The nature of this research study examines the relationship between text-talking and writing skills used by American Sign Language (ASL) and English speakers. When given ample opportunity to text-talk in academic settings, it is likely that students will improve their expressive communication and writing skills. The main research question asks: "What are benefits to ASL-English speakers in developing their literacy skills through the use of text-talking and story texting?" This study utilized a mixed methods design for assessing academic English text conversations and corresponding cognition and language development benefits for fifth-grade ASL-English dual language students. Academic conversations via a printed language may indeed be one of the paths towards mastery of verbal and written articulation. Emphasis is placed on assessing text discourse analysis via the use of low-tech and/or high-tech tools. Pre-and post-assessment artifacts were utilized for this study to document critical language development of selected terms and concepts. The design of the study used assessments for ASL-English dual language students that provided sufficient Language Arts achievement data. Enhancing each learner's "cognitive organizing skills" and especially "academic discourse fluencies" progressing from story acting to storytelling, to story texting, to story writing, was the focus of the research design with specific emphasis on story texting itself. The study designed learning activities and related assessment tools where students could text one another to communicate about the stories they read. While this conceptual architecture for learning has the potential to benefit all monolingual and dual language learners, for the purpose of this study, ASL and printed English were the languages of instruction and discussion. The participants of the study were comprised of twenty-three (23) fifth-grade ASL-English student speakers selected from two school sites who also completed pre- and post-assessments. Educators and student participants signed necessary consent forms. ASL-English speaking students were committed to 4 weeks, or a total of 900 minutes, of story texting sessions that lasted 45 minutes daily during school hours. Working with classroom teachers and students as co-researchers, formative and summative assessment tools were developed and collected to examine the benefits of meaningful academic text conversation. The results of this exploratory study point to positive findings with the use of story texting and academic text conversation, and significant vocabulary gains with student motivation to text. The findings indicate that ASL-English speaking fifth-grade students when provided with opportunities for story texting engagement and given the necessary tools and support can enhance their vocabulary and organization of ideas based on pre- and post-vocabulary tests and storytelling summaries over a four-week period or 900 minutes of texting practice. The design of this study could be duplicated by monolingual (e.g., English-only) and dual language schools as part of their ELA programs. The study contributes to enhanced performance of texting with multiple pedagogical uses that align with the Multimodal Discourse Model. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]