Equitable Foundations: 
Empowering Bilingual Learners through Interdisciplinary Collaboration 

About this Project

Beginning Spring 2025...

A goal of the proposed research is to determine what instructional and assessment practices educators are currently implementing in the classroom for Spanish-English learning children in kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2. Data will be collected on: Prior background knowledge and experiences in training, considerations in lesson plan development, fidelity of academic language of instruction, integration of academic vocabulary into classroom activities and lessons, and what assessment measures are being used to gauge student achievement in the content. This will be accomplished with the administration and development of a questionnaire, teacher interviews, and classroom observations, to be developed as part of the research team in collaboration with Dr. Raúl Rojas, a professor at the University of Kansas.​

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In an overburdened U.S. educational system, it is necessary to offer evidence-based supports and services to address the needs of the educators. To address educator needs, teacher workshops will be developed to focus on cultural responsivity, language development, and classroom facilitation strategies. This will directly provide insight into the every day needs of teachers and what can be done to support them with instruction in the classroom. Instruction is akin to intervention practices in speech-language pathology. Understanding the principles of word learning (Alt et al., 2019; Meyers-Denman & Plante, 2016; Plante & Gomez, 2018), along with the gaps in accounting for language in instruction and intervention (e.g., Arizmendi et al., 2021) helps facilitate the process of implementation into the classroom.