Bilingual Elementary Students Research Articles

The Effect of the Process-Based Approach on the Writing Skills of Bilingual Elementary Students

The objective of this action research study was to assess the impact of the Process-Based Approach (PBA) on the development of the writing skills of young students who are learning English as a Foreign Language. The participants included 12 third-grade students from a bilingual private school in Manizales, Caldas. Six workshops were implemented, guiding the students to write different texts in English by using the writing process stages and applying some writing strategies, such as planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own output. Instruments such as a teacher’s journal, a writing rubric, external observations, self-assessment protocols, and L2 writing pre- and post-tests were used to collect the data. The results suggest that the PBA was useful for enhancing the writing skills of young English learners. Additionally, the strategies applied during the process bettered third-grade students’ writing performance in aspects such as content, organization, conventions, vocabulary, and fluency. Finally, the data illustrated that the PBA and the writing strategies made students feel confident about writing, which, at the same time, contributed to the students’ self-efficacy in writing tasks.

Learning to Teach Bilingual Students: How Teacher Candidates Appropriate Linguistically Responsive Practices

ABSTRACTAs the number of English Language Learners (ELLs) educated in general education classrooms has increased, many teacher education programs have implemented reforms intended to prepare teacher candidates to work with ELLs. This multiple-case study uses a sociocultural perspective on learning to examine whether and how four undergraduate teacher candidates from a reformed program appropriated linguistically responsive teaching practices for use in fieldwork with bilingual elementary students. All participants were females who were born and raised in the United States; two were monolingual and White, and two were bilingual and Asian. Within-case analysis reveals four distinct portraits of young women learning to be teachers, with substantial variation in their teaching practice. Cross-case analysis demonstrates patterns in the sources of participants’ knowledge and highlights the importance of guided participation during fieldwork to enable teacher candidates to appropriate knowledge for use in the classroom. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.

A Comparative Study of Phonological Processing in Bilingual Elementary Students with Down syndrome in Kurdish and Persian

A Comparative Study of Phonological Processing in Bilingual Elementary Students with Down syndrome in Kurdish and Persian

Incidental Corrective Feedback by Classroom Teachers and Uptake by Bilingual Elementary Students in Teacher-Learner Interactions

The study investigated (1) the relationship between corrective feedback types and errors by bilingual elementary students in speaking; (2) corrective feedback type that leads to high uptake; (3) uptake commonly made by bilingual elementary students in response to incidental corrective feedback; and (4) perspectives of elementary classroom teachers and bilingual young learners on the provision, frequency, and timing of corrective feedback. The qualitative and quantitative research involved classroom teachers from grades 1 to 5 and bilingual elementary students. A total of 20 classroom teachers and 362 elementary students able to speak English, Bahasa Indonesia, and Chinese from a school implementing an international curriculum participated in the research. The study revealed that (1) different corrective feedback types, namely recast, explicit correction, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, repetition, and elicitation were not specifically linked with phonological, grammatical, and lexical errors in speaking; (2) recast led to high uptake in the form of incorporation but not student-generated repair; (3) repetition was the most common type of uptake by bilingual elementary students; and (4) classroom teachers and elementary students wanted teachers to correct errors and give delayed error correction but have different perspectives on the frequency of doing it. For classroom teachers, learners’ errors have to be corrected all the time but for students, errors have to be corrected sometimes. Peer application of corrective feedback and repeated error by another student are new kinds of uptake based on the results of the classroom-based research.

Service Learning: Staging Hispanic Theatre for Bilingual Elementary Students

Staging Hispanic Theatre” is a service-learning course that exemplifies a pedagogical practice that Rita Irwin and colleagues term “a/r/tography”—a strategy in which arts-making, research, teaching, and learning take place simultaneously, benefitting students, instructors, and audiences. Undergraduate students engage in high-impact practices (HIP) as they study children’s theatre and pedagogy, and they use this knowledge to write and act in their own plays in Spanish for elementary school children in bilingual programs. Undergraduate students mentor and model behavior for elementary students in the target language and simultaneously develop their own linguistic, literary, and pedagogical skills. They provide cultural capital for children who may not be familiar with theatre practices and behavior, and they explore how language can be used to communicate in real-world settings and how a liberal arts education can be applied to understand existing works of literature and to create new compositions. With this essay, I also show how arts-making and teaching practices can overlap with and impact research

Examining the role of vocabulary depth, cross-linguistic transfer, and types of reading measures on the reading comprehension of Latino bilinguals in elementary school

Given the increase of bilingual students in the K-12 public school system, understanding reading comprehension performance, especially among this population, has been a major focal point in the research literature. This study explores the nature of reading comprehension among a sample of 123 Spanish–English bilingual elementary students. We add to the existing knowledge base regarding reading comprehension in two significant ways: (1) augmenting the Simple View of Reading by testing the role of both vocabulary depth contribution and dual-linguistic ability in English reading comprehension; and (2) questioning the manner through which reading comprehension is understood through measurement and conceptualization. Specifically, we build a comprehensive model of reading comprehension that tests the effects for vocabulary depth, Spanish oral language, and biliteracy. In line with previous research that suggests different reading measures tap different abilities, we test our model for three different measures of reading comprehension: a cloze exercise, a passage and multiple choice based test, and a timed silent sentence reading judgment task. Our findings converge with previous research on the role of vocabulary depth in reading comprehension and also challenge prior work which has compared different reading measures. Implications for theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding reading comprehension, specifically among Spanish–English bilingual students, are discussed.

A record of bilingual elementary students’ reading strategies in Greek as a second language

The present study aimed at identifying and recording the reading strategies employed by immigrant children, who speak Greek as a second language (L2). The sample consisted of 32 Albanian and Romanian speaking children who attend the fifth and sixth primary school grades. Think aloud protocols and retrospective interviews were employed to collect data. The findings revealed that more competent bilingual readers employed a wider range of ‘top-down’ and more complex reading strategies compared to less competent readers, who showed overdependence on bottom-up decoding strategies and limited awareness of the reading process.

Nonlinear Processing as a Comprehension Strategy: A Proposed Typology for the Study of Bilingual Children's Self-corrections of Oral Reading Miscues

This paper reports on a study of bilingual elementary students' oral reading miscue patterns focused on self-correction strategies. Specifically, two kinds of self-monitoring during reading were compared: self-correction for which previous context to the miscue provided no prompt to self-correct, and self-correction for which the miscue itself and/or the previous context appeared to be sufficient to signal the self-correction. While both of these measures can be associated with productive reading strategies, it is the former that seems to be related more closely to written language processing of the more conscious and reflective kind. The primary objective of the study was to discuss a proposed typology of reading self-corrections that would be useful in studying how beginning readers process text. The 45 students, who either spoke or understood both Spanish and Náhuatl, and were from a semi-rural community in central Mexico, were also tested on a series of language awareness measures as well as general assessments of reading and writing, to explore relationships among these measures. In school, virtually all literacy instruction is in Spanish, reflecting a sharply diglossic allocation of the two languages in the speech community as a whole. Children's awareness of this aspect of language use was also assessed.