Los refuerzos visuales en la educación bilingüe. Experiencias en una escuela de Texas/ Visual Prompts in Bilingual Education. Experience from a School in Texas

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present three teaching activities and an evaluation proposal, in order to enhance science vocabulary learning in bilingual education contexts. It has been shown that the use of images is a natural and useful way of acquiring vocabulary in a L2 (Comesaña et al., 2009; Mayén, 2013). Indeed, technical and scientific vocabulary is often easily understood and remembered through the use of images and videos, either in regular education (Arnheim, 2013) or in a second language (Parkinson, 2012). The present study is based on the classroom observation made by a Science and Biology teacher in a special bilingual program for Mexican children in a public school in Texas (7th to 9th grade). It has been observed that the lack of knowledge in English is helpfully compensated through the use of visual prompts by the teacher. Thus, three teaching activities based on visual stimuli (word wall, video and dramatization) and an evaluation proposal based on images are presented and analyzed. Finally, the positive consequences of the use of visual stimuli in terms of students’ self- reliance, motivation and comprehension are considered. DOI: 10.1400/229696

Keywords

• Bilingualism
• education
• vision
• L2 learning
• English for Specific Purposes