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

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

English/Spanish

Two-Way Bilingual Immersion

Middle School/Junior High

Discover middle school DL techniques and strategies.  Topics include how to develop academic language and incorporate syllabication across content areas, bridging Spanish and English within the DL classroom, activities to motivate struggling writers, merging literacy into content areas, and how to transfer academic content between languages.

As teachers of sixth through eighth grades covering all content areas, we will give the participants a glance into our middle grades classrooms in a Title I school.  The middle school Dual Language program has been in effect for four years at our school, and ten years at our feeder elementary school.  Coming from a highly rural area, with 82% of students receiving free/reduced lunch, and a 71% Hispanic population we had a strong need to implement a Dual Language program, along with a need to incorporate proven ELL strategies into our daily instruction. In our session we will review classroom activities and strategies that develop speaking, writing, reading, and listening abilities in math, science, social studies, and language arts. Our goal will be to provide practical techniques that are easily adapted across contents to help all students grow academically, as well as to bridge the gap for ELL students.  Topics addressed will be: how to develop academic language across content areas, bridging Spanish and English within the Dual Language classroom, incorporating syllabication and word parts in all content areas to aid with comprehension, activities to motivate struggling writers by capitalizing on their diversity, merging literacy in Science and Social Studies, and how to transfer the academic content students have learned in one language to the other.  We will showcase actual student products, rubrics, modeling and plenty of take-aways that can be used and adapted to meet the needs of multiple grade levels, all presented with a middle school approach.