How can Bilingual Transliteracy be Improved?

In a Spanish Dual Immersion program, students face reading comprehension challenges not only in English, but in Spanish as well. As a bilingual teacher there is a need in the classroom for multi-modal strategies that help students improve transliteracy skills in both languages. This project uses OCDE (Orange County Department of Education) Project GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Development) and combines some strategies using technology to help bilingual students achieve transliteracy improvement.


                                  De la Torre Home        Learn More        Standards        Inspiration        About the Author

Multi-modal strategies increase comprehension in bilingual students

The purpose of my capstone is to use a multimodal strategy to improve bilingual student's transliteracy skills.  In a bilingual classroom, my students struggle with both English and Spanish reading comprehension. Using multimodal strategies, such as GLAD and i-station help increase student's transliteracy skills in both English and Spanish. My hope is that with my findings other teachers can help support not only bilingual students but it will also benefit English only speakers in their class. GLAD strategies can be beneficial to all students since they offer multi-modal tactics that can help students better understand reading comprehension.

In my capstone you will find different OCDE Project GLAD strategies that I used with my 3rd grade Spanish dual Immersion students. I have included personal lesson plans with GLAD strategies embedded into them. In addition, there are also videos and student work.
"Harvesting Hope: Cosechando Esperanza" Cesar Chavez Narrative Input Chart
Round 1
In the first round of my research I wanted to use a technology tool that would engage students in reading and thus increase comprehension scores.  I looked at a technology tool that students had never used in class before called Istation. This is a bilingual online program that offers a variety of digital stories embed with games and quizzes. As a pre-test I had students read one English book and one Spanish book at the same reading level of 3.3 and take an Accelerated Reader quiz after each book. Then Istation was used in English for one week and in Spanish for the second week during reading time, for a total 2 weeks. For those two weeks students did not use their anthology text books nor did they take their regular comprehension tests from the anthology. Once the two weeks of using I-station was done students read a different English and Spanish book and took an Accelerated Reader quiz for each book. This data was collected and was used as the posttest. After comparing my pre and post tests, results showed that in English post test, students scored very similar to their pre test scores. However in Spanish students posttest were significantly lower than their Spanish pretest.

​Please checkout the blogs I have created throughout my year with Touro. Just click on the word blogs. ​
Click on the 90 second video to learn more about my project
Round 1 only Isatation
Round 2 multimodal strategy with technology
Round 2
In my second round I decided to modify my driving question to incorporate multi-modal strategies using GLAD and different technology strategies to increase reading comprehension. Students worked on two units using GLAD and technology strategies for a 6 week period.
For the first unit, students worked on the Cesar Chavez unit for 3 weeks. In the first week I did a Spanish narrative input using the book called “Cosechando  Esperanza” by Kathleen Krull.  I also used “edpuzzle” where students watched a video in English on Cesar Chavez's biography and answer comprehension questions throughout the video. The second week I did a Cesar Chavez pictorial in English using OCDE Project GLAD material. The third week students worked on their Cesar Chavez handwritten biography in English. In addition to the handwritten biography students had to tell his biography using a digital storyboard, on storyboardthat.com.     
The second unit students worked on was the animal unit. The first week I used the “Leopardo de la Nieve” pictorial in Spanish. Students then had to pick an animal of their own they could research about using the internet as well as books from the library. Students used the “Leopardo de la Nieve” pictorial as a reference as to what they needed to find out about their own animal. The second week students wrote their animal reports in Spanish. In the third week students presented their reports in Spanish in front of the class. In addition, students had to make a google slide presentation of their animal report in their language of choice.