Marisol is a Mexican American second-grader in a school in Brooklyn, New York. She has been on an individualized education plan for a specific learning disability from the time she was in kindergarten; however, her teachers are considering exiting her from the special education system because of her strong academic gains during her second-grade year.
Marisol lives with her very supportive mother in an apartment complex down the street from the school. Her father works a lot and is rarely at any school function, but her mother is always present. On some weekends, her father takes her fishing. Marisol’s father and mother’s primary language is Spanish. Marisol speaks Spanish at home but is not enrolled in a bilingual school to add on to her Spanish language and literacy learning. Marisol is very excited to show her mom her work, and her mother is quite proud of the work she is doing.
At writing celebrations, where Marisol shares her writing with a larger community of parents and school faculty, she shines?reading her writing with expression. In story writing, Marisol can focus her pieces on one moment but needs significant teacher support to elaborate. She tends to write simple actions and say that she is done. With the exception of sight words, she spells most words phonetically and will stretch them out orally prior to attempting to spell an unfamiliar word. Marisol is anxious to read the series chapter books that her peers are reading. These books are a challenge for her, and it takes her a significant amount of time to get through one. Her comprehension suffers because of her lack of fluency when in longer books. Marisol takes a long time decoding words and tends to look at each individual letter rather than parts of a word.
Sociocultural Context Question: What does Marisol’s sociocultural context mean for her literacy learning? What does the teacher need to take into account in order to move her forward? What steps would you take?
