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

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Spanish and English

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion

Elementary (K-5)
Middle School/Junior High
High School

This session presents an instructional framework for bilingual development in Spanish and English informed by genre-based theory and practice that promotes an equitable focus to language development, increases coherence and correspondence across languages in TWI and DLI programs, and enhances emergent bilinguals’ access to academic content knowledge and skills.

Quality of language instruction is key to K-12 two-way immersion (TWI) and dual language instruction (DLI) programs.  However, K-12 accountability requirements along with lack of resources in the target language often result in a stronger focus on English language development.  This session addresses the strand of immersion pedagogy and assessment by introducing Dual Language Pathways, a dual language framework that provides rigor and coherence on K-12 language instruction across two languages in TWI and DLI programs.  The Dual Language Framework is a genre-based approach (Martin, 1992) to language instruction, informed by theory that has been shown to be effective in K-12 English instruction (Brisk, 2014; Gebhard et al., 2011; Gebhard, Chen & Britton, 2014; Schleppegrell, Greer, and Taylor, 2008), and at university-level Spanish instruction (Achugar & Colombi, 2008; Balke & Colombi, 2013; Colombi, 2003), not only for language development, but also for increased reading comprehension and writing across content areas.  This session presents an instructional framework for bilingual development in Spanish and English informed by current genre-based theory and practice to promote an equitable focus to language development, to increase coherence and correspondence across languages in TWI and DLI programs, and to enhance emergent bilinguals’ access to academic content knowledge and skills.   Participants will hear about an exploratory study being conducted in a large urban district in the West of the United States and look at preliminary data related to the use of the framework as the focus for professional learning for the district.  The session will also include hands-on application of the framework, sample dual language pathways for Spanish and English and a discussion on the implementation of the pathways in TWI or DLI programs