ABSTRACT
This chapter provides biology teachers with a digital educational tool containing multiple scaffolds (e.g., images, text, animations) to enhance the bilingual teaching and learning of cell division. It is framed within the interactive learning strategy, posing challenges based on the ability to identify the stages of mitosis and meiosis in images. Through self-assessment and autonomous learning, students could acquire a more realistic and rigorous cell division’s model in English and Spanish. The resource design principles are based on both the students’ learning difficulties and the requirements expressed by the teachers participating in this study. To detect them, 38 tenth grade learners were asked to identify several mitotic and meiotic stages in micrographs and diagrams, justifying their answers. Thirty-five teachers were also surveyed about their experiences and perceptions of bilingual teaching of cell division. The responses from both groups pointed to the need to create error-free resources that address the learners’ communicative difficulties in the framework of bilingual education. In particular, the tool presented in this chapter uses the universal language of micrographs as a scaffold to improve learners’ visual, scientific, and linguistic literacy.
