August 20, 2026

Thursday Edition

Empowering DLI educators with best practices, relevant research, classroom tips, and fun ideas that will inspire you into, through and beyond your teaching week.

OUR NORTH STAR

Our Craft

STUDENT TALK

Learning how to speak a new language is one of the cornerstones of dual language bilingual education. It is part of our first pillar, bilingualism and biliteracy, and should therefore be given careful consideration. Since translanguaging entered the dual language immersion space, how and when students and teachers use the target language has been the topic of great debate.

Student Talk

When a beginning learner of the target language begins in a dual language immersion program, their dominant language is English. For example, when a student is a new learner of Spanish, they will develop receptive skills first, and slowly begin to produce or speak the language. During that time period, that student will inevitably express ideas mostly in English. We do not want to silence students in this early period when their new language is beginning to develop, however, we also must encourage students to use the words they are learning in their new language from the time they start. When I taught kindergarten, we had a morning greeting where we said 'hola' to each other. Sometimes that was the only word my Spanish learners students could say and that was ok. They were on the road to bilingualism and I encouraged students to use the words we were learning, but they were NEVER silenced for not being able to express themselves in fluently in Spanish.

Expectations Must Match Proficiency Level

Our expectations must match proficiency level. New learners of the target language in TK, K or 1st grade will express themselves primarily in English because they don't have the words in their new language. Once students move into higher grades, we need to ask ourselves are students not using the target language because they can't or because they won't. In order for students to continue to develop speaking skills, they must practice speaking the language.

One Road to Speaking Proficiency

The road to high levels of speaking proficiency is SPEAKING. There is no other path. We must provide oral language opportunities throughout the instructional day and expect students to use the language. Will students code-switch? Most likely and that's ok. We are not going to police language use, but we are going to notice how our students are languaging. We are going to notice what they need in order to plan oral language opportunities that will improve their speaking skills.

NEXT WEEK: TEACHER TALK & MORE ON TRANSLANGUAGING

QUESTIONS DRIVE PARTICIPATION

Last week I shared about using morning question to engage students in talk. The idea is students arrive, settle in and immediately engage in a conversation with their peers around the morning question. Click HERE for last weeks newsletter. A morning question invites all students to participate.

Focus on High Frequency Verbs

I started the day with my kindergarteners with questions Instead of focusing on high frequency words, I focused on high frequency VERBS and high frequency PHRASES. A typical high frequency word in Spanish at the beginning of the year is Yo. Instead of spending a week teaching Yo by itself, pair it with a verb such as Yo tengo. By focusing on high frequency verbs and phrases students began to use their speaking skills in Spanish from the first week of school.

Stretch Students Language Ability

Focus on posing questions that will stretch their language ability. If you are doing a unit on weather, you could pose the question ¿Qué prefieres, un día soleado o un día nublado? y ¿Por qué? This connects the conversation to what they are learning while having a casual conversation about their preference.

Progress Not Perfection

Students need to know that they can make mistakes. They need to know that they can use language resources in all their languages to express their ideas, however they also need to know that they're working towards being able to express themselves fluently in each instructional language. At the end of the day the goal is for students to speak in both instructional languages fluently and with confidence.

INTERACTIVE READ ALOUD

The teacher Read Aloud is an essential component of the DLI instructional day. Reading Aloud provides students a model of a fluent reader, an opportunity to connect to a story as well as an opportunity to talk.