Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Spanish/English

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion

Middle School/Junior High

Session illustrates a collaborative inquiry that explores how a first-year science teacher balances teaching content and language in a middle school dual language immersion (DLI) program (Spanish/English).  Presenter will overview the inquiry and then engage the audience in analyzing the teachers’ journal entries.

Session illustrates a collaborative inquiry that explores how a first-year science teacher balances teaching content and language in a middle school dual language immersion (DLI) program.  The DLI program offers science and social studies to a group of approximately 90 DLI students, 2/3 of whom are native Spanish-speakers. The inquiry also seeks to discover the types of pedagogical tasks and grouping configurations that prompt middle school DLI students’ use of Spanish.  

A seventh/eighth-grade DLI teacher and two university professors collaborated to document both the planning and teaching of science content taught through Spanish.  According to Cammarata & Tedick (2012), the immersion field benefits from teachers’ narratives about specific challenges of balancing the teaching of content and language.  In this study, the teacher’s voice takes precedence in the study’s results. The guiding questions are:  How does a first-year teacher in a middle school DLI program navigate the challenges of planning and the teaching of content and language?  What strategies does a DLI science teacher use to explicitly teach language during content instruction?  What types of pedagogical tasks and grouping configurations prompt middle school DLI students’ use of Spanish?  Data are generated through teacher interviews, video-taped Spanish and English lessons, classroom observations, lesson plans, and teacher-written journal reflections.  Form-focused instruction (Lyster, 2007; Spada, 1997; Swain, 1988) is used as a lens for data analysis, as this is the pedagogical approach currently deemed as a solution to resolving the lack of focus on language instruction in immersion contexts (Cammarata & Tedick, 2012).  Simultaneously, a need exists for researchers to explore types of pedagogical tasks and grouping configurations that promote immersion students’ use of the target language (Ballinger & Lyster, 2011).  Presenters overview the inquiry and engage the audience in what they learned through video-clips and curriculum documents, and through participation in interpreting data.