This annotated bibliography is reformatted and customized by the Center for Positive Practices. Some of the authors featured on this page include Ester J. de Jong, Kaj Sjöholm, Cory Buxton, Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe, Martha Allexsaht-Snider, Alyson L. Lavigne, Marion Griessler, Enric Llurda, Siv Björklund, and Jasone Cenoz.
(2015). Rethinking Bilingual Instruction, Educational Leadership. It's one of the ironies of United States culture: We love our history as "a nation of immigrants," but at the same time, we're conflicted about immigration and the changes it brings. In this article, Patricia Gándara examines the research on one area of debate: whether multilingualism should be considered a problem to be fixed, or a national resource to be encouraged. Research has long supported the academic and social benefits of programs that help English learners maintain fluency in their home languages. Other research, however, has failed to find workforce advantages for bilingual speakers. Gándara and her colleagues commissioned a series of studies to look at the data more closely, and these studies found employment and wage benefits for bilinguals. On the basis of this research, Gándara advocates that schools put more effort into bilingual maintenance and dual-language immersion programs, as well as less-ambitious strategies that support the native language skills of English learners. [More] Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Multilingualism, Immersion Programs, Language Maintenance
(2011). Teacher Advocacy in Bilingual Programs, Bilingual Research Journal. As a consequence of changes in federal and state policies in education, educators who believe in the value and importance of bilingualism find themselves in a contested environment where their notions of best practices for emergent bilinguals contradict those espoused in such policies. In this context, acts of advocacy that support bilingual practices become an important part of teachers' work. The purpose of this article is to identify what advocacy for bilingual learners would and could entail, using studies that have focused on the work of bilingual educators in bilingual programs. Drawing on conceptual work and a review of 30 empirical studies, the article describes how bilingual teacher advocacy is conceptualized in and beyond the classroom setting. It concludes with insights regarding the multifaceted, complex phenomenon of teacher advocacy and its relevance to future research and teacher preparation for emergent bilingual learners. [More] Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingual Education Programs, Bilingual Teachers, Bilingualism
(2013). Más o Menos: Exploring Estimation in a Bilingual Classroom, Teaching Children Mathematics. Textbooks, as well as classroom instruction, tend to present estimation as a stand-alone exercise, ignoring that "the process of estimation depends on the situation itself as well as the estimator." When taught this way, estimation is stripped of its power to help students judge the reasonableness of answers and make sense before, during, and after solving problems. Authors, Melissa Adams, a novice fourth-grade Latina bilingual teacher, and Higinio Dominguez, her bilingual Latino research partner, collaborated in a teaching unit on estimation. Early in the unit, they noticed that their students–all Latino and Latina bilinguals–were overapplying the rounding rule or not applying it at all. Noticing the difficulty that students were experiencing with the tasks, Adams commented, "I don't know why they're not getting something that seems so easy, you know?" Besides student difficulties, the authors began to notice a more fundamental problem: The teacher and students were attending to different aspects of the tasks. On the one hand, the teacher was attending to the computational aspect of estimation–learning how to estimate but not necessarily learning the purpose of estimating. Adams and Dominguez developed mathematical tasks that capitalized on the teacher and students' mutual noticing process. In the next interaction, Adams elicited from students multiple meanings related to the concept of estimation. Adams and Dominguez consistently privileged the informal words "más o menos," "casi," "about," and "almost," all common in students' everyday bilingual vocabularies–and deferred the more formal terms "aproximadamente" and "approximately" for the important point in the unit when students had had multiple opportunities to develop a strong understanding of the concept. In this teacher-researcher collaboration, the teacher learned to see estimation through her students' eyes. [More] Descriptors: Bilingual Students, Mathematics Instruction, Elementary School Mathematics, Bilingual Education
(2015). Wordless Book-Sharing Styles in Bilingual Preschool Classrooms and Latino Children's Emergent Literacy Skills, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. The current study explored the preschool classroom environment as an important context for supporting dual-language learning Latino children's development of emergent literacy skills. The results of the study showed that teachers in Spanish-English bilingual preschool classrooms varied in the way they shared wordless picture books with the children, with analyses yielding three distinct narrative styles: didactic constructors, didactic providers and conversational sharers. These styles were differentiated in the manner in which teachers engaged the preschoolers in book-sharing interactions. Children whose teachers adopted a didactic constructor style (i.e. teachers elicited most of the narrative information from the children) seemed to have the best outcomes at the end of the preschool year, in terms of their print-related, language and storytelling skills. In addition, teachers' use of cognitively challenging talk was related to Latino preschoolers' language and storytelling skills, especially for the youngest children. Results are discussed in relation to the importance of preschool in supporting low-income Latino children's emergent literacy development. [More] Descriptors: Preschool Children, Preschool Education, Bilingualism, Hispanic American Students
(2015). Latin@s and the Intergenerational Continuity of Spanish: The Challenges of Curricularizing Language, International Multilingual Research Journal. This paper focuses on the future of Spanish in the United States and on the tensions and challenges that surround what Fishman (1964) referred to as "intergenerational continuity..It examines the teaching of language itself and the role of such instruction in the development and maintenance of Spanish/English multicompetence (Cook, 1996), that is, of the complex linguistic repertoires of Latin@s in the United States. Because language instruction generally continues to view languages as autonomous codes and systems of rules and structures, the paper draws attention to specific pedagogical questions that must be addressed by those committed to both educational access and equity for Latin@s as well as to their linguistic multicompetence in a context in which members of the new Latino/Hispanic category struggle with issues of race, class, and language, with their membership in the new panethnic category itself, and with the ways in which they are constructed by their teachers and their mainstream peers. [More] Descriptors: Language Maintenance, Spanish, Spanish Speaking, Hispanic Americans
(2015). Latina Mothers and Daughters: Ways of Knowing, Being, and Becoming in the Context of Bilingual Family Science Workshops, Anthropology & Education Quarterly. Building on previous research of family engagement and using perspectives drawn from Chicana/Latina feminist theories, in this ethnographic study we explored how Latina mothers and daughters negotiated and contested multiple ways of knowing during bilingual science family workshops. Our research illustrated that critical pedagogies Latina mothers enacted in spaces intersecting family, school, and community contexts and how they navigated aspects of (in)visibility, language, and womanhood were important in their daughters' educational being and becoming. [More] Descriptors: Hispanic Americans, Females, Mothers, Daughters
(2015). Way Forward in the Twenty-First Century in Content-Based Instruction: Moving towards Integration, Language, Culture and Curriculum. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings that provide the basis for an understanding of Content-Based Instruction/Content and Language Integrated Learning (CBI/CLIL) in the field and its relevance in education in the twenty-first century. It is argued that the agenda of CBI/CLIL needs to move towards integration; integration in a number of domains that include pedagogical, geographical and even terminological issues in CBI/CLIL. [More] Descriptors: Course Content, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Language of Instruction
(2015). Sign"geist": Promoting Bilingualism through the Linguistic Landscape of School Signage, International Journal of Multilingualism. This study is an examination of signage and sign-making practices in one elementary (Kindergarten to sixth grade) public school which offers a German Bilingual Program (GBP) for the development of German-English bilingualism. Schools are public spaces in which the visible language choice on signs reveals the circulating discourses around language status. Surprisingly, little is known about the creation of these signs and the decision-making behind their creation. This linguistic landscape is analysed using nexus analysis which sheds light on the convergence of (1) the historical body of social actors in which teachers are primarily responsible for sign making, (2) an interaction order in which teachers practise organic sign placement and (3) discourses in place which include the promotion of bilingualism. This research reveals that signage is limited in its promotion of German-English bilingualism, constrained strongly by practices that define sign maker's responsibility and the GBP's reach. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic landscape research by exploring the degree to which a school offering a Bilingual Program promotes bilingualism through signage. Educators and researchers looking critically at school signs are given cause to question accepted practices and strong discourses which limit the promotion of bilingualism. [More] Descriptors: Signs, Language Planning, German, Bilingualism
(2001). Language Attitudes of School Children in Two Catalan/Spanish Bilingual Communities, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. A questionnaire on the attitudes of school children on both sides of the border between Aragon and Catalonia in Spain was administered to detect any attitudinal differences towards Catalan and Spanish between the two communities and any attitudinal effect of attending optional Catalan classes on the Aragonese side. Responses are classified into three possible categories: Unfavorable, neutral, and favorable. Descriptors: Bilingualism, Elementary Secondary Education, Foreign Countries, Language Attitudes
(2013). "Educación Bilingüe a Nivel De Escuela Secundaria": Dual-Language Education at the High School Level, Voices in Urban Education. The Summer 2013 issue of "Voices in Urban Education" presents an interview with Dania Vazquez, founding principal of the Margarita Muñiz Academy, a Boston public high school offering dual-language education in Spanish and English. The first dual-language high school in Massachusetts, this Innovation School opened in the fall of 2012 with 80 ninth-graders and plans to eventually serve 320 students in grades 9 through 12. The purpose of the interview is to share the school's unique model and early successes. [More] Descriptors: High School Students, Urban Education, Interviews, Language of Instruction
(2015). Bilingual "Educación" in the Home: Everyday Mexican Immigrant Family Educational Practices, Association of Mexican American Educators Journal. As we embrace the increasing numbers of young Mexican immigrant children and their families present in our schools, it is important for educators to better understand the many family educational practices present in these households. This article examines the strategies and resources utilized by two Mexican-born and two U.S.-born Mexican immigrant families in teaching and guiding the bilingual educación of their children–an education that encompasses academic teaching but also provides teachings that shape children's views toward the English and Spanish languages and their cultural identities as Latinas/os in the U.S. Drawing on sociocultural theory, three primary types of teaching practices used by these families to impart bilingual educación in the home are illustrated while highlighting the values and social capital they communicate: 1) school-prescribed teaching practices; 2) embodied teaching practices; and 3) culturally-prescribed teaching practices. The author concludes with implications for educators. [More] Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Immigrants, Hispanic Americans, Values
(2015). Dual Language Instruction and Achievement: A Need and a Void in the Midwest, Mid-Western Educational Researcher. In recent years, the benefits of bilingualism through dual language (DL) education models have been well documented. Despite evidence of bilinguals' heightened cognition and achievement, Midwestern English language learners (ELLs) are relegated to language programs that do nothing to enhance or maintain students' native language. This descriptive study employed a survey to collect data on existing DL programs across the state of Illinois (the largest population of ELLs in the Midwest), to better understand the challenges facing DL educators and administrators in the nation's middle. Data suggests the predominant obstacle encountered by school administrators is a lack of qualified DL educators, including an inadequate knowledge of dual language pedagogy and/or limited academic language biliteracy. Dual language program expansion across the Midwest can only continue if the teacher shortage and development needs are addressed. This study presents recommendations for DL teacher preparation and professional development. [More] Descriptors: Bilingual Education, Bilingualism, Barriers, Teacher Shortage
(2001). The Effects of Third Language Learning on Second Language Proficiency: An Austrian Example, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Compared the effectiveness of English instruction at an Austrian immersion school and a regular Austrian high school. Immersion students showed the highest levels of English proficiency and also outperformed regular high school students in French, suggesting that in addition to language learning experience, further factors such as aptitude, motivation, attitudes, and teacher commitment, influence the language learning process. Descriptors: Bilingualism, Comparative Analysis, English (Second Language), Foreign Countries
(2013). Multilingual Policies and Multilingual Education in the Nordic Countries, International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education. This article presents some aspects of multilingualism and multilingual education in the Nordic countries, drawing upon experiences from the project "Network for Researchers of Multilingualism and Multilingual Education, RoMME" (2011-2013), where Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are represented. The aim is to briefly present and discuss some similar and differing trends within the field of multilingualism and multilingual education in the Nordic countries, taking into account both outside and inside perspectives. On the basis of the RoMME-experiences a tentative holistic cross-professional framework of reference for understanding and researching multilingual education policies and individual language learning paths is suggested and discussed. [More] Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Multilingualism, Trend Analysis, Educational Trends
(2013). Every Language Is Special: Promoting Dual Language Learning in Multicultural Primary Schools, Young Children. The changing demographics of neighborhoods and schools require that all educators consider how to support children who are developing bilingualism and biliteracy. Research documents the importance of engaging young children in learning by drawing on community heritages and cultural and linguistic resources, and of connecting more effectively with families. Such inclusive pedagogies are especially important in light of two contradictory trends: increasingly diverse school populations, with children and families from varied backgrounds and with a range of immigration and other life experiences, and the erosion of dual language and bilingual programs in some communities and school systems. Given the impact of children's home resources on their academic, social, and identity development, educators must think of creative ways to provide multilingual school experiences. In this article, the author invites readers to a school district with children from approximately 69 countries who speak 89 different home languages, including Spanish, Bengali, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, and French. The district does not have bilingual programs, but educators have advocated for dual language learning through other means. In the sections that follow, the author focuses on an elementary school summer program for emergent bilinguals led by Mrs. Rangan, a district English Language Learning teacher, as an example of inclusive practices that reimagine the relationship between home and school. [More] Descriptors: Elementary Schools, Summer Programs, Bilingualism, Multilingualism