Case Study Final Report

Reading Ability

Case Study Final Report: Reading Ability

EDHD425 (0101): Language Development and Reading Acquisition
Chuchu Li
University of Maryland, College Park
Rachel Solomon
May 12, 2014

Case Study Final Report

Reading Ability

For my case study project, I chose to focus on the aspect of reading

ability. I observed a child that I used to babysit that lives in my neighborhood
at home. I decided to test whether the relevance of the reading material to
the child makes it easier for them to read. What I found was very interesting.
To start with some background knowledge, according to our lecture,
reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to
construct or derive meaning (reading comprehension). It is a means of
language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and
ideas. Learning to read and to speak is a very important part of child
development. Also, according to our lecture, language and reading include a
wide range of purposes for the developing child. The purposes include, but
are not limited to: helping children interact with others, express their wishes,
control others behavior, and to explore and understand their environment.
The exact research question that I came up with for my project was: does the
relevance of the reading material to the child make it easier for them to
read?
The child that I chose to observe is a six-year-old female. Her name is
Kayla and I used to babysit her when she was very young (probably around 1
year old), and she said that she didnt remember me. This is relevant
because it shows her comfort level with me, and that basically I was a
stranger to her. She is Caucasian, Jewish, and comes from an upper-middle
class family. She currently attends kindergarten at McDonogh School in
Maryland, which is a top private school. I would expect someone of her age

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Reading Ability

and in her position to be able to read. I wouldnt necessarily expect her to be

able to read very well or read everything, but I assumed that she would be
able to sound out most words, and be a little above average for her grade
level.
Kayla was very excited for me to come observe her. Her mother told
me that she couldnt wait for me to get there and read with her. She even
made me bracelets and drew me a picture. I think this is relevant because it
shows her attitude before I even started observing her.
I only visited with Kayla one time and I did a self-designed experiment.
My original plan for this project fell through, so that is why I did not start
earlier and I didnt observe the child until April 26, 2014. I broke my
experiment down into three different parts. For the first part of the
experiment, I showed her a bunch of different words on flash cards to assess
her reading level. For the second part of the experiment, I showed her
different simple sentences on flash cards. Some of these sentences were
relevant to her personally, and others had nothing to do with her. Finally, for
the third part of the experiment, I had her read two simple books. One of the
books was about something that she was very interested in, and the other
book was about something that she had little to no interest in.
First, I will go over the results of part one of the experiment. I held up
flash cards that had words printed on them. I wanted to test her reading
ability and see what level she was on. Kayla seemed to be pretty on track for
her age, and maybe even a little advanced like I expected. She could read or

Case Study Final Report

Reading Ability

sound out almost every word, except for some that were more difficult, which
was again expected. She easily read words such as cat and doll, but
couldnt read more difficult words such as elephant and pencil.
For the next part of the experiment, I showed her flash cards that had
simple sentences printed on them. I found that she easily and quickly read
sentences that were relevant to her, or had names of her family members in
them, but she had much more difficulty reading sentences that werent as
relevant to her. For the purposes of these results, you need to know that she
a mom, dad, three brothers named Jake, Evan, and Tyler, and a dog. To give
some examples of these results, I will give some sample sentences that I
used and say whether they were easy or hard for her to read. The sentences
I love my mom and dad, I have three brothers, I play with Evan,
Barbie is pretty, My name is Kayla, and I love pink, were all pretty easy
for her to read. The sentences I like cars, Jordan goes to school, and The
grass is green, were all much more difficult for her to read. I showed her
many more sentences than these, but these are just some examples to get
my point across. It is clear that Kayla can much more easily read sentences
that are relevant or important to her than those that she has no interest in.
Kayla had difficulty reading the sentence I like cars, but had no
problem reading the sentence Barbie is pretty. She told me that she is
much more interested in Barbie than in cars. Kayla had difficulty reading the
sentence Jordan goes to school, but had no problem reading the sentence
I play with Evan. Her brothers name is Evan, whereas she doesnt know

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Reading Ability

anyone close to her named Jordan. This again, reinforces that she can more
easily read sentences that are relevant to her.
For the last part of the experiment, I had her read me two simple books
that she had never read before. The first book was about Barbie, and the
second book was about cars. These books were both on the same reading
level, and as I stated earlier, she is much more interested in Barbie than in
cars. Kayla read the book about Barbie pretty easily with little help needed.
She had much more difficulty reading the book about cars and needed me to
help her sound out most of the book. Kayla was also very fidgety and
wouldnt sit still when she was trying to read the book about cars, but was
much more calm and attentive when reading the book about Barbie. I
thought this was extremely interesting.
From the results of part one of my experiment, I can tell that Kaylas
reading ability and vocabulary level are on track, and even a little advanced
for her age. She is probably a little advanced because she attends
kindergarten at a top private school. Also, she can more easily read the word
cat than pencil because cat can be easily sounded out, whereas the
letter c in pencil makes the s sound, so it is much more difficult and
can be confusing to young children.
From the results of part two of my experiment, I can tell that Kayla had
a much easier time reading sentences that were relevant to her than
sentences that werent relevant to her. There are a couple of reasons that
this could happen. For one, she could recognize the names of her family

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Reading Ability

members, and things she likes (i.e. Barbie). She also couldve been paying
attention and focusing more on things she was interested in. She may not
have even been trying to read the sentences about things like cars.
From the results of part three of my experiment, I can again tell that
Kayla had a much easier time reading the book that she was interested in
than the book that she had little to no interest in. Again, there are a couple of
reasons that this could happen. For one, she recognizes the names of things
that she is interested in, for example, Barbie and dancing. The book was
about Barbie taking a dance class so she might be used to reading other
things that have these words in them. She was much more interested in the
book about Barbie than the book about cars, so again, she could have been
paying more attention and trying harder to sound out words.
Although we never really discussed much in class about the relevance
of material to the child having an effect on their reading ability, I decided to
think outside of the box. We did talk a lot about reading ability though and
this class is focused on language development and reading acquisition, so
my study definitely relates to our class in some ways.
If I had more time, I would be very interested in observing more
children and see if they too, follow the pattern of more easily reading things
that they are interested in. I will definitely remember this study and take this
into consideration when I one day become a teacher and have my own
students. I didnt realize how much I could learn from observing Kayla, and
everything I saw really opened my eyes.

Case Study Final Report

Reading Ability

Overall, what I learned from my case study is that children can much
more easily read things that are relevant to them and that they are
interested in, rather than things that have nothing to do with them or that
they dont care about. After considering these results, I realized that this is
probably true of people of all ages. Although we have the ability to read
anything, we are more eager to read about and pay more attention to things
we are interested in.