Case Study – Tom

Information gathered during initial meeting

• Male, age 29, resides on his own.
• Divorced 4 years ago and has one son age 8 with whom he spends every third weekend.
• Attended high school until he was 16 but left due to poor attendance, lack of interest and failing grades.
• Worked in a beer manufacturing plant for 13 years and recently lost his job due to plant closure – he was making good money and is bitter about the plant closure.
• Over the past 6 months he has tried to get a “good paying job” at the local factories but they won’t look at him since he doesn’t have his Grade 12 diploma.
• Tom often mentioned that it is the “company’s” fault that he is in this situation.

Tom came to the learning centre to get high school upgrading. After three months he was close to dropping out because he was continually failing his written assignment. However, Tom’s English teacher convinced him to give it another chance and referred him to the “literacy program” in the learning centre.

Assessment results

Expressive writing:

• Tom had frequent and some inconsistent spelling errors.
• He tended to add or miss parts of multi-syllabic words.
• Tom had spelling problems with suffixes and prefixes.
• Tom used poor grammar, mixed tenses, fragmented and run-on sentences.
• He used limited vocabulary when writing, most likely due to poor spelling because his verbal vocabulary is strong.
• He had difficulty organizing thoughts in his writing. He just put down the thoughts as they occurred.
• Tom’s handwriting was poor – his letters were hard to distinguish.
• Tom was unable to see most of the errors in his writing, but could spot a few spelling errors when he really struggled with the words.
• He had difficulty hearing the letters when he asked for the correct spelling of a word – the letters had to be stated very slowly in order for him to write the word.

Reading and comprehension:

• Tom struggled with oral reading when confronted with new words or multi-syllabic words – poor word attack skills (could not sound out the word and missed parts of the words).
• While reading orally, he was faced with a number of words he was unable to pronounce and his comprehension declined, as compared to when he was able to read silently.
• Tom’s comprehension was much stronger when he was given time to silently read the passage versus when he heard the passage orally.
• He was able to find factual answers, predict and discuss inferences from the passage, and he enjoyed making conclusions and judgments.
• His verbal expression of his understanding of the passage was stronger than his written expression.
• Tom was able to follow multi-step instructions when he read them versus when he heard them orally.