This qualitative case study examines how one bilingual teacher draws on their critical consciousness to support immigrant students and their families. Drawing on the construct of conscientization, I argue praxis is the embodiment of critical consciousness through acts of responsiveness and actions educators enact to rewrite unjust spaces and…

This study examines how three bilingual education teachers engaged with a transitional bilingual policy while balancing the demands of monolingual high-stakes assessments in ways that contributed to advocacy on behalf of their bilingual learners. The consequences of high-stakes accountability can be exacerbated in bilingual settings, because in…

Though Cantonese has been spoken in the United States since the 1880s, very little is known about the attitudes of younger Cantonese speakers and learners and their ideas about their bi/multilingual identities. We fill this gap by reporting findings from focus group interviews with 14 fourth and fifth graders attending a Cantonese-English DLI…

As teachers and students access their linguistic and cultural repertoire to teach and learn, comprehensible input may be possible as the result of teachers' systematic efforts to connect with their students. Some evidence of this purposeful connection has been found in studies that have explored teachers' efforts to prioritize meaning making over…

This study contributes to the literature on cross-linguistic literacy relationships for English language learners, and in particular, the Spanish-influenced spelling patterns of Spanish-English bilinguals. English spelling, reading, and vocabulary assessments were administered to 220 students in four TWI programs over a three-year period, from…

As classrooms across the U.S. are becoming increasingly more multilingual and multicultural, there is a need for research that provides insight into literacy instruction that builds on students' linguistic knowledge. The qualitative study of a fourth-grade dual-language classroom examined the ways that peer mediation in Spanish and English…

Interviews with 61 fourth-grade English language learners (ELLs) and native English speakers in an English-only California school district found that compared with weaker ELL readers, ELLs who read English well expressed more confidence about their own primary-language abilities and about others' perceptions of their primary language and…