Two-Way Bilingual Language Arts Portfolio.

Several California Title VII-funded Developmental Bilingual Education (DBE) programs have worked together to produce a portfolio for language arts. The portfolio includes collections of student work as well as authentic assessment materials for oral language, written language, reading, and literacy questionnaires for parents and students. This portfolio will be presented, along with the rationale for its development and its usefulness for teachers, parents, administrators, and evaluators. “PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC).” 2 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Oft of Educational Research and improvement ED CATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) his document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it Minor changes nave been made to improve reproduction Quality Points of weve or opinions stated ,rt this clocu . ment do not necessarily represent official OERI position of policy ) 13 ‘; it u I. Purpose of the Portfolio The Language Arts Portfolio, entitled Two-Way Immersion Portfolio Assessment was developed to provide teachers, administrators, parents and others a more indepth understanding of each student’s level of language arts development in English and the target language, or non-English language (i.e., Spanish or Portuguese). Two-way bilingual/immersion education is the marriage of bilingual education for linguistic minority children and immersion education for linguistic majority children. Thus, instruction is provided to native speakers of two languages using both languages; one of the languages is a second language for each group of students. H. Rationale and Utility for the Portfolio Two major reasons prompted the development of the portfolio. Both reasons emanated from evaluation-related results. Teachers and program directors of the Two-Way Bilingual Immersion (Developmental Bilingual Education) programs felt that traditional standardized achievement tests, particularly the reading subtest, underestimated the students’ language arts progress and achievement in the two languages. Thus, the teachers and program directors wanted to collect evidence that would substantiate their observations that the students were making substantial progress in their development of language arts in both Spanish or Portuguese and English. In addition, teachers felt that this information would be particularly useful for their own understanding of each student’s level of language arts development in the two languages and that this information would be beneficial in discussions with parents as well. Thus, the portfolio was developed to provide additional information to teachers and parents as well as to document language arts growth in students for administrators and project-related reports. Not all of the information in the portfolio will be utilized for the project-related evaluation reports. There is a tremendous amount of information that is being collected. During this pilot year, the evaluator will determine what information will be most useful for reporting purposes. As much portfolio data as is beneficial will be used to supplement discussion of language arts development that typically focuses on achievement test scores in reading. Thus, the portfolios should provide a much more comprehensive understanding of the students’ language arts development in both English and the target language (Spanish or Portuguese). K. Lindholm, AERA 1993 Bilingual Language Arts Portfolio 2 3 111. Portfolio Development The Two-Way Bilingual Language Arts Portfolio was developed by teachers and project directors from Title VII funded Developmental Bilingual Education programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles County Office of Education (ABC Unified School District and Long Beach Unified School District), and Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. Parts of the portfolio were adapted from the current portfolios and/or work of Dr. Barbara Flores, Elena Castro, Erminda Garcia, and ABC Unified School District. The first stage of the portfolio development necessitated identifying what language arts information should be gathered. Subsequent phases involved bringing teachers together to ascertain what information they wanted to collect and what information they felt they could realistically gather and to provide feedback on the forms that were under development. The portfolio is currently being pilot tested. This academic year (1992-93) is the first year of its implementation. IV. Timeline for Data Collection A timeline is included that indicates what information should be collected at which time periods. Two reasons for the timeline are that the information can be spaced out so that teachers do not have too much data to gather at any one time and so that information is collected across all projects at the same time to enable project-wide consistency in data collection. All project sites are adhering to the timeline. However, some projects decided not to collect all of the information or to gather all data at every time period.