using the English word because she does not know the Spanish word; however, at other times, I have heard Jessica use both the Spanish and the English word before and know that she knows both and is somehow choosing which word to use during the conversation.
For the language domains of reading and writing, Jessica is clearly more dominant in English due to her English-only schooling instruction for the past four years. This current year is Jessica’s first exposure to formal instruction in Spanish and the Spanish instruction has been limited to a 20 minute, small group, mini-lesson every day. In her English reading, Jessica is currently reading on-grade level (level 23) based on the Rigby running record and comprehension questions that are given three times per year. The two areas that Jessica still struggles with in her English reading are in comprehension and vocabulary, which is appropriate for both her reading level and because she is an English language learner (ELL). Most of Jessica’s running record errors and misunderstandings during the comprehension questions were due to not knowing the specific vocabulary within the story. Interestingly, some of the words she was able to decode, but clearly did not know the word because when asked later on about the topic, she answered incorrectly or gave a miscued response due to her lack of understanding. For example, some of the words were: gallop, fully, tufts and browsing. In terms of using comprehension strategies, Jessica stops to ask questions, using the pictures and tries to use context clues to figure out the new vocabulary. Again, this is developmentally appropriate for her reading level and she is on par with the other students in her guided reading group.
In terms of Jessica’s reading ability in Spanish, she is about a full grade level below (level 11), according to the Rigby reading assessment, although she has made wonderful gains throughout this year to reach that point. Jessica is able to easily understand the stories that she reads in Spanish and can retell the story, including the problem and the solution. Occasionally there are vocabulary words that are unfamiliar to Jessica, but she is normally able to figure out the new words due to context clues and picture clues. Most of Jessica’s errors are because she predicted the word instead of stopping to decode the word and her prediction was wrong. Another unique mistake that Jessica made when reading in Spanish was mispronouncing the words, possibly because she has not heard the correct pronunciation nor has she seen the word in a written format. For example, she read the word silla as the word “sila” and the word ruedas as the word “redas”. However, when I asked her what a silla de ruedas was, she pointed to the wheelchair on the page, therefore, she clearly understood the word, but simply did not pronounce all of the sounds in the word.
Finally, Jessica is also more dominant in her English writing as well, and this is because of her substantial formal instruction in writing in English. Jessica uses a more typical English discourse pattern when she writes in both English and Spanish. In her writing sample in English, Jessica gave a variety of sentence lengths, used difficult and unique vocabulary and wrote for a sufficient amount of time. Therefore, in Jessica’s written English development, I would place her at the transitional stage of writing, according to Rubin and Carlan. Whereas in her writing sample in Spanish, Jessica struggled with coming up with ideas and was continuously guided to add more details and thoughts to her paragraph. Jessica did not use many unique words, nor did she add many thoughtful details to her ideas. She began all of her sentences in a similar way and made a few spelling and grammatical errors. I would place Jessica closer to a phonetic stage and possibly moving into the transitional stage, according to Rubin and Carlan, in terms of her abilities to write in Spanish.
Overall, Jessica is a typical simultaneous bilingual who has been enrolled in an English-only school environment since the age of about three years old. She has a somewhat balanced level of oral language in both of her languages; although I would argue that her English academic vocabulary is stronger than her Spanish. She is dominant in English in both reading and writing, due to her language of instruction, although she has been fast to transfer to skills to Spanish throughout this past year. Overall, if Jessica were able to continue to receive formal instruction in Spanish, I believe that she would be able to be on-grade level within a year or two because of her positive attitude, her motivation to learn Spanish, her on-grade level abilities in English and her ability to transfer skills between her two languages.
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