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

Elementary (K-5)

Looking for ways to boost students’ oral language proficiency and effective ways to assess it? Come learn about oral language production strategies to promote student-to-student conversation using academic language with integrated grammar, measured by various formative and summative language assessments. Examples given mostly in Spanish.

This session will focus on effectively promoting and assessing students’ academic oral language development in a 50/50 two-way dual immersion program. We will begin by highlighting how oral language development has been a neglected aspect of many dual language programs and then explain some of the reasons why and how our program has moved it to the forefront of our teaching. We will describe the strategies that we are using to assess our students’ abilities to use academic language.  The presentation will focus on oral proficiency assessments, including the one that we created using ACTFL’s guidelines, and speaking rubrics that measure formative growth. Additionally, we will outline specific activities geared towards promoting student conversation using academic language, including our implementation of Lyster’s Counterbalanced Approach in teaching grammar through content.  We will encourage attendees to ask questions and to share the oral language development strategies that they use. Participants will leave our session with effective resources to share and use in their classrooms and programs.