Guiding a student to do well or improve performance requires an in-depth understanding of the student’s areas of weakness and strengths. Proper and intelligent analysis of the teacher’s markings and comments is vital for academic guidance. DCJ’s report reveals a lot about his English growth and the influence of the Spanish spoken at home. For instance, one outstanding strength of DCJ is that he understands vowels in all dimensions. He scores over 80% in all the vowels related tests with the least being 12/15 (pg 46). Besides, a good mastery of vowels has strengthened his reading skills, and he does equally well in reading (Teacher’s passage and Directions 5-C).
However, there are a few areas that require improvement in DCJ’s report. He needs to work on his communication skills by learning the usage of words in sentence construction. This is evidence in the cloze test, where he fails to pick the right words for effective communication (page 158-Core Reading Maze Comprehension 2-A). Even though he does well in the vocabulary test, this may be attributed to the fact that most of the vocabularies are related to the common word in human early life development but not due to his ability to evaluate the useful words. Besides, the Spanish language influence affects his pronunciation, mostly when he reads “City Walk,” the most wrongs relate to Spanish words.
One strategy of improving the weak areas is by limit the extent of speaking the second language. At 11 years, language acquisition devices are still very active, and children tend to explore the opportunities that they come across. It is imperative, therefore, that parents and teachers use the second language appropriately. Secondly, the student needs to be exposed to frequent conversations where he learns the word choice. For instance, conducting arguments in English and letting being in charge of the debating session. This will enable him to build confidence in the word choice and have a command on written communication.