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

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

not language specific

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

The use of engaging thinking routines can nurture students to achieve metacognition, increase vocabulary, and improve oral and written proficiency in the target language.  This presentation offers practices that will make students’ thinking visible, and demonstrates rich and empowering tools to assess and reflect students’ proficiency while honoring their work.

Current research highlights the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and immersion education.  Children who are immersed in a second language from an early age become compound bilinguals, allowing them to acquire two linguistic codes simultaneously.  Speakers of multiple languages tend to acquire language faster and develop certain areas more effectively due to the brain’s plasticity.  They also show higher performance of executive functions than non-immersion peers.  Given the cognitive benefits of bilingualism and immersion education, how can we purposefully use strategies to further deepen and nurture students’ cognitive abilities?

Current research challenges the notion that various cognitive skills form a hierarchy, on which understanding represents a low-level skill.  A fundamental and important goal of teachers, especially in language immersion education, is to facilitate understanding among students.  By making students’ thinking visible, teachers can effectively assess students’ thinking to monitor progress and inform instruction.  Students achieve metacognition when they become aware of their own thinking processes.  Visual thinking strategies also expose students to the thinking processes of others.  Meaningful learning can be nurtured when students are capable of understanding the resources within their own minds.  Teachers can assess and motivate students’ learning, thinking, and understanding through the use of thinking routines developed by David Perkins, Howard Gardner, Ron Ritchhart, and many other educators and researchers at Harvard University’s Project Zero.

Through the direct teaching of thinking strategies and routines that can be used across all grade levels, a culture of thinking can be promoted within and beyond the immersion classroom.  With the implementation of these strategies, students can use metacognition to reach beyond surface level learning and communicating.  In doing so, students will become flexible thinkers, achieve deep levels of understanding, enhance their target language proficiency, and solve the unknown challenges that will face them in the future.