Second Language Instruction Central California (SLICC)
SLICC is based at California State University, Bakersfield. It offers professional development designed around teaching through imaginative standards-based lessons and activities that enhance student learning and involvement, including aspects of reading, writing, sequencing, and verbal sharing. Participating teachers are trained to engage in, develop and implement classroom activities to enhance student proficiency, the learning needs of students, reading and writing strategies, standards-based instructional sequences, assessment strategies, and classroom management techniques. The participants spend time practicing multiple approaches to learning and techniques for keeping classroom instruction in the target language for maximum student language acquisition.
Description of Core Programs:
There are two sites at which we offer professional development in Communication Based Instruction through a SLICC workshop series for teachers of second languages (Spanish, French, English, etc.) from kindergarten through high school. Region 8 includes Kern County and is held in Bakersfield; Region 7 covers multiple counties including Tulare, Kings, and Fresno and is hosted by the Tulare Office of Education in Visalia.
The Kern County site offers its professional development yearly in multiple levels.
Foundation Level One focuses on methods of presenting new material in comprehensible ways while staying in the target language in the classroom, questioning techniques which the teacher may use to determine the level of students’ comprehension, types of communication activities that can be practiced by the students for maximizing verbal abilities, and classroom management strategies for staying in control while students are participating in the various activities.
Foundation Level Two reviews those techniques and strategies presented in level one and adds the use of technology for enhancing and varying both the presentations and the activities.
Leadership Development is for those participants who, after two years, show exemplary pedagogical skills and interest in becoming part of the SLICC team. They aid the veteran team members in the planning and execution of the workshops.
Partnership Showcase:
In the spring of 2008 the SLICC team members presented two days of a professional development inservice for the Bakersfield City Schools. Because of the success of this presentation, participating administrators of Evergreen Elementary School invited the team to do a more extensive four-Saturday series for their teachers. Two team members took up the challenge. For two Saturdays Tina Dalton concentrated on the use of target language techniques and activities required to aid teachers of grades 4-6 in presenting materials in a comprehensive way to students new to the English language.
Vicky Bartley geared her two sessions to methods of presenting the elementary (grades k-3) curriculum in a comprehensible way while achieving the state and district standards and while staying in the target language. Both presenters received high ratings from those who attended the series.
