ELL Meeting with Colleagues

Having discussed our ELL students, my colleagues and I were largely in agreement about what was occurring in our coordinating teacher's classroom.  While there, we observe a small ELL class made up of around 5 students.  The scores that I list later are based entirely off of an observational standpoint.  Regarding my student, "E", we discussed mostly his outgoing nature as a student.  By far, he is the most vocal member of the class, which is notable in that every student speaks a different native language, making English necessary in the classroom for everyone, not just the teacher.  I believe that this diversity within the class has greatly helped E to become more comfortable with his English; he is a talkative student, one who is most comfortable when he is able to make side comments and crack jokes to his friends.  Perhaps it is because of this type of personality that his speaking is so good.  He seems to understand how English functions well,   making few errors that I have noted.  That being said, his vocabulary seems to be quite small, and he occasionally forgets the articles of a word ("I have question").  It is for this reason that I would score him as a 3 on the WIDA chart in the speaking category.  In regards to his listening, this should be his highest score of the four.  His comprehension is excellent; in class, he is by far the most likely to answer a question posed by the teacher, and to me this represents a solid understanding of what is being said.  He will also go out of his way to ask critical thinking questions, again showing that not only is he understanding the material, but also going beyond it and developing thoughts of his own about it.  It is for this reason that I score him as moving into level 4 on the WIDA chart.  Reading and writing (I will group them together because I believe them to have a similar score) seem to challenge him the most out of the four categories.  His writing is prone to a simple grammatical errors, many of which seemed to be shared by the class.  He is however capable of demonstrating his thoughts on paper.  Reading seems to be a bit uninteresting, or perhaps challenging for him.  He sometimes shortcuts words at first glance based on the first letter (one example being him saying "settlers" instead of "cattle"), and on one occasion reading only half of the book that he was assigned in class.  It is for these reasons that I score him as a 2 on both reading and writing.