This study examined the ways that 5th graders and their teachers constructed third spaces in bilingual and bicultural communities of practice in a dual-language school. Students and teachers used students' funds of knowledge to connect with and transform academic tasks and discourses and to create third spaces. In transformational third spaces,…

Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge. An intervention was designed to enhance fifth graders' academic vocabulary. The meanings of academically useful words were taught together with strategies for using information from context, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple…

Among 56 Mexican American fifth-graders participating in two-way bilingual education for 3 years or more, standardized test scores of both English-dominant and Spanish-dominant participants equalled or surpassed those of nonparticipant peers. Participants developed high levels of English literacy skills, but Spanish literacy was not as well…

A study examined a program for advancement of students' literacy to improve their reading and writing skills. Subjects were seven fifth-grade bilingual students in a growing middle class community, located in a suburb of a large midwestern city. The problem of low reading and writing scores was documented in student writing samples, teacher…