Sarah Breneman

READ 436
25 March 2018
Informal Reading Inventory

Word Recognition in Isolation:

Susan excelled in reading the words for each list she got through. She was excited and
enthusiastic to work with me, and stayed focus and worked hard to read each word off of the
lists. Susan attempted all of the words, even when the words became difficult she would try to
sound out each phoneme to annunciate the word properly out loud to me. As a second grader,
Susan was capable of reaching the fifth grade word list. Once she got to the fifth grade word list
is when her frustration level increased and was noticeable when she was reading the words. She
acknowledged the words becoming larger, and her focus transitioned from being committed to
read the words correctly and as fast as she could; to paying attention to the markings on my
sheets and watching if my hand moved to make an “x” for an incorrect word she read. On the
fifth grade word list she got 14 out of 20 correct, which was her lowest with only missing one off
of the third and fourth grade word lists. Susan needs to work on differentiating between similar
sounding and looking words, to avoid reading and writing down the incorrect word when she
actually meant to put the correct word. Lastly, Susan should work on reading aloud the ending of
words. She struggled with the “ed” endings mainly off of the fifth grade word list and would just
not even read the endings. With a deeper understanding of why the ending is there for the word
and repeating the annunciation of different ending sounds would be beneficial for Susan.

Word Recognition in Context (Passages):

Susan read the passages with confidence and enthusiasm. When it came to word recognition
Susan did an excellent job with only three errors total between the two passages she read. There
was a lot of self-correction she used to complete the passage independently with no pausing to
ask for help from me. The fourth grade passage Susan read was done at a fast pace, but even
though she read it quickly she fully pronounced every word and was easy to understand while
following her reading. The mistakes that Susan made while reading the passages were forgetting
a letter in a word, which made her replace the word in the passage completely with a word she
was assuming it was in her mind. Susan acknowledged the length of the words in the passages
immediately, and addressed how she was thinking that the fifth grade passage was going to be
more difficult for her with the words being larger. Susan should work on slowing down her
reading pace when it comes to more advanced passages. This will help decrease the
misplacement of letters in words in order to ensure her word recognition at all grade levels.
Susan’s frustration level was met at the end of the fifth grade passage, when she came upon
unfamiliar words and she was annoyed with her lack of understanding of the larger words within
the passage. Based off her the word recognition Susan’s at an independent level with fourth, and
fifth being her instructional level.

Comprehension:
Susan answered all of the comprehension questions independently. She excelled with the
retelling questions of what events occurred in the passage, with a lot of detail and enthusiasm.
Susan answered the questions with confidence and would recall almost word for word what was
said in the passage. This skill she used shows her focus and attention level being high. Out of all
twelve questions that were asked between the two passages she only missed one question. The
one question that Susan struggled with was defining the meaning of a word from the passage.
The word was “intense,” and she attempted at using context clues; but Susan could not look past
the words surrounding it to find the basic meaning of the word and continued to only define the
word to be related to the passage. With comprehension Susan should work on word definitions,
and to differentiate how a word is used in a passage while acknowledging that the word has a
basic definition that is different than how it is used.

Fluency:
Throughout the entire IRI process Susan excelled with her fluency. With the independent
readings she never paused for a lengthy period of time, and read each word and passage as fast as
her abilities would let her. While reading the passages Susan would use enthusiasm in her
reading relying on the punctuation of sentences to change her tone of voice to reflect on what is
being said within the passage. At the fourth grade level she was over 100 words per minute with
few errors and self-corrections. The words per minute decreased at the fifth grade level when she
noticed the words becoming larger, and she was unfamiliar with the words. When a word would
come up that she was unfamiliar with she would either sound out the phonemes in the word to try
and not slow herself down with the whole passage or she would replace the word with a similar
sounding word. She would be frustrated with herself when she did not know how to pronounce a
word, but would quickly self-correct after she sounded out the phonemes. Susan is only a second
grader with high fluency with the fourth and fifth grade levels. In order to ensure Susan
continues to excel and grow with fluency she needs to continue to be challenged by
incorporating more difficult passages and chapter books for her to read.

Reflection:
The IRI went a lot better than I had expected. It was a fun experience to have between Susan and
I, because it allowed me to be separated from the rest of the class to fully focus on her abilities.
Susan was very easy and fun to work with, which also made the experience enjoyable and
helpful for me as a future teacher. In administering the IRI it expanded my perspective of the
reading process for elementary students. It was interesting to see the student’s ways to get her
through challenging words with pronunciations. The word list was easier to grade and follow,
than the passages. I enjoyed working with the word lists more than the passage, because I feel
that I was too focused on making the checks and errors documented on the sheet of paper rather
then providing her with my full attention in hearing her read. The comprehension questions were
a helpful portion of the IRI by allowing the student to directly display her knowledge and
understanding of the passage without any insight from me. This allowed me to have a deeper
observation of how student’s process and understand the events in stories with what their
interpretation of the purpose is. Overall, I did enjoy completing this assignment and hope to be
able to complete this kind of assessment in my future classroom in order to gain a deeper insight
for each of my students with how they understand and read words.