Case Study #1:
Rafael is an 8 year-old male, who was born in Brazil and currently resides in The Bronx with his parents, maternal grandparents, and 6 year-old brother. Rafael communicates with his parents and grandparents in Portuguese, and with his brother in English and Portuguese. Although Rafael has been enrolled in English-speaking educational programs since the age of 3, he continues to demonstrate weaknesses in spoken language, writing, spelling and reading comprehension. Rafael's third-grade teacher reported that he commonly produces incomplete utterances and that his sentences are syntactically simpler than those of his peers. Rafael's written narratives are scattered and disorganized, and are produced with limited lexical diversity. Rafael has good decoding abilities, but exhibits poor comprehension skills. Rafael generally follows classroom directions, but requires frequent redirection because he is easily distracted. He was observed to rush through his assignments, resulting in careless errors. According to Rafael's third-grade teacher, he is shy and only socializes well with a few classmates with a similar cultural background. Additionally, Rafael's mother reported that he appears to demonstrate similar difficulties in all of the domains mentioned above in Portuguese, even though he is proficient in that language.

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