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

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

English/Portuguese

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Elementary (K-5)

This presentation summarizes our journey from a parallel monolingual to a holistic bilingual writing assessment model, from an initial classroom-based pilot to the creation of an action plan for implementation in other grade levels. We will discuss lessons learned and a phased approach for our schoolwide implementation.

This presentation aims to present and analyze the theoretical concepts that support a side-by-side writing assessment pilot project of a third grade classroom in a Portuguese-English one-way early total immersion school context. The theoretical framework used as a foundation is the holistic bilingualism view proposed by Soltero-González & Hernandez (2012), and the side-by-side writing assessment proposed by Escamilla et al. (2014), that analyzes bilingual writing from a holistic view where students make bidirectional use of both languages throughout their bilingual writing trajectory. The methodology consists of a descriptive pilot project in an ethnographic setting, which analyzes a specific reality, in this case a third grade classroom-based writing assessment, in light of the theoretical framework. The literacy process in both languages has as foundation the Common Underlying Proficiency hypothesis proposed by Cummins (1988), which proposes that languages work from a central processing system in the brain. These fundamental language skills form a common foundation for the learner and are transferred between languages, facilitating the process of language acquisition in the other language. The presentation is organized into the following sections: Introduction: presents the objectives of the presentation; Literature review: presents a brief introduction of the literature on bilingual writing development and the side-by-side writing model proposed by Escamilla et al. (2014); From theory to practice: describes the pilot project, lessons learned in the application of the pilot project, and a phased schoolwide implementation of the bilingual side-by-side writing assessment model.