This article draws on qualitative data from a Two-Way Immersion Spanish environment classroom to explore how African American students lived experiences, language, and cultural practices are regulated and/or constrained. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Bahktin's heteroglossia and raciolinguistics, the authors present two distinct…

Numerous complexities undergird how parents support the bilingual development of their young learners, especially in a predominantly monolingual-centric society. In this article, we highlight belief practices which informed parents' decision-making processes in supporting their children, who were enrolled in a diverse dual language immersion…

This paper draws from a broader research project and reports on a qualitative case study that investigated instructional practices in grades 3-5 Two-Way Immersion (TWI) classrooms where the partner language is Spanish. Using Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the degree to…

Students' attitudes in first-grade dual language immersion (DLI) classes were compared with those of similar students in mainstream English classes. Results for the sample of 81 Latinx students indicated that for attitudes toward activities in Spanish, including reading and speaking in public and with relatives, both ELLs and non-ELLs in DLI had…

Spanish-English emergent bilingual children's range of sociocultural and linguistic knowledge have typically gone devalued in relation to school literacy curricula. This case study examines how emergent bilingual children in a second grade one-way immersion dual language classroom draw on their prior cultural-experiential knowledge and dynamic…

This qualitative study examines students' perceptions of their bilingualism in a school that is attempting to disrupt inequalities through the promotion of social justice through bilingual/bicultural education. In order to understand students' perspectives of their bilingualism in Arizona's restrictive policy context, the researchers apply…

Scholarship suggests that bilingual students' translanguaging skills -- their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies -- should be leveraged as a valuable meaning-making resource and that translanguaging pedagogies can disrupt linguistic hierarchies and the ideologies of race, class, and nationhood that constitute them.…

Two-way immersion schools are growing in popularity throughout the United States. An emerging issue is to what extent these schools are able to connect with parents from multiple communities. This article describes an effort to connect parents with the school and one another through parent language classes at a Spanish/English two-way immersion…

Two-way immersion (TWI), an approach that combines language-minority students and native English speakers in dual-language classrooms, is growing in popularity in schools of newly Latinized regions of the U.S. Using North Carolina as an example, this critical review of the literature posits that as neoliberal trends increasingly shape the…

This study reports on an innovative approach to dual-language instruction (DLI) at the secondary-education level and introduces the 2-1-L2 model. The context of the study is an American Government class at a public charter high school in Tucson, Arizona, where the 2-1-L2 model was used for nine weeks to structure daily 90-minute lessons into a…

This comparative case study (based on observational, interview, and picture-sort data) examines how teachers and students talk about cultural, linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic difference in two elementary Spanish-English two-way immersion programs. In addition, I analyze how those discourses are associated with both contextual conditions and…

Is it best to learn reading in two languages simultaneously or sequentially? We observed second- and third-grade children in two-way "dual-language learning contexts": (a) 50:50 or Simultaneous dual-language (two languages within same developmental period) and (b) 90:10 or Sequential dual-language (one language, followed gradually by the other).…

This study looks at how parents in one Spanish-English two-way immersion (TWI) charter school report their participation in various home language and literacy practices. Parent groups, based on a cluster analysis, highlight the heterogeneity of Latino parents at the school while acknowledging the commonalities as well. Four parent groups emerged…

This article reports a qualitative study of the reasons mothers chose to enroll their children in a Spanish/English two-way immersion (TWI) Program in Central Texas. Some of the mothers' reasons varied, and others overlap. All mothers expressed the belief that the program would provide their children with more opportunities, cognitive benefits,…

This qualitative study explores how parents decide to enroll their children in one-way immersion programs and how the decision is made to continue in those programs at the middle/junior high school level. A total of 131 parents responded to a survey with open-ended questions about these two decisions. Analyzed thematically and within a conceptual…