Bilingual Literacy at Camberwell PS

Literacy at CPS - then Planning, delivery and assessment of Literacy was very separate - French teachers planned with French teachers and English teachers planned with English teachers. Only Integrated Unit planning was done together – even within the IU, the tasks would be separate for English and French. As the French level of writing and reading was significantly lower than the English level, it was difficult to see how working together could happen.

Literacy at CPS - now The reading and writing levels of our students is more comparable between French and English. French teachers and aides have had training in Early Years Literacy program, guided and shared reading and other teaching strategies used in English classrooms. The implementation of Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) through the ALPOS project has led French and English teams to be working together. Teachers and students create rubrics together

The beginning… ‘Why are you teaching procedural texts in the French classroom, while I am teaching persuasive in the English room?’ ‘Why are our expectations for class behaviour, presentation of work and assessment different?’ ‘We know a lot of our students have similar needs in both the French and English classrooms.’ We began with creating joint classroom expectations at the start of the year. We had ‘protocol folders’ in each classroom that had documents for students to refer to. These could be found in both classrooms. In order to gain their ‘pen licence’ students were required to have correct handwriting in both the French and English classrooms (this had traditionally only been assessed in the English classroom and the students attitudes towards their work in French was lacking!)

Writing… The idea of mirroring the writing literacy program between French and English was the beginning. The French teacher ‘piggy backed’ what I was teaching the class about the writing text type by teaching the same skills a week later in the French classroom. This allowed students to focus on vocab and enhancing the skills they had already gained in the English classroom, and produce higher quality work in the French classroom. The feedback from students indicated that they felt more confident writing in French when they had covered the text type in English at the same time. Currently our text type is narrative in the form of picture fiction. As a bilingual task students created a character that would feature in two picture fiction narratives. They had to describe their character in French (allowing for teaching around adjectives) and English. They are now currently drafting a story in the English classroom featuring this character and will in the coming weeks write another story featuring the same character but different setting and plot in the French classroom. The rubric is the same for both tasks.

Rubric… Students used the same rubric in the French classroom for their writing task, as they used in the English classroom. This meant that the expectations and criteria were consistent across the classes.

Integrated Unit… To get the rest of our level team on board, a bilingual integrated unit project was established. Instead of the project being done in English and some of the content being touched on in the French classroom, we asked the students to present their project in both French and English. The students had the option of HOW to present their project (Powerpoint, poster, video, podcast, letter, etc) This was a great success and we have continued to use the bilingual approach to our IU projects since. Implementing a bilingual approach to our Integrated unit meant that French and English teachers were required to work closely together to ensure the content was being taught across both languages and that students were being given ‘project time’ with both teachers or even, where possible having doors open between classrooms so both classes and teachers are working on their bilingual projects at the same time.

Rubric… The IU rubric was created with French and English criteria. Students were required to present their project in front of both teachers at once, and answered questions in both French and English. The first Bilingual rubric we created specified that students should have at least three ‘pieces of information’ in their project in French. They now complete their projects half in French half in English as a standard expectation. Students are also moving away from from finding their information in English then translating it to French, to researching in French and paraphrasing. This is a huge step!

Where to now? Working in PLTs we have established a spelling differentiation program which allows students from across level 3 to work on their spelling strategies at their own level. This was planned together so that each teacher is aware of what the others are teaching in both French and English. We found that the majority of students had similar needs in terms of spelling goals in both French and English. We hope to use a similar model with other areas of literacy.