Nathan's Ganske Screening Essay

Unable to find a student to assess, I used one of the sample, Nathan’s. Nathan is entering 6th grade. He is behind in his spelling development. This could be a result of starting word study at a later age and not always consistently. Nathan has setbacks in word knowledge development and struggling with encoding and decoding skills. According to Invernizzi and Hayes(2004), “General [word] knowledge is what is needed when students stumble upon words they have never seen before, or when they try to write words they don’t know how to spell, or when they re not sure of the meaning of a specific word” (222). Nathan was given the Ganske Screening Inventory. The assessment consist of 20 words; 4 groups of 5 words. The words are based on the different stages of

Nathan was able to spelled 11 words correctly of 20 words. Based on Nathan’s spelling, he is in the late Within Word stage and the early Syllable and Affixes stage. According to Invernizzi, Abouzeid, and Gill (1994), Within Word pattern “includes more than letters and sounds. Simple phonetic elements such as consonants, blends, and short vowel phonograms are correctly represented”(157). Nathan is able to spell single syllable words, often they are short vowel words. Examples of this are the first group of words. Nathan spelled correctly all of the words in the first group. In the second group, Nathan only spelled one word incorrectly, clutch. Nathan has able to do the -cl blend. Like Russel, Nathan had trouble with the complex consonant, -tch (CLUCH/clutch). A complex consonant is when more than one consonant is combined to form a single sound. This confusion showed “confusion over consonant patterns associated with long and short vowel sounds (Invernizzi, Abouzeid, Gill, p. 162-3). In the third group, Nathan got three words incorrectly, palace, exciting & treason. With both palace and treason, Nathan had vowel phonological errors; vowel omission and vowel substitution