Bilingual Education 2020: Solid accomplishments, but we can do better.

Take time to listen to this wonderful presentation by renowned bilingual education scholar, Dr. Stephen Krashen, whose presentation is on what the research says on how children learn a language.  He underscores the importance of "comprehensible input," meaning that students, with scaffolding like sharing key terms, read interesting, compelling stories. 



Children love stories.  Adults, too.  We're wired in this way.  So pleasure reading in the target language is the way to go.  Fiction, rather than non-fiction, tends to fall into this category of "pleasure reading" that according to the research, correlates with advanced reading abilities later in life.



School often doesn't depart from these assumptions, unfortunately.  But they could.  At least in this moment of quarantine, we, as parents and grandparents, can assume this more sophisticated approach to language learning.



-Angela Valenzuela