On day one the author sets up the expectation that her kindergarten Spanish language immersion classroom will be a 100% target language environment. To accomplish this, the author implements several structures, routines, and expectations to maintain the immersion environment. Getting to know the students, modeling appropriate behavior, promoting…

Drawing on life stories and classroom observations, this qualitative study examined how six bilingual maestras enacted and embodied critical biliteracies through bilanguaging love. These maestras were born, raised, and now teach bilingual education on the Texas-Mexico border. Their stories revealed contradictory and complex beliefs about literacy…

This article reports on a case study of a kindergarten, monolingual teacher and how she used Spanish, the home language of her Latino/a students who are English language learners (ELLs), in the classroom. The article focuses on how the teacher develops and uses her emerging knowledge of Spanish to scaffold students' learning, specifically when…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…

This case study examines one third-grade teacher's strategic participation in translingual practice and the ways that this participation shaped emerging bilingual students' meaningful engagements with texts. Using a transliteracies perspective, we describe instances of emergence and resonance as students and their teacher leveraged resources coded…

This article provides an in-depth exploration of the language ecologies of two classrooms attempting to implement a two-way dual language (TWDL) program and its mediating conditions. Drawing on ethnographic methods and a sociocultural understanding of language, we examined both teachers' and students' language ideologies and language practices,…

Within dual language education programs, well-structured peer interactions can facilitate the learning of language and curricular content simultaneously. Research has found that even very young bilingual students can engage in peer linguistic mediation to help less proficient classmates participate in small group work. In this article, I analyze…

This article reports findings from a study that investigated the ways in which first-grade dual language teachers drew on various resources to instructionally support academic language development among Spanish-English emergent bilingual students. Classroom observations, semistructured interviews, and document collection were conducted over a…

This study explored the role of school in promoting positive bicultural and bilingual identities through the encouragement of Spanish use in 7 Latino children in 1 kindergarten classroom in North Carolina. Using a case study approach, researchers collected data through participant observations and interviews to examine the classroom practices of…