Our Language and Content Allocation Plan
Effective Dual Language programming requires the division of Common Core Standards between languages of instruction. Vida Charter School aspires to maintain as close to a 50:50 division within a student’s day as is possible.
Language and Content Allocation Plan
Guided by the scholarship of Doctors Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow, writers of Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges Between Languages, and in collaboration with Vida teachers and the Academic Excellence Committee, Vida Charter School refines and concretizes its Language and Content Allocation Plan in order to allow students adequate opportunities to learn content-specific language in both languages.
According to Beeman and Urow, the “bridge” is “the instructional moment when teachers purposefully bring the two languages together, strategically guiding bilingual learners to
- transfer the academic content they have learned in one language to the other,
- engage in contrastive analysis of the two languages, ... and
- develop ‘metalinguistic awareness’”