Seventh International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education

Strand I: Pedagogy & Assessment

Portuguese (L1) and English

Elementary (K-5)
Middle School/Junior High

We will look at some high-yield strategies that very occassionaly embrace students' L1 but avoids a foray into the translanguing use of L1 in an immersion setting.  Participants will leave with a better understanding of the difference between the two pedagogies as well as how to pair this effectively with form-focused instruction to get better language output. 

Lyster (2007) argues that immersion teachers need to guide learners first notice language structures during content lessons, then raise their awareness of how the structures work, and finally provide opportunities for students to practice using the structures.  Being effective at this will guide our students in thinking and talking through language, or ‘languaging’ (Swain, 2006), in new ways.

I will highlight work that has been done in a third grade social studies and science English immersion classroom in Brazil in which a linguistic feature and grammatical subsystem were selected for content lessons around a grade-level theme.