Post 3.
What I understand is not always what I am explaining.
On a conference call with my second chair, she explained that while I understand the issues with our Latino/Emergent Bilingual students in mainstream classrooms, I had to break it down on my prospectus. In doing so, my readers will understand what I am talking about. One of the first things I share with my creative writing students is for them to understand and think of their audience while brainstorming their stories. I have been failing to recognize my audience.
I thought that my audience was composed of PhD holders, scholars who have gone through the same process I am going through. Hence, I was writing using my scholarly voice to explain my research problem. I did not realize that my audience, though scholarly, will not always have a PhD, and most importantly, will not always have an background in education. This means they will not always be familiar with the terms used within the bilingual education community. I am in essence writing just as if I am addressing only the teachers in bilingual/dual education programs. Precisely an issue I want to address with my research: Teachers with no bilingual/dual education background are still expected to contribute to the education of English language learners (ELLs), however, we may not be preparing them with the tools to do so successfully. We need to include them in our audiences as well.
My research problem is actually divided into two issues: The first issue I want to explore is the perspective of knowledge of early childhood education teachers on English language learners (ELLs) becoming literate in English and Spanish (biliteracy knowledge). The second one is to explore early childhood education teacher’s perspective of self-efficacy in biliteracy (How confident they feel in that they have sufficient knowledge on biliteracy to be able to contribute to their students’ process of becoming bilingual). Participants of this study will be early childhood education teachers who have English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms but are not teaching within a bilingual/dual language program. My challenge is to put these three sentences into one concise one, while not generalizing on terms and also while being specific enough to be understood by anybody in the community. Time keeps running!
The Process... 