Writing Analysis

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Viri and having her draw and write English and Spanish.  She is a struggling writer in Spanish who has improved immensely since she was my student in summer school just 8 months ago.  That said, she often leaves out letter sounds in Spanish, so I was curious to see what she would write for me in English.

During writing time (in Spanish), Viri always has an idea that she would like to write about.  Since Spanish is her dominant language, she always seems comfortable describing orally what she will write about.  I would say that Viri is at the phonetic stage in her writing in Spanish.  Viri is able to match most of the phonetic sounds to letters.  Viri has pretty typical errors at this stage such as leaving out the “h” in “hoy” and the “h” in “hermana.”  Other difficult-to-hear sounds that Viri leaves out in Spanish are words such as leaving out the “n” in “pintamos” and the “n” in “grande.”  

When I asked her to draw a picture and write about it for me in English, Viri thought a long time about what she might draw.  Finally, she drew a stick figure little girl with a blue marker, added a yellow smile and a black string of hair. 

She then wrote:

ai lai tu gou tu fechin en du waroho

Viri read it to me:  “I like to go to fishing in the water.” 

In her less dominant language of English, Viri’s writing is probably at the phonetic stage.  Viri is well aware of the fact that writing in English and Spanish look different.  I know Viri is not at the semiphonetic stage still, but I am wondering if she might be at an early phonetic stage because she leaves out not just difficult-to-hear sounds, but obvious ones like the “k” in like and the “t” in water.  However, unlike monolingual Spanish dominant writers at this stage, Viri uses more than just vowels, she uses consonants.   Consistent with a simultaneous bilingual at the phonetic stage, the vowels that Viri writes in English use the Spanish vowel sounds.  Also, very consistent with a Spanish dominant student learning English, Viri misses the “th” sound in the word “the” and instead writes a “d” sound in place of it.  

Viri’s ideas in her writing in both languages are usually simple and lack details.  She tends to use the same vocabulary but occasionally will seek help to incorporate new vocabulary into her writing.  The organization in her writing is more circular as would be expected for the discourse pattern of a Spanish dominant student, although it is sometimes so disorganized that it is hard to read because she often goes for length over organization (she has just recently learned that her own writing can go across several pages and be more than just one phrase long). 

Spelling in both languages seems to be somewhat difficult for Viri as far as slowing down to hear all of the consonant letters.  She consistently misses consonant letter sounds in both languages.  Viri does not have errors in sentence structure in Spanish, however does have more difficulty in English.  For example, she wrote “I like to go to fishing in the water.”  The use of the phrase “go to fishing” seems to be the result of her using what she knows about grammar in Spanish and applying it to English.

When looking at the miscue analysis, I did not see evidence of code-switching in any of Viri’s writing.  Similar to her oral language, Viri tends to stay in one language when she writes, and avoids code-switching.  This is probably even more evident in her writing because she cannot just code-switch depending on who she is communicating with like she can orally.  Viri uses L1 spellings and applies them to L2 words.  For example, she writes “ai” for “I,” “en” for “in” and “lai” for “like.”  She also records some sounds with little knowledge of the language code.  This includes things like “fechin” for “fishing” and “waroho” for “water.”  Viri’s example does not show any confusion of word boundaries.