Evelyn Ortiz’s infographic on Bilingual Education vs ESL Education EDDN 639 – Trends and Current Issues in Second Language Acquisition

Touro TESOL Candidate Evelyn Ortiz is a certified bilingual teacher (Spanish speaking) working in the Wyandanch school district. She has worked for more than three years as a third-grade bilingual teacher in Wyandanch. Ms. Ortiz states that: “I love working with ENL, CLD students and I pursuing my master’s in TESOL at Touro College so that I can better support my students with new strategies and methods.”

The assignment guidelines: Infographics

CAEP: Standard 1: CONTENT AND PEDAGOGICAL KNOWLEDGE 1.5 Providers ensure that completers model and apply technology standards as they design, implement
and assess learning experiences to engage students and improve learning; and enrich professional practice. CAEP

For this assignment, you will create an infographic for a specific group of learners (your audience). I highly recommend that you create your infographic for the learners that you are currently teaching, or typically teach. You will know more about this group than other groups of learners and are likely to have an easier time designing instruction for them.

Here Ms. Ortiz’s assignment submission and infographic:

Infographic Documentation

1. Identify your audience

The intended audience for this infographic are parents. In the Wyandanch school district we have both Bilingual education and ESL education. I think that it is important for parents to know the differences between the two programs so that there aren’t any misconceptions for the program expectations that their child may be enrolled in.

2. What is the learning objective(s) of the presentation

• I can identify the differences between Bilingual and ESL education.
• I can identify the instructional expectations of a Bilingual one way program versus the two-way program.
• I can identify the differences between a Push In / Pull out and ESL class period.

3. What type of infographic did you create? If your infographic falls into more than one category, please list them.

The infographic created falls into the category of educational. It can also be a compare/contrast infographic.

4. What content did you decide to include in the presentation (point form or outline is fine)?

I decided to include bullet points of sentences so that the information is short and concise.

5. What design decisions did you make in terms of: Text – font, colors, white space, and so on – I chose three different fonts: Oswald, Arvo and Advent Pro Medium. The top of the page there is white margin and then there are two colored columns, the left side is magenta and the right side is purple. The left side has font colors in yellow, white and black. The right side has font colors in light blue, white and black. The left side represents Bilingual Education and the right side represents ESL education.

Text reduction – how did you translate text into a graphic form? I took the most important points and created short and simple sentences and organized it by bullet points.

Color – The main background color is magenta and purple. The fonts are yellow, light blue, black and white.

Pictures/graphics – I chose a picture of child that is surrounded by educational images. The child looks happy and excited. The books below her say “never stop learning” on the bind. I like that there is a clock, a globe and a lightbulb in the background. The clock represents time, the globe represents diversity and the lightbulb represents innovative ideas and learning. There is also a question mark and a music symbol. The students should be curious with their learning and encouraged to ask and answer questions to gain a better understanding of academic content and the world around them. The music symbol represents harmony and music. The students can learn content through rhythm and music.

5. Reflect on the process of creating your infographic. You should be reflecting on pedagogical benefits and challenges of creating and using infographics. Maximum 250 words on this section.

The pedagogical benefits of creating and using infographics and that it can be used to summarize a topic. The infographic can be used to organize information that makes it more meaningful and comprehensible to understand. The audience is able to get the gist of a topic and learn important facts by reading an infographic. Infographics are also very colorful and can be a visual aid to comprehend a topic. Not only can an infographic be used to education, it also could be used to persuade and used for advertisement. Infographics can also be incorporated into the classroom, especially at the Middle School and High School level. I chose to give the students at the HS level during my practicum hours, an infographic to represent what they have learned about the topic, which was Selena.

Some of the challenges of using infographics is that it is sometimes difficult to compact the information into a one page infographic. In addition, creating an infographic is not difficult however, people who are not tech-savvy may find it a bit challenging to create one at first. When I assigned an infographic as an assignment I had to show the students step by step how to sign in, edit text/images and how to choose a template. The beginning stages takes a lot of patience but then it eventually gets easier to create. The activity may be challenging but the students eventually enjoyed it.

6. What did you learn relating to teaching and learning with digital content?

I learned that teaching with digital content could be appealing to the intended audience. Looking at an infographic can be more captivating than looking at a worksheet of information. An infographic can be accompanied with visuals and the most important points and or information which would not be overwhelming for ELLs.

7. When might you use this infographic with your students, parents or audience?

I might use this infographic with parents and colleagues. There are parents who believe that their student is a bilingual program that is an additive or maintenance program when indeed, it a transitional program. The priority of the program is to get the students to “test out of bilingual” program which means to get them to reach commanding. Many students who do not have phonics base in Spanish do not get the opportunity to build those skills in their native language, the goal is to start in English even though there is evidence to support the idea that teaching both may aid L2 acquisition. By the third to fifth grade, it is difficult to start teaching them sight words and phonics in their language when they have entered such a rigorous grade. The parents think that the bilingual program teaches Spanish, however,  we teach content in Spanish it is not intended to build them up from scratch like the dual language and or two-way program does.

References

YourDictionary. (2016, June 2). ESL vs. Bilingual Education. Retrieved from https://esl.yourdictionary.com/about-esl/esl-vs-bilingual-education.html.