This study examined 94 bilingual and emergent bilingual 10th grade students' perspectives on multimodal composing for academic purposes in their English Language Arts class. A social semiotics theoretical framework was employed to understand students' views of the affordances and constraints when composing three digital multimodal projects--a…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepares an annual report on graduates and dropouts in Texas public secondary schools. This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate, longitudinal graduation and dropout rates, and state attrition rates. In addition to statewide statistics, the report provides historical information about dropout…

Technology continually changes day-to-day interactions, and emergent bilingual learners often multitask, using several digital tools, at times simultaneously, to communicate and learn. Students may text, post on social media, and listen to music as they complete their work. Studies have examined the affordances of technology for language learning,…

High school students labeled as English learners, referred to in this article as emergent bilinguals, participated in a mixed-methods study of their social and emotional well-being. Relationships with school personnel, peer relations, and involvement in support activities were connected to well-being while experiences of microaggressions from…

This paper examines how high-stakes, standardized testing shapes language and literacy instruction for emergent bilingual students in a public high school on the U.S./Mexico border. Drawing from discourses of citizenship education and language and literacy theory and scholarship, this paper finds state-mandated exit exams overwhelming guide…

Background: South Africa's "Language-in-Education Policy" (LiEP) provides for bi/multilingual education, but schools are only supported to choose monolingual English language policies from Grade 4 and ignore the learners' home language or languages as resources for learning. Many teachers translanguage orally, using the learners' home…

The purpose of this study was to better understand the influence of educators' attention to identity construction as tenth grade Emergent Bilinguals and native English-speaking students develop mathematical, social, and epistemological empowerment in a mathematics classroom. I incorporated a framework detailing critical consciousness as a mediator…

During the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years at a public high school in El Paso, Texas the author developed and led an after-school arts-based literacy class. This arts-based literacy class was part of the design of a larger ethnographic study spanning the same timeframe that examined how Texas' high-stakes accountability policies shaped…

Transition planning is particularly important for dually identified English learners with disabilities, who frequently face additional challenges to postsecondary education success. This study examined postschool expectations, transition planning experiences, and supports of a nationally representative sample of English learners with disabilities,…

One of the key aspects to learning a language is building good vocabulary knowledge. However, building vocabulary is considered to be as hard a process as developing the language itself in the long term. In second language acquisition (SLA), the larger vocabulary size has been connected to intelligence and as a major determinant of successful…

The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) serves a diverse population of English Learners (ELs) with different ethnic backgrounds, cultural identities, and languages spoken. SDP's population of ELs has grown significantly, from about 12,000 in 2014-15 to nearly 20,000 in 2022-23, an increase of 66%. This community-informed study focuses on English…

Public schools in the U.S. today are educating more students from language and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds and from lower socioeconomic groups. Schools, however, have a long history of providing inequitable educational opportunities that disadvantage low income students and students of color who are increasingly segregated in under-funded…

This paper draws on qualitative research that examines the language practices and learning experiences of ten adolescent multilingual immigrant and refugee English Learners (ELs) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Specific questions addressed include: How do these students capitalize on home languages as they engage in linguistic…

The present study takes an unconventional look at the challenges of bilingualism. High school students' level of the native Kalmyk language is viewed in connection to creative musical abilities (instrumental, vocal, choreographic) in the field of Kalmyk folk musical art. The vector of research is determined by the revitalization of the native…

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students' writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences…