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This video shows students in a two-way immersion dual language Kindergarten class participating in a Bridge from content learned in Spanish (Science and Language Arts) to English. Make sure to note the steps or elements of a side-by-side Bridge.

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Biliteracy Unit in 2nd Grade: The Bridge

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Biliteracy Unit in 2nd Grade: The Bridge

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This section captures Karen Beeman guiding the students in doing the Bridge. The Bridge is the moment when students synthesize their learning in Spanish, develop the matching oracy in English, and then add the English equivalent to what they have learned in Spanish. After created their Bridge, the students engage in the contrastive analysis between languages, identifying similarities (in this case, cognates) and differences (grammar as evidenced by the use of gender in articles and plural).

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Biliteracy Unit in 2nd Grade: The Bridge

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Trabajando con un grupo de estudiantes bilingües de primer grado, Karen Beeman hace el puente luego de haber trabajado la oralidad, la comprensión lectora, la escritura, el estudio de palabras y la fluidez en español.

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Implementing the Bridge in the Two Teacher Model (and When You’re Not Bilingual) – Part 1 - Teaching For Biliteracy

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The Bridge – it’s been an area of growth for me since I began teaching in Two-Way Immersion five years ago. For a while it really intimidated me. I wasn’t sure what to do, when to do it, or how to do it. It was definitely an aspect of teaching unique to teaching for biliteracy,

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The development of metalinguistic awareness

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The development of metalinguistic awareness

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Research has shown that multilingual learners’ metalinguistic awareness is higher than that of monolingual speakers, due to the presence of more than one language in their repertoire.

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The development of metalinguistic awareness

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Are Bilinguals at an Advantage in Metalinguistic Awareness? A Meta-Analysis​

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Are Bilinguals at an Advantage in Metalinguistic Awareness? A Meta-Analysis​

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The purpose of this research was to see if bilinguals students are at an advantage in metalinguistic awareness over monolingual students.

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Are Bilinguals at an Advantage in Metalinguistic Awareness? A Meta-Analysis​

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The purpose of this research was to see if bilinguals students are at an advantage in metalinguistic awareness over monolingual students.

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Dual-Language Classrooms: Bridging Content and Academic Language

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Dual-Language Classrooms: Bridging Content and Academic Language

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Learn how to make your classroom a safe place to bridge dual-language content with six steps.

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Bridge Content in Dual Language Classrooms

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Get ideas for bridging lessons on academic vocabulary in your dual-language classroom so your students can reach proficient biliteracy.

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Asi se Dice - That's how you say it - Bilingual 2nd + 3rd Grade Classroom

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Asi se Dice - That's how you say it - Bilingual 2nd + 3rd Grade Classroom

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Presents a strategy for bilingual students in grades 3 and higher that engages them in working collaboratively in and across Spanish and English

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Asi se Dice - That's how you say it - Bilingual 2nd + 3rd Grade Classroom

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Transfer & Designated ELD in a Spanish bilingual Classroom

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Transfer & Designated ELD in a Spanish bilingual Classroom

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Archive SEAL Transfer & Designated ELD in a Spanish bilingual Classroom

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SEAL Cross Language Connections in the Classroom

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SEAL Cross Language Connections in the Classroom

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Illustrates cross-language connections and metalinguistic awareness in the dual language brain utilizing various strategies in grades Kindergarten – 3rd grade.

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SEAL Cross Language Connections in the Classroom

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What does it look like, sound like, and feel like?

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Cheryl Urow Teaching for Biliteracy, Inc

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Interview: Dr. Sonia Soltero on the Importance of Cross-linguistic Connections and Metabilingual Awareness

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Interview: Dr. Sonia Soltero on the Importance of Cross-linguistic Connections and Metabilingual Awareness

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Ways dual language teachers can help activate their students’ cross-linguistic connections and metabilingual awareness.

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Dr. Sonia W. Soltero I recently spoke with Dr. Soltero to learn more about ways dual language teachers can help activate their students' cross-linguistic connections and metabilingual awareness. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Can you tell me about your background in bilingual education and current work? is Professor and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Language, and Curriculum and former Director of the Bilingual-Bicultural Education Graduate Program at DePaul University in Chicago. Soltero's scholarly work on English Learners, Latino education, and bilingual/dual language education has been published in English, Spanish, and French. She has been involved in dual language and bilingual education for more than thirty years as a dual language teacher, university professor, professional developer, and researcher.
I am a product of bilingual education. I grew up in various countries in Latin America, and I went to bilingual schools where part of the day was conducted in English and part of the day in Spanish throughout all grade levels. In my professional life, I started as a bilingual and dual language teacher. I worked in that capacity in Tucson, Arizona and in Chicago. In Tucson, I taught on the Native American reservation with children from the Yaqui Tribe. In Chicago I worked in a two-way dual language program that served mostly Mexican, Puerto Rican and African American students. I was also a dual language program coordinator.
What changes have you seen in the field of bilingual education over the past 30 years?
For the past 20 years, I have been a professor in the Bilingual-Bicultural Education Program at DePaul University and teach courses required for bilingual education and ESL state endorsements, including biliteracy, second language acquisition, and bilingual education policy/history. I also created a course on language program design, which is pretty unique given that the coursework in bilingual education programs tends to be very focused on instructional theory, research and practices within the classroom. I also have worked quite a bit with districts in numerous states including New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois. Moreover, I have served as an external partner and researcher at Ana G. Mendez University, dual language university, which is based in Puerto Rico but also has campuses in Florida, Maryland, Texas.

My journey in bilingual education began when I was completing my undergraduate degree and afterwards while working as a bilingual education teacher in Tucson. That was during the heyday of bilingual education. But then we saw multiple state policies ban or curtail bilingual education like what happened in California, Massachusetts, Arizona. Certainly, No Child Left Behind and the demise of Title VII [The Bilingual Education Act] are examples of policies that really started to undermine bilingual education. But, now we are seeing a reversal of these restrictive policies in both California and Massachusetts.

In terms of the field itself, we continue to struggle with labels which are always problematic and constantly changing. For example, we used to call English Learners (ELs) bilingual students, and then we shifted to English language learners, then English learners, and now we are shifting to emergent bilinguals, in our pursuit of finding an accurate representation of what it means to be a developing bilingual.

We also did not used to have the type of attention and focus on bilingualism and biliteracy that we have now. The discussion tended to be around native language literacy, English language literacy or English as a second language. Now there's a lot more talk in the last 10-15 years or so, about bilingualism and biliteracy. Because of the Seal of Biliteracy, biliteracy has gained a lot of interest, attention and increases in research. Many researchers are doing important studies about biliteracy that provide the necessary guidance for practice and assessment. This has been a great development in the field to more deeply think about how the two languages intersect and complement each other and how bilinguals jointly develop their two languages.
What are some examples of how teachers can facilitate cross-linguistic connections in the classroom?
Also, something that was always there, but not really emphasized in the past was the notion of cross-linguistic connections and also what I call metabilingual awareness, where teachers and students intentionally and strategically engage in comparing and contrasting their two languages, analyze the similarities and differences, and play with the two languages.

For instance, if a teacher during language arts is teaching about literary characters in Spanish she would write and say, características físicas (physical characteristics) in Spanish and then ask students ¿Cómo se dice características físicas en inglés? (How do you say características físicas in English?). The teacher would then write on the board the words in English and Spanish using a different color as a scaffold for students to differentiate the two languages. Moreover, the teacher can simultaneously conduct a 1-2 minute mini-lesson of analyzing and discussing all of the differences and similarities between those words in the two languages. So, just something as simple as that can help students build those cross-linguistic connections and increase their metabilingual awareness.

The teacher would also point out words that are cognates-two words that in English and Spanish sound, look and mean the same. Cognates can help increase students' vocabulary in both languages. There are many cognates that are common words in Spanish but tend to be very uncommon or what we call low frequency words in English. For example, very sophisticated words in English like rápido (rapid) or comenzar (commence) are everyday words in Spanish. So, all of those kinds of examples help students have a more sophisticated vocabulary and expanded language.

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Interview: Dr. Sonia Soltero on the Importance of Cross-linguistic Connections and Metabilingual Awareness

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Dr. Sonia W. Soltero I recently spoke with Dr. Soltero to learn more about ways dual language teachers can help activate their students' cross-linguistic connections and metabilingual awareness. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Can you tell me about your background in bilingual education and current work?

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Making Cross-Language Connections with our Children

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Making Cross-Language Connections with our Children

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Going Beyond Translation: Boosting Metalinguistic Awareness for Multilingual Students

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Going Beyond Translation: Boosting Metalinguistic Awareness for Multilingual Students

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What is metalinguistic awareness and why is it important?

This process of making connections between language consciously, bridging from one language to another, is called metalinguistic awareness. In Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges between Languages (2013), Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow describe metalinguistic awareness as, "the understanding of how language works and how it changes and adapts in different circumstances" and a strategy for doing so as contrastive analysis (p. 4). Historically, in the United States, languages have generally been kept separate and restrictive language policies have further promoted English-only environments. Yet, the brain loves connections so we need to make these opportunities clear for students. Plus, even if we don't teach in a bilingual/dual instructional setting, we can still validate our students' bilingual/multilingual identities by promoting metalinguistic awareness.

Furthermore, bilingual/multilingual learners are constantly in a state of using their "full linguistic repertoire" which Ofelia Garcia as translanguaging (2009: 140). If we don't encourage connections across languages for our language learners then we are not allowing them to fully access their entire knowledge base in any language!

How can teachers bring metalinguistic awareness into the classroom?

There are many ways to support the connection between languages into any classroom that go beyond translating. Translation alone may not provide opportunities for students to drive their own learning and metalinguistic awareness plus their English language development.

Here's an excerpt from my book The Language Lens for Content Classrooms (2019) about the importance of capitalizing on cognates and word study:

Our ELLs come from many different language backgrounds and many different language families. What do I mean by language families? A group of related languages comprise a language family that comes from a common ancestral language, and there are known to be 147 language families in the world (Thompson, 2015). Indo-European languages like Greek, Slavic, and Romance languages come from similar roots yet have their own characteristics. When we teach students to look for these common roots, we are using the strategy of discovering root words and even cognates.

Let's take the word assess in English, for example. Although it can be traced back to Middle English, it is likely rooted in the Latin word assessus, which is the past participle of the word assidere, which literally means "to sit beside." If we think about the spirit of assessment in its most authentic form, we hope to be learning about what a student can do by literally or figuratively sitting beside the student. Assessment, when done accurately, is an act that is something we do in service of students, although I'm sure you could argue, as can I, that assessment is often something that is done, especially large-scale assessments, not entirely in service of students and certainly not always in ways that accurately assess what students can do. At any rate, my point here is that by diving into the word history of the word assess, we can see that it is connected to the term to sit beside not by accident. There is meaning there.

Another way to make words come to life is to teach cognates. For example, the word water in English is similar to the following:

* wasser in German

* vand in Dutch

* voda in Russian

* woda in Polish

* voda in Czech

Approximately 30-40 percent of English words have a word that is similar in Spanish, like map/mapa, dollar/dólar, and camera/cámara, to name a few (Colorin Colorado, 2017). Allow students to share the cognates they hear and read. Some teachers even co-create lists with students throughout the year.

In word study, analyzing the parts of words, or morphemes, is an effective way to get students to see patterns and meaning across content areas (Ebbers, 2008). For example, if you teach that the prefix inter means "between," then students can see it in many words, like international, interface, interstate, intertwine, and interval. In fact, there are forty-five more words-at least!-that use this prefix (Sight Word Games,

2013). Talk about word power!

Word study and cognate study in general is an effective way to be more linguistically responsive through small steps. I've seen teachers simply add this in by doing a quick word study for a few minutes once a week with content vocabulary related to the unit. Like all the ideas presented here, make it your own so that you and your students get excited about language!

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Going Beyond Translation: Boosting Metalinguistic Awareness for Multilingual Students - Confianza

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By Sarah B. Ottow Have you ever been communicating in another language and found connections to your own? For me personally, I can share a few examples. The word chocolate in English is the same in Spanish, chocolate , yet it pronounced differently.

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This module describes the theories of metalinguistics and how these theories apply to biliteracy learning and instruction.

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Metalinguistic Approach to Biliteracy Instruction | MoraModules

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This module describes the theories of metalinguistics and how these theories apply to biliteracy learning and instruction.