BE024350: Literacy Instruction for Bilingual Latino Students: Teachers' Experiences and Knowledge

Notes:

16 p.

Abstract:

To date, the on-going debate concerning beginning reading instruction primarily has involved federal government officials and selected reading researchers without including teachers’ voices. In this report, we present the results of a series of focus group interviews with teachers of Latino children in three urban centers with significant Latino representation: Chicago, El Paso, Washington DC. We approached this task from a critical educational and a literacy sociocultural stance. Thirty K-5 teachers from three school districts with an extensive record of innovation in bilingual education participated in this research. We employed a semi-structured interview protocol that probed teachers’ perspectives on five pre-determined domains: curriculum, instruction, assessment, home-school connections, and research. For each data set, the two researchers jointly read the transcript to identify key topics that fell within and outside of the five domains. As a result of our analysis, we concluded that our participating teachers rejected the widespread belief that the literacy education of Latino students is an intractable problem requiring services of a remedial nature. Far from obsessing about instructional methods, they explicitly stated that they were ready and willing to “do whatever it takes” to make sure their students succeed. As a result they crafted learning experiences that were coherent, developmentally appropriate, and culturally responsive. In other words, their approach was oriented towards future learning, not reteaching irrelevant and useless skills. In their words, the ultimate goal was to create “better people” not just students who could pass tests.