Some Thoughts on Bilingual Education
For those of you who don't know, I am currently working as a substitute bilingual interventionist in a K-4 dual language program at a local elementary school. Now, you're probably wondering "what is a bilingual interventionist and what do they do?" The answer to this question is a bit complicated but I will try my best to give a good explanation. As a bilingual interventionist I mainly work with small groups of students and provide extra reading intervention/assistance in Spanish. My students spend half of the day learning in English and the other half learning in Spanish. During the Spanish half of the day, I go into each classroom for about a half hour to work with groups of students and help them develop reading strategies, comprehension skills, and phonetic awareness. Now that I've briefly explained my role, I'm going to move on and share a few things that I have learned and observed about bilingual education over the past few weeks.