Within today's multilingual communities, a growing percentage of students are emergent bilinguals--bringing to school a home language other than English and thus poised to become bilingual as they acquire the new language. As a result, school leaders need to have essential background knowledge and a wealth of strategies at their fingertips to…

This paper explores how Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (CSSFL), a theoretical and pedagogical approach, facilitates emergent bilingual (EB) students' engagement in explicit, equitable literacy practices within the unique context of a middle school intensive reading classroom. This design-based research (DBR) study documents…

In light of linguistic diversity within many U.S. classrooms, it has become paramount that technology and engineering teachers provide accessible yet rigorous instruction that supports students' language development. One of the best ways to support emergent bilingual students is to provide rich and robust vocabulary instruction in English, while…

Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including…

The case of two middle school science teachers engaged in a long-term professional learning project is used to complicate the story of teacher change and agency and the presumed relationships between teacher knowledge and practice. Becky and Kelly were highly participatory in all aspects of a multi-year professional learning project, yet, when…

This study reviews orientations toward educating multilingual students with a focus on recent policies and initiatives in California. It includes data and findings from a study investigating the linguistic and cultural resources that English learners bring to school as funds of identity. The research site was a public elementary school in an urban…

Planned instructional scaffolding--the temporary use of materials, routines and structures to support students in doing challenging academic work--is a critical component of English-language reading instruction with emergent bilinguals (students formally categorized as English Language Learners). Although scholars describe how scaffolds…

Despite evidence that youths' literacy practices and identities are important contributors to literacy learning, studies of secondary literacy instruction often focus on understanding classroom storylines from the perspectives of teachers and schools. The purpose of this case study was to examine how one youth, Leo, shaped the storyline of his…

Implementing challenging mathematics tasks with multilingual students who are not yet fluent in the instructional language is difficult for monolingual teachers because of the linguistic and cultural differences between the teacher and students. In this study, we examined how monolingual preservice teachers set up cognitively demanding mathematics…

Bilingual and multilingual speakers mix two or more languages for communication, gaining information and sense-making in varieties of contexts. How do bilinguals mix languages and what does the mixing afford for their learning and participation? This study examines these questions, focusing on Korean-English bilingual youths in a community-based…

Using visuals is a well-known strategy to teach emergent bilinguals (EBs). This study examined how preservice teachers (PSTs) implemented visuals to help EBs understand mathematical problems and how an innovative intervention cultivated PSTs' capability of using visuals for EBs. Four middle school mathematics PSTs were engaged in a field…

Many existing assessments for deciding the potential special education needs of emergent bilingual youth are either normed on monolingual students or normed on bilingual students through monolingual data collection (Hamayan, Marler, Sánchez-López, & Damico, 2013; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015; Perkins, 2005). To address this issue, we…

This nonexperimental study examined academic performance profiles and contributions of language-specific and metacognitive skills to science reading comprehension of Grade 7 students of varied English proficiency. The sample included 204 regular education students, most of whom were English learners (ELs; 35 non-ELs, 86 current ELs, and 83 former…

Purpose: We examined the association between language experience and elementary students' eligibility for special education in Massachusetts. Method: A secondary descriptive data analysis was conducted on the anonymized demographic data obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Third, 4th, and 5th grade…

This reflexive vignette reveals the emotional risks of ethnographic work by a Chicano researcher, educator, and advocate doing work in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, caught at the intersection of vulnerable Latina/o youth and their possible futures. Data in this creative piece are derived from field notes of one classroom observation from an…