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

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

English (L2) and Portuguese (L1)

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

We will explore the collaboration in two immersion classrooms (Pre-K and Grade 3) to examine how noticing and awareness were used to improve output. We will take a close look at what scaffolds were constructed and how they were removed to improve students’ accuracy and fluency.

We will outline some of the research we put into practice in a school-wide effort to improve L2 output.  We will let participants explore a preschool classroom as well as grade 3 classroom where our intention was to work closely with teachers to help them to implement effective noticing and awareness.  We will highlight the following stages of the work in our school:

1. What is noticing and awareness?  In exploring this we will show how we addressed comprehensible input with our teachers but how this stops short of what our students need.
2. Setting clear language goals in every lesson.  Without this there would be no way to properly hold students accountable to output.  Integrating language and content.
3. What scaffolding strategies are needed to make a rigorous curriculum accessible to all learners through the immersion language?
4. Strategies for effective corrective feedback
5. What is a reformulation and how to get teachers to do this effectively in the classroom? 

Finally we will let the participants see the importance of teacher collaboration and how they worked together to set goals, strategies and what they did to look for learning.