Real Life Reading Inquiry

           I observed 6-year old girl twins reading. I had each of the girls read to me for fifteen minutes. I have a bookshelf in my house that has many different children’s books from my childhood.  I let the girls pick whatever book they would like to read, which they both picked a Dr. Seuss book, which is not surprising. The twins have grown up around the same settings and in the same home around the same people. Even though this is the case, the two read extremely differently. I am going to refer to the twins as TWIN A and TWIN B.

           Twin A read to me first in a quiet setting and did not have a difficult time. She read “The Foot Book” by Dr. Seuss. The girls are both in first grade. She told me that she has previously read that book, but only two times. She knew almost every word. Her fluency was very good throughout the entire book. As she read the book, I wrote down three words that I wanted to see if she could recognize on plain paper after she read the book. The three that I picked for her were quick, fuzzy and twenty-four; she pronounced all of them easily and correctly except for quick. She read the book fairly fast; sometimes she would read fast and confuse the words “food” and “feet” even though she knew them when I asked her to read that particular sentence again.

            On the other hand, twin B had more of a difficult time with a book that she read two times as well.  She read “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.” She would follow each word with her finger, and read quite slow. She saw the word “bad” in a sentence and automatically mad it mad. I asked her at the end of the book what that word was when I wrote it on a plain piece of paper, but she still said it was “mad” even though she knew how to sound it out.  I asked her why that was and she said because she gets confused when words all look the same like mad, sad, bad, had. She also had a difficult time with the words “where, here, there” because they blend together as well.  I did notice at some points she would try to read faster, but that is where she would read a word incorrectly. This made me think that she felt under pressure because she has read around her twin sister before and noticed how she read.

           I thought it was surprising that these two girls have been exposed to the same setting, but read extremely different. The two articles that relate to this experience are What can I say besides “sound it out”? Coaching word recognition in beginning reading by Kathleen F. Clark and One-Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction by Theresa A. Deeney. Clark’s article really helped me to assist twin B as she was struggling with pronouncing different words. I did not want to keep asking her to sound it out, so instead I would have her reread it, or skip and see if she read the same word later in the book correctly. Deeney’s article helped to assess the twin’s fluency as they were reading. As I stated previously, I noticed that twin B’s accuracy, rate and prosody were all extremely different from twin A’s. Before this class I did not think to look into reading so deeply, but as I observed these girls reading I realized it definitely is. They both can read, but extremely different and one lacks in some departments that the other does not.