The English Language Learning Assessment

957 Words Apr 14th, 2015 4 Pages
Student Background Elijah is a 2nd grade student who has been classified as an English Language Learner by the Comprehensive English Language Learning Assessment (CELLA) at the school. However, he is not fluent in his native language, which is Spanish. According to Elijah, he does not speak Spanish at home or study it even though his parents speak the language. He could comprehend in Spanish but can only speak a little of the language. Most of the times, he responds to his mother in English. Elijah has one older sister who is married and lives in Georgia, where his family used to live before they moved to Florida, and a younger brother in Kindergarten. Elijah prefers addition problems over subtraction problems and can read almost as fluently as his native English-speaking peers. He can comprehend, follow direction, and complete his assignments as well, but at a much slower rate than his peers. For example, in a phonic instruction, Elijah was very slow at proving the words given on the board. He continuously looked over at his peers’ whiteboard to see where they segmented the words into two syllables and which letters were identified as a vowel or which letters were marked as digraphs. On Tuesdays, Elijah’s class goes to the computer lab for i-Ready math. Students had headphones that they used to listen to the directions, but Elijah’s headphones failed to work on one of those days. The teacher did not have any extra ones available either. As a result, Elijah had to read…
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