Elizabeth A Smolcic, Thesis Supervisor Amy C Crosson, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
emergent bilinguals English learners pre-service teachers academic language English language learners
Abstract:
There is a large percentage of Prek-12 teachers who have not been prepared to work with emergent bilinguals, despite the increasing population of these students in today’s United States education system. Pre-service teachers in Pennsylvania are required to take a three-credit course related to emergent bilingual instruction. However, many teachers feel that their teacher education program inadequately prepares them to teach and effectively meet the needs of emergent bilinguals. This study followed a group of undergraduate education majors engaged in an introductory course to learn about emergent bilingual instruction. It includes survey and interview data from a group of 25 students and seeks to learn the attitudes and knowledge about emergent bilingual instruction that emerge after a one semester course related to teaching this population. The findings of this study report that the pre-service teachers in this study ended the course with deficit attitudes, a limited conceptualization of academic language, a shallow understanding of first language and cultural inclusion, and an unclear understanding of their role as a mainstream teacher teaching emergent bilinguals. This study suggests that there needs to be more reflection and integration of emergent bilingual instruction throughout each course sequence in teacher education programs.
