Özet:
Pre-service teachers need opportunities to apply theory and connect to best
practices as they teach in classroom settings be it, whole or small group. For
many pre-service teachers often times their experience is limited to simply
watching instruction or working with small groups of students (Pryor & Kuhn,
2004). The student teaching experience is a critical component of the teacher
preparation program. Through the use of the English Language Learner Classroom
Observation Instrument (ELLCOI), and researcher observation the hope is that
these will aid in bringing to light the instructional activities used by pre-service
teachers during reading instruction with ELLs. This study explores how preservice bilingual teachers connect theory into practice by examining their
instruction in the following categories: Instructional Practices, Interactive
Teaching, English-Language Development, and Content Specific to Reading as
listed in The English Language Learner Classroom Observation Instrument
(ELLCOI) developed by Haager, Gersten, Baker, and Graves (2003). To capture
these instructional events video tape recordings of eight South Texas pre-service
teachers were taken during a reading language arts lesson in order to observe
instruction in high need districts’ dual language/bilingual classrooms. Data were
compiled to capture the nature and quality of instruction on key essential elements,
as well as reading instructional practices specific to the teaching/learning process
in the dual language classroom. The findings portray the results of the ELLCOI
with bilingual/ESL pre- service teachers and how they make sense of their
instructional practices as a means to instruction in one-way dual language public
school classrooms