Teaching math in a bilingual education program

Emphasis is inquiry and standards-based teaching and learning of science with dual languages learners. Students will explore technology applications and participate in laboratory experiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on various theoretical and pedagogical approaches to effectively teach content and academic language. Field experience working with English language learners is required.

Restricted to undergraduate juniors and seniors. Literacy and Language Arts in Dual Language Elementary Classrooms: This course examines the methods and resources for teaching biliteracy in dual language elementary classrooms. It focuses on the application of biliteracy in learning theories, methods of evaluation and consideration of individual differences, instructional practices contextualized in biliteracy curriculum development, and knowledge of state and national standards for Language Arts and Reading in Spanish and English.

Students will design, implement, assess and critique biliteracy instruction, with an emphasis on effectively engaging dual language students.

This course is taught in Spanish. An additional emphasis is on the implementation of dual language education with U. Emphasizes the theoretical and practical conceptualization of both composition and reading theory. Restricted to major: IDST. The results were based on a complex classification of children according to their language abilities.

Although these children entered kindergarten with limited English proficiency and obtained initial scores on both English and math tests that were lower than native English-speaking children, they fully closed the math gap by fifth grade, an achievement that the Han attributes to bilingualism. Nonetheless, English scores still lagged by fifth grade. Much of this research has focused on children in low SES environments, but Marian, Shook, and Schroeder extended the question to investigate whether these results would be similar for Spanish-speaking low SES children and monolingual English-speaking middle-class children who were in Spanish-English bilingual programs and were instructed through Spanish from kindergarten.

The numbers of children in each of the relevant groups defined by language and social background, grade, and education program were vastly different ranging from 6 to , so non-parametric analyses were used and results need to be interpreted cautiously. Thus, all children profited from the bilingual education program, although not surprisingly their progress depended as well on other factors known to affect education outcomes.

One explanation that Marian and colleagues offer for the better mathematics outcomes for children in the bilingual programs is that the bilingualism achieved in these programs led to higher levels of executive function and that better executive function was the mechanism for the improvement in math performance.

Therefore, bilingual education may have a serendipitous effect in that it not only promotes bilingualism but also enhances a crucial aspect of cognitive performance. There is a large and growing literature investigating the relation between bilingualism and executive functioning in young children, but three studies are particularly relevant. The first study is interesting because the results were unexpected. In addition to expected effects of SES, he found that Hispanic children outperformed the other groups, particularly on the most difficult condition.

Mezzacappa proposed that this bilingualism was responsible for the superior executive function performance by children in that group. Esposito and Baker-Ward administered two executive function tasks to children in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade who were in a bilingual education or English-only program. Their results showed that children in second and fourth grades in the bilingual program outperformed children in the English program on the trail-making task, an executive function task that has previously been shown to be performed better by bilingual than monolingual 8-year-olds Bialystok There were no differences between children in the two kindergarten programs, but all these children found the task to be difficult.

Another small-scale study conducted with a population of middle-class children from kindergarten through second grade produced somewhat different results. Kaushanskaya, Gross, and Buac examined the effects of classroom bilingualism on executive functioning as measured by task shifting as well as measures of verbal memory and word learning. For task switching, they used the Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task Frye, Zelazo, and Palfai , a task previously found to be performed better by bilingual than monolingual preschool children Bialystok There were no performance differences between children in the two programs on the executive function shifting task, but the task was arguably too easy for the children since it is typically used with younger children, or on a test of verbal short-term memory.

However, tests of verbal working memory and word learning were performed better by the children in the bilingual education program. In these three examples, children who were assigned to groups either because of ethnicity Mezzacappa or education program Esposito and Baker-Ward ; Kaushanskaya, Gross, and Buac were compared to controls for their performance on executive function tasks.

A different approach is to use exposure to bilingual education as a scaled variable to determine if it is associated with executive function performance and thereby avoid between-groups comparisons. Two studies by Bialystok and Barac investigated the relation between the amount of time young children had spent in an immersion program and performance on executive function tasks.

Children from monolingual English-speaking homes who were attending schools in which instruction was either in Hebrew Study 1 or French Study 2 were administered executive function and metalinguistic tasks. Similar results were reported in two studies by Nicolay and Poncelet , showing better performance on executive function tasks for children in French immersion programs. In these studies, children were followed longitudinally, ruling out initial differences in ability.

There have always been questions about whether bilingual education programs were appropriate for all children or whether they were an exclusive option best suited for high-achieving students with strong family support see review and discussion in Cummins and Swain Consider first the role of intelligence, a variable on which all children differ.

In one of the first studies on this issue, Genesee examined the role of IQ as measured by a standardized test on the development of French second-language abilities for children who were learning French either through immersion or foreign language instruction in school. The main result was that IQ was related to reading ability and language use for all children, but there was no association between IQ and overall communication ability; children at all levels of intelligence communicated with similar effectiveness.

Importantly, there were no interactions with the type of program in which children were learning French: low IQ children in the immersion and foreign language program performed similarly to each other on all language and cognitive measures, in both cases performing more poorly than children with higher IQ scores in both programs. Thus, there was no evidence of any negative effect of participation in an immersion program for children whose measured intelligence was below average.

The limited evidence for this question is similar to that found for IQ, namely, that the deficit associated with SLI is not further exacerbated by bilingual education and has the additional consequence of imparting at least some measure of proficiency in another language.

Few studies have investigated this question in the context of bilingual education, perhaps because children with language impairment are widely discouraged from attending bilingual education programs, but an early study by Bruck assessed language and cognitive outcomes for children in kindergarten and first grade in French immersion programs, some of whom had been diagnosed with language impairment.

These were Anglophone children being educated through French, and linguistic measures for both French and English were included. The crucial comparison was the progress found for language-impaired children in the French immersion program and similar children in a mainstream English instruction program. There were no significant differences between these groups. Even though these children struggled, they did not struggle more than they would if they were in the bilingual program.

This issue of selecting the appropriate comparison is central to the debate. Trites , for example, argued against placing children with learning disabilities in French immersion programs, but his comparison was based on children without learning disabilities in those programs rather than children with learning disabilities in monolingual English programs. With this caveat in mind, a few studies have examined the effect of SLI on language development for children who grow up bilingually.

Korkman et al. About half of the children in each language group were typically developing and half had been diagnosed with SLI.

As expected, children with SLI performed more poorly than typically developing children on these linguistic measures, an outcome required by definition, but there was no added burden from bilingualism and no interaction of bilingualism and language impairment. Bilingual children also obtained lower scores on some vocabulary measures, but this occurred equally for bilingual children in the typically developing and SLI groups and is consistent with large-scale studies comparing the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual children Bialystok et al.

Paradis et al. Rather than comparing children with SLI to typically developing children, they compared three groups of 7-year-old children, all of whom had been diagnosed with SLI: monolingual English speakers, monolingual French speakers, and English-French bilinguals. The sample was small and consisted of only 8 bilingual children, 21 English monolingual children, and 10 French monolingual children, so data were analyzed with non-parametric tests and results must be interpreted cautiously.

The results showed no significant differences between the three groups of children in their mastery of morphosyntax; in other words, no additional delay to language acquisition could be attributed to bilingualism for children with SLI. Although it was discussed above in the context of testing outcomes of bilingual education, the issue is sufficiently important to warrant further consideration.

The main concern for Hispanic children from Spanish-speaking homes in the US is whether they will acquire adequate levels of English language proficiency and literacy to function in school and beyond. Although there is some controversy over this question, the majority of studies have shown improved outcomes with bilingual education Genesee and Lindholm-Leary This conclusion is supported by two major reviews and meta-analyses conducted first by Willig and then by Rolstad, Mahoney, and Glass for papers published after the Willig review.

The most persuasive evidence on this point comes from the large-scale longitudinal study and review conducted by Collier and Thomas that included every variety of bilingual education; the authors decide unequivocally for the superiority of bilingual education in developing the skills and knowledge of Hispanic and other at-risk children.

Contrary to this conclusion, Rossell and Baker argued that the effectiveness of bilingual education is inconclusive. As stated earlier, Rossell and Baker defined bilingual education narrowly and considered only programs that provided instruction through the first language for limited EP children, in other words, Spanish-speaking children in the US although curiously they included some studies of Canadian French immersion in their analyses.

However, this is only one of the many incarnations of bilingual education so while an evaluation of its effectiveness is important, that evaluation does not necessarily generalize to the broader concept, a point that Rossell and Baker acknowledge. Their review began with a list of studies and then excluded of them for a variety of methodological reasons, so the final sample of 72 studies that entered the meta-analysis may not be representative of this literature.

However, Greene conducted a follow-up study from the same database using different inclusion criteria and reported that a meta-analysis found positive outcomes for bilingual education. However, it is impossible to adjudicate between these two conclusions regarding whether bilingual education is the most effective way to promote English language skills in limited English proficiency children Willig or not Rossell and Baker because the conclusions were based on different evidence.

Yet, whether or not there are advantages, the evidence is clear that there is no cost to the development of English language skills in bilingual programs. What is completely uncontroversial is that bilingual education additionally maintains and develops Spanish skills in these children, an outcome that Rossell and Baker note but dismiss as irrelevant.

A different way of considering the impact of bilingual education on school outcomes for low SES Hispanic children in the US is to use data on the reclassification of children from ELL to EP, a decision made on the basis of English language and literacy test scores.

In that sense, reclassification is an indication that adequate levels of English proficiency have been achieved. However, Umansky and Reardon compared this reclassification rate for Hispanic students enrolled in either bilingual or English-only classrooms and found that these rates were lower in elementary school for children in bilingual programs than in English classrooms, but that the pattern reversed by the end of high school at which time children in bilingual programs had an overall higher rate of reclassification and better academic outcomes.

As with some of the studies based on test scores, English proficiency takes several years to develop, but according to the reclassification data, it developed sooner in the bilingual programs. Children with language disability, for example, will always find language tasks to be difficult; the important outcome of this research is that they do not find such tasks to be any more difficult in two languages than they are in one.

In most evaluation research for educational programs, the conclusion tends to converge on a binary answer in which the program is considered to be either effective or not, or more or less effective than a control or alternative program.

Given the complexity of bilingual education, such binary conclusions are inadequate. One reason is that independently of the quality of the program, bilingual education to some extent will almost inevitably help children to become bilingual or maintain bilingualism, an outcome that in itself is valuable but rarely considered in strict program evaluations.

My question is related to past tuition costs and what expenses are eligible for reimbursement per the parameters of this grant. This past year, I took courses as a part of the MAT program, which I presume would qualify as past tuition towards my initial teaching certificate. However, would my student loans from my undergraduate degree in Earth Science be considered a past tuition cost which this money could be used to help reimburse?

I see that student loans are listed as one of the options for acceptable reimbursement, but I am not sure if that specifically applies to student loans obtained during attainment of the teaching degree itself i. Our district provides tuition reimbursement at the SUNY course cost for initial teachers to get their professional certification and for professional teachers to take approved coursework.

May a participant receive reimbursement after completing course requirements for one category in Year 1 and then request reimbursement from a different category in Year 2? If a teacher withdraws from the certification program after completing the reimbursed course s , must they repay the TOT funds? Is the one-year service commitment in addition to the year of full-time employment required for tuition reimbursement? For example, if a teacher is employed full-time in a low-performing school in and receives TOT tuition reimbursement that year, will they complete their service commitment in June or June ?

Yes, the one-year service commitment is in addition to the year of full-time employment required for participant eligibility. Thus, in your example, a teacher who is employed in a low-performing school in and receives reimbursement in that year will complete their service commitment at the end of the following school year, in June Home Board of Regents News Index.

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Exploring multiple languages in the classroom provides a foundation for cultural education that allows students to learn and grow alongside classmates from a different cultural background.

As a result, students learn to become more adaptable and more aware of the world around them. To encourage the academic and cultural development of students in bilingual education settings, teachers should have a strong foundation in education and leadership.

To implement the best teaching practices in bilingual education classrooms, teachers should be equipped with a foundation in transformational leadership and cultural awareness. To that end, teachers looking to have a meaningful impact on the lives of their students can further their own education and pursue an advanced degree in education policy and leadership. EdD vs.

Transformational Leadership in Education. What Is Bilingual Education? Academic Benefits Students can benefit in many ways from participating in bilingual education programs or classrooms.