Japanese American AssociationPatricia Velasco, Ed.D.Queens College, CUNY

August 31th, 2015

NEW YORK CITY AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

What we know about bilingual education?

• We know is has cognitive, social and economic advantages

• We know that bilinguals are more aware of their environment and can willingly focus their attention more on tasks that demand concentration. :

• We also know that: • We have to contextualize

instruction.• Drills don’t work. Memorization of

dialogues doesn’t work. • What works is teaching by having

access to interesting content and we create activities that lead the students to use the language.

• We don’t have to be afraid of the content

•What this presentation will cover:

• The interest of promoting bilingual education in NYC and in the United States in general. The Seal of Biliteracy• What these changes mean in terms of re-

conceptualizing bilingualism and its instructional practices• How the European Union is promoting

bilingualism/biliteracy even in places where it was not the norm• Understanding what it means to develop

language through content area instruction• Vocabulary• Syntax

• We will finish with your observations and point of view

THE INTEREST OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN NYC AND THE UNITED STATES (IN GENERAL)

Interest in bilingual education in NYC and the United States• There have been recent programmatic efforts that encourage bilingualism and biliteracy, such as the Seal of Biliteracy, an award given by these states in recognition of students who have studied and attained oral and written proficiency in English and one or more languages by high school graduation.

Seal of Biliteracy: where we are • New York, California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada,

Minnesota, Indiana, Washington have already adopted the Seal of Biliteracy

• States such as Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Colorado and Oregon are in the early stages of adopting the Seal.

The interest in bilingual education demands re-conceptualizing how we think and how we teach

Re-conceptualizing bilingual education:•We need to look again at the way we think about bilingualism and its instructional practices.

• The first reconceptualization is that bilinguals are not two bilinguals in one (García, 2009)

• In bilinguals, the languages are always active and interact and influence each other.

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Home Languag

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NewLanguag

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•And what about the terms:

• New Language replaces second language

• Home Language replaces first language, mother tongue or native language

• CAN YOU THINK WHY THE CHANGES IN TERMINOLOGY?

Re-conceptualizing the impact of languages and terminology

And we also have to know that there are some areas that we have to be careful about:

• Research by Saunders, Goldenberg and Marceletti (2013) based on the five levels of language proficiency that California previously employed: Beginner, Early Intermediate, Intermediate, Early Advanced and Advanced, found that progress from beginning to middle levels of proficiency is fairly rapid (from level 1 to 2 but progress from middle to upper levels of proficiency (level 3 to 5) slows considerably. In other words, there is evidence of a plateau effect where many new language learners reach a middle level of proficiency and make little progress thereafter.

A plateau? What research says:

Understanding academic language development and identifying the plateau

Social Language

Yesterday I went to the park with John, we played ball, then we ran.

More complex language

Yesterday I went to the park with John and we played ball and we broke a window. We ran.

Even more complex language

Yesterday I went to the park with John and we played ball. We hit a window and broke it and we ran.

Academic Language

Yesterday I went to the park with John to play ball. I threw the ball really hard and unfortunately broke a window in a house across the street from the park. We had to run fast to get away.

THE EUROPEAN UNION AND HOW THEY ARE APPROACHING BILINGUAL /TRILINGUAL EDUCATION

CONTENT AREA INSTRUCTION

In the European Union:• All EU citizens have to learn

three languages

• The way this is done is by using a methodology known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

• Even countries that didn’t have a tradition of being bilingual are now implementing bilingual education

• CLIL focuses on content first, then the language that is embedded in the text

• Students are engaged in creating an activity that allows them to use the language they are learning

• There is collaboration, from the language and content area teachers and the students

• Students are allowed to use their home language as they plan

• Mami Masuya Fleming from UNIS has developed CLIL lessons

How does CLIL work?

From the European Union perspective• Content and Language through Science

Understanding what it means to develop language through content in the NYC public schools

SOME EXAMPLES

We have to focus on word meanings.

• Given that Seal of Biliteracy stresses reading and writing, we have to focuson texts that are interesting. Vocabulary and syntax can be learned from them.

Vocabulary instruction has tobe contextualized

• Let’s look at some examples

Most spiders live on land, but this spider is different. It spends most of his time under water. How does it breathe? It breathes by making a tent full of air bubbles under water.First it spins a web in the shape of a bell. Then it fixes it to plants under the water. Next it swims up to the top of the water and traps a tiny bubble of air with its hairy back legs. It drags the bubble to its web. It does this many times until its home is full of air.

air pockets

inhale and exhale?

net

pulls

attaches

Inhale and exhaleAir pocketsweavesnetattachesgrabspulls

weaves

grabs

Word associations

spinsrotates

revolves

goes round

We also have to look into syntax, or how sentences are put together. One of the greatest difficulties are pronouns

Most spiders live on land, but this spider is different. It spends most of its time under water.

Can you find additional pronoun substitutions?

Most spiders live on land, but this spider is different.

It spends most of its time under water. How does it breathe? It breathes by making a tent full of air bubbles under water. First it spins a web in the shape of bell. Then it attaches to plants under water

Syntax. Working with conjunctions:

Most spiders live on land, but this spider is different. It spends most of his time under water. How does it breathe? It breathes by making a tent full of air bubbles under water so it can survive.

althoughbutbecausebutsothan that

Let’s see how a science teacher does it• The video you will see is about a teacher teaching to a small group of students about electricity.

*The video was removed because it’s too large to be uploaded.

One area where bilingual education in NYC is also making strides is in allowing the new and home language to interact in writing•Translanguaging entails the transformation of information. You can receive a message in Japanese and then produce a summary in English.

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LET’S LOOK AT SOME WRITING SAMPLES

• Writing is by nature a recursive process in which there are stages (planning, drafting, finalizing sections; then re-planning sections; re-writing, finalizing).

• Using TL in the planning process

Learning new words• Transcription: Tube un pero

nombre blackie. La ultima ves que yo tube un pero era cuando yo tenia 6 ano pero haora nolotengo porque un caro loaplasto y podia verle las tripas.• guts• [I had a dog named Blackie.

The last time I had a dog was when I was 6, but now I don’t have him because a car squashed him and I could see his guts.]•  

Associating different features (description and internal/social dialogue) with different languages

• Sample 3 • Los otros dias yo vi a tres niño y a 3 niñas juando en la nieve y los tres niños empujaron a tres niña en la nieve y las tres niñas se calleron en la nieve donde havia poca caca mucho susio.• I said to my self is she going to

yell then I said it out loud to my friend.• [The other days I saw three boys

and 3 girls playing in the snow and the three boys pushed three girls in the snow and the three girls fell on the snow where there was poo very dirty. ]

Rhetorical devices for engaging the readerTranscription: There are 4 butterflies in our class. How? Why butterflies? Let me tell you how. Let me speak in English for a second. First, it is an egg. Then larva. Then a caterpillar. Next it is a pupa. Then a butterfly.  

Let’s look at another video. This is a kindergarten class• *The video was removed because it’s too large to be uploaded.

What we covered:• The Seal of Biliteracy in the

United States• Re conceptualizations about

bilingual education, specifically the interaction across languages• The importance of content

area instruction and how the EU is doing it• Some strategies for teaching

vocabulary and syntax using a text• How language and content

are being integrated in some public schools across NYC

What did you think? How can you apply it?