Supporting Bilingual Learners'' Literacy Practices Through Science

This book examines two bilingual education teachers'' practice in an attempt to understand the planning and instructional key events occurring in these two teachers'' classrooms focusing on students'' academic language development during science instruction. Considering the political climate around Bilingual Education in California, it is rare to find schools that have been able to maintain a successful dual language program after Proposition 227 passed and, moreover, to find schools that are teaching science in this time of accountability. This book showcases the teachers'' teaching and their interactions with students in two dual language classrooms. It focuses on the teachers'' planning process for activities to develop academic language during different science units. The research captures a detailed description of classroom instruction, planning time, and reflection on practice as the teachers taught their science units, showing teachers'' level of understanding of their own practice reflected in the type of opportunities they provided for students'' development of academic language components in the content area of science.