Bilingual Teaching Practices: Meeting The Needs Of Latina/o Youth In Secondary Schools

This multiple-case study sheds light on bilingual secondary pre-service teacher practices and the instructional pivots they make to deliver content area instruction in Spanish to secondary Latina/o emergent bilinguals. Lesson plans and interviews with pre-service teachers were analyzed to examine the challenges and possibilities of bilingual instruction at the secondary level. Issues such as absence of multilingual instructional material and knowing the academic content in Spanish were identified as obstacles. Yet, the resourcefulness of pre-service teachers to locate materials online led to instructional pivots that allowed the primary language of Latina/o students to serve as a tool for accessing often abstract content.