As a result of a university partnership, elementary students at two midwest Catholic elementary schools have been provided with exploratory world language instruction (FLEX) from pre-service teachers. To investigate students' attitudes and learning of Spanish, researchers interviewed second and fourth graders. The students' parents and pre-service…

A qualitative think-aloud study, informed by social literacies and holistic bilingual perspectives, was conducted to examine how six emergent bilingual, Mexican American, fourth graders approached, interacted with, and comprehended narrative and expository texts in Spanish and English. The children had strong Spanish reading test scores, but…

In this article, we describe how students were invited to write and publicly read their "momentos de cambio" (moments of change) stories--memoirs in which they recount moments of significant change, both joyful and traumatic, in their lives. Drawing from elements of Latino critical theory, we conceptualize these stories in part as…

This study examines the effects of four types of reading comprehension questions--immediate, non-immediate, summary, and unanswerable questions--that linguistically diverse and predominantly low-income parents asked their fourth graders on children's text retellings. One-hundred-twenty (N = 120) parent and child dyads participated in a home visit…

The article analyzes meaning-making practices in a two-way dual-language (TWDL) program on the U.S.-Mexico border among "transfronterizo" and Mexican-origin youth. In the article, we show that emergent bilingual learners and their teacher participate in activities that mediate understanding of science content knowledge. We show how the…

This article explores how a primary school teacher utilized the frameworks of dynamic assessment (DA) and the instructional conversation (IC) within a Spanish as a foreign language classroom. DA was used to construct zones of proximal development with individuals in the classroom context. A menu of pre-scripted assisting prompts, used to respond…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) in the United States has increased dramatically. Given this increase it is vital for teacher education programs at the pre-service level and professional learning programs at eh in-service level to address the needs of ELLs. This article presents a teacher preparation model--"a language-based…

Two-way immersion (TWI) programs teach English Learners (ELs) and native English speakers in the same classroom using both languages in an immersion approach. Studies suggest that TWI programs result in greater student integration, thus providing a promising alternative for Spanish speaking ELs, who are frequently concentrated in high poverty,…

This study examines resilient and nonresilient characteristics in mathematics among Hispanic students in a major metropolitan city located in the south central region of the United States. The study examined data from semistructure interviews of 118 resilient and nonresilient English language learners (ELLs) in 4th and 5th grade. The interviews…