Becoming Bilingual Teachers: Understanding the Relationship Between Pedagogical Language-Specific Knowledge and Content Teaching Across Languages

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Bilingual Education Across Languages

Abstract

This paper examines the pedagogical language beliefs of bilingual teachers and how their knowledge or lack of knowledge shapes the teaching of content in a dual language immersion classroom. Through in-depth interviews with two Korean English first-grade bilingual teachers, observations of their classroom instruction across both Korean and English, and analysis of teacher-student class interactions, this study begins to identify necessary language-specific knowledge teachers need in order to teach content more effectively and efficiently across languages. Based on the findings from math and language arts instruction, implications for language-specific training for bilingual teachers that will enable them to better utilize the specific characteristics of each language in content pedagogy will be discussed.

Authors

• Jin-Sook Lee, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Wona Lee, University of California - Santa Barbara