THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE USE AND ORAL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AMONG FIRST GRADE BILINGUAL TEACHERS

Bilingual education is the use of two languages, one of which is English, as media of instruction for the same group of students. The treatment and use of each language and the amounts of English and the students' native language spoken by the teacher in a bilingual classroom are of great importance to the effectiveness of a bilingual education program. The small amount of research in this area has demonstrated that English is the language most frequently used by bilingual education teachers.;The language use of eleven first grade Spanish/English bilingual teachers was analyzed for the study. The subjects, working in the same urban school district implementing a transitional bilingual education program, were asked to audio-tape Math and Social Studies lessons. The bilingual teachers' language use patterns and those of their students were then coded using the Ober Reciprocal Category System. Scores on the Language Proficiency Interview were used as measures of the teachers' oral language proficiencies.;These teachers varied greatly in the amounts of classroom time they used the students' L1 (from 0 to 97 percent). This variation in teacher language use was positively and significantly correlated with the teachers' degree of oral proficiency in the two languages of instruction.;The teachers' degrees of language proficiency were also positively and significantly correlated with their language use in all categories of verbal behavior studied except for cooling the climate of the classroom. For cooling or disciplining, teachers used a higher percentage of the students' L1 than for any other category of the observation system. The strongest correlation found in the study was between teacher language use and student language use.;This study investigated the relationship between bilingual education teachers' language use in the content areas and their language proficiencies in the L1 and L2 of the students. In addition, the study sought to establish the relationship between the teachers' language use and the students' language proficiency. Through the use of an observation system, the investigation also considered the purposes for which bilingual teachers use the L1 and L2 of the students.