ABSTRACT
As the children returned from lunch and put away their lunch bags, toys, and snacks, they chattered in Spanish and English. Sofia asked Mari, “After school will you walk home with me?” Across the room, Michael pushed Tony saying to him, “That sticker is mine, lo traje de mi casa” (I brought it from home). Tony replied, “No es mío, lo sacaste de mi desk” (No it is mine, you took it out of my desk). Ms. Gallego, a second-grade teacher, walked across the room and said:
The teacher looked up at Carla and waited about three or four seconds; Carla wiggled in her chair and repeated in Spanish:
This common everyday classroom event illustrates the use of oral language and a practice-wait time1-that evolved over the years as teachers struggled with stimulating and encouraging children, and especially second language learners, to demonstrate their understanding and to take risks speaking.As the two-way bilingual immersion teachers discussed, planned, practiced, and evaluated ways to assist children with their oral language development, some common practices were shared across the grade levels. While striving to accept children’s communicative acts, teachers tried to balance, on the one hand, “not pressuring” for oral production and, on the other, encouraging children to produce oral language, especially the second language. In the preceding example, the teacher initiated the conversation in Spanish, signaling to the children that this is Spanish time. As she began to call on individual children, she allowed enough “wait time” for the children to self-monitor the language of the communication and make switches between languages before she continued.
