Jason Nolasco

Prof. Hall
EDSE 457
7 December 2015
Case Study Report
Carlos is a 7th grader who studies at Alexander Hamilton Middle School in the Long Beach
Unified District. He is 12 years old and is of Hispanic descent. Although the school he studies in is
low-performing, he is a well-disciplined and hard-working student who receives mostly A's in his
classes. His favorite classes are the hard sciences: science and math. Although English is one of his
weakest academic subjects, he has an A in the class despite often complaining that the class is poorly
managed due to frequent misbehaving students. His reading is good as he can read texts well of his age,
as we had read short texts like The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar
Allan Poe. He had no real shortcomings reading the texts other than mispronouncing some of the
harder words that his age group would have probably had difficulty on anyway, and understanding
those stories on a much higher level but that is rather understandable given his age.
Given his grasp of his English is good it is really of no surprise that he understands the other
subjects. His other subjects often require a good grasp of English as he has mentioned that many of his
classes require mastery of the vocabulary that is given to them. Even his art class require some
knowledge of English as he has to remember specific words like mosaic, collage, etc. His history class
also requires a good grasp of the English language because his teacher requires them to remember and
summarize the units that they have studied. For example, they are told to make a booklet of a historical
figure in which they are supposed to draw what things we still use from their time, and write a
paragraph about those things. They also did a similar thing in which they had to draw and describe
about the events from a time period of a certain civilization. For science, vocabulary is rampant
because their science class is actually a health class so they are supposed to remember numerous parts

of the body and how they function. In English it is not surprising that they have to constantly practice
the language because they have to summarize the books that they have borrowed from the library,
memorize the vocabulary words, and write essays about the short stories that they read in class. The
only subjects in which the mastery of English is not that important is Mathematics and Physical
Education, which is not so surprising considering they are not very language-heavy. He barely talks
about those particular subjects because he does not really have anything to say about those classes
language-wise.
It was rather difficult what to do with him early on because he was already well off without me
in the first place so I opted to read short texts with him. I already had some knowledge of PALS so I
decided to use that when we had to read the texts. The first text we read, A Sound of Thunder by Ray
Bradbury, was easy since the story was good and he loves science fiction. Since I have obviously have
a much superior grasp of English, he did not have to ask me any questions if I understood the story but
he did have to summarize what was going on with the story so far after reading a couple of passages,
and I often asked him what to expect next from the story. At the end of the sessions, he understood the
story, aside from a few things like remembering the specific actions made by the characters or the
names of characters.
I continued this tactic when we went on to read Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart.
Although it was a much shorter story, it was much more dense because of Poe's heavy use of very
descriptive narrations. The short story was also bizarre which could make it difficult for him to
understand. My suspicions were justified because he already was unsure what the intentions of the
narrator were, and his bizarre behavior made it somewhat confusing for my reader to understand what
the main character is doing. I used frequent interventions to make sure he did not go off track and to
make sure he received corrections since they were a few important details that he was getting wrong.
Since we had little time, I did not have much time to let him self-correct his mistakes so I often had to
point him out the corrections. In the end he did understand the story for the most part once he got used

to the unusual style of writing and topic. I realized that I could have done some preparation for him
about the story because he was not used to strange texts; I had to use a chart to illustrate that the
character was mentally-ill and not inherently evil which my reader kept assuming.
The worst story that we had to read was The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The style of the
story did not fit in well for PALS because the story by itself is rather simple that it makes little sense to
summarize its passages frequently. Paragraph Shrinking from PALS was hard to implement because
there were really no main characters and the main ideas were hard to find since the story had multiple
hidden meanings. Prediction Relay was also hard because the story uses a plot twist. Considering the
story seemed so harmless he was not getting excited whatsoever because he was not expecting any
interesting outcomes. My reader did not want to admit it but we honestly hated the story. Again, he was
not used to strange stories so I had to tell him what the plot twist meant because he could not see the
connection between the morbid usage of the lottery and the stoning of the lottery winner. Again,
preparation would have been better for him but I had little time and I completely underestimated how
much I hated this story. I really hated this story that I had to repeat this statement again. Fortunately the
last two stories were much better and tolerable for us this time as we read The Mustache by Robert
Cormier and The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty. There were much simpler so there were no big issues
other than him getting a few mistakes on some important details or passages.
From my tutoring experience, one of the biggest takeaways is the benefits of having preparation
for the reading so students can immediately get a sense of what to expect from the story. Since I had no
time to do any preparation for my reader, my reader was rather unfamiliar with certain things like plot
twists or strange stories. Due to this he needed some help because he was looking at the stories at a
very straightforward or practical way which only hindered his ability to access the stranger parts of the
stories. It made me realize that younger students have much fewer experience reading different kinds of
stories or characters so having preparation gives students, especially the younger or inexperienced
ones, a way to better handle stories that they are rather unfamiliar with. Due to this, preparation is key

since it taps students' prior knowledge and use whatever is retrievable to relate it to the text because I
did nothing to help my reader relate to the texts immediately. Another big takeaway is that PALS is
useful but needs some modifications to certain texts. For The Lottery, the story was so slow and deep
that we went through a couple pages with him just simply summarizing the agonizing process of the
lottery, or the quiet character of the town, itself so it got extremely boring and redundant having to
summarize very plain information over and over again. For these kinds of texts, analysis would have to
be emphasized more because simply summarizing the texts leaves a lot of important information
untouched from the story. Since my reader was unable to see the deeper meaning and tone of the story
because we spent so much on summarizing the passages, Prediction Relay was futile because his
predictions were rather uninspiring or shallow. Otherwise, PALS works for more straightforward texts
like most of the stories I read with my student because PALS forces frequent summarizations and
prediction analysis. The last big takeaway from this is that time management is important. I had little
time with him so I barely spent time to guide him in self-correction. His reading comprehension could
have improved, or better assessed, if I strayed from spoon-feeding him the answers but I just really had
no time to allow him. I should have attempted to bring in any useful strategies to make sure he was able
to fully understand certain passages with less help from me without using too much time.