Post 113: Case Study of Transitional Bilingual Education Model

Post 113: Case Study of Transitional Bilingual Education Model

Transitional Bilingual Programs--A student is temporarily in a bilingual program where content area curriculum is first taught in the students' L1 until the students' L2 (English) is proficient enough for him/her to learn academic content in English. In this case, a transitional Bilingual program serves as a remedial program,  to improve student English proficiency until the student can mainstream into regular content classes.

When I was teaching at a private school, I had the privilege of tutoring a Chinese student of about 13 years old. She was from China. She had good L1 reading and writing skills in Chinese. Unlike some Language Minority Students I had taught in some ESL Pullout classes, she had been in a classroom in China when learning her L1 so she knew Chinese classroom etiquette. She was used to a teacher centered classroom where students sit passively and take in information, memorize Chinese characters, learn Chinese history and proverbs, and then take tests and exams to show mastery of the teacher's lesson. At 13, she was the equivalent of a 7th grader. She did not know any English and she did not speak any English. She spent all her time hanging out with the other Chinese students speaking only Chinese. She was assigned to me in the Transitional Bilingual Program where I would speak to her in Chinese to teach her English and improve her English Proficiency. 

I taught her the English alphabet. I taught her to read and write in English. We read aloud together Chinese/English books.  I went to the public library to find books that had Chinese on one side of the page and English on the other side of the page. I used elementary ESL books such as Side by Side Chinese/English Picture Dictionary to teach her names of common objects. She also learned English at her dorm where her dorm mother Hyacinth, a Canadian, also taught her English and how to live in American culture at the American dorm.  

My proudest moment was when she read her first American book without any Chinese translation. Her eyes danced with joy at the realization that she was reading a book without having remediation in Chinese. It took her only a few more months and her English was finally good enough that she started hanging out with English NS and no longer needed to spend her lunch time with me learning English and speaking Chinese with me.

At my job, I taught primarily Chinese students and a couple of Korean students. My Chinese students were lucky to have a Chinese speaking teacher so that they could use their L1 until they were ready to speak/read English and/or do English content work just like my overjoyed 13 year old student did. Having a bilingual teacher on staff works. What about my 2 Korean students? 

Well, since I did not speak Korean, I had to revert back to the ESL Content Class model where I teach the content area only in English using SDAIE teaching models. With the Korean female student, she learned very well English with me using Second Acquisition methods, but not so much with John. I will discuss John's case in my next blog post.

What happens when you are in a school with 8 or 10 languages being spoken in the same class? Can the school afford to hire multiple Bilingual teacher for each of the languages?  Now that is a sticky wicket question.