This article using a persuasive writing example to showcase how digital technologies can be used to support all students, especially emerging bilingual learners, as they learn genre-specific norms for writing.

Academic discussion can create space for student voice and active negotiation of text meaning in the classroom. However, teachers hoping to use academic discussion may find it difficult to draw learners into these discussions if students do not feel a sense of agency--a particular concern for multilingual students or those designated as having…

Writing in school has long been disconnected and inauthentic to multilingual learners due to its monolingual, language-focused, and standardized features. Although more and more researchers have called for and explored newer asset-based writing pedagogies, such as digital multimodal writing, to support diverse learners in response to emerging…

The author describes a heritage language poetry translation project taught in a third- and fourth-grade classroom with both multilingual and monolingual students. Students interviewed family members about their heritage languages, worked with family and community members to choose and analyze a poem in their heritage language, identified essential…

Situated in sociocultural theories of language and literacy, the authors describe an approach to teaching nonfiction text to emergent bilinguals (EBs) through the strategic use of a reading protocol. The protocol focuses on "where" reading text is positioned in a learning sequence and "how" students engage with these texts.…

Changes in the U.S. demographics over the past few decades reflect the growing diversity in American classrooms as more students come to school speaking, reading, or writing two or more languages. By building on students' full repertoire of linguistic and cultural resources, educators have the potential to transform literacy instruction in…

Since many bilingual students do not have access to bilingual education, this article illustrates how to collaborate with families and create instructional innovations to support biliteracy for all young bilinguals. The authors implemented a Biliteracy Jumpstart for 6 weeks at the beginning of school year culminating in Family Biliteracy Day with…

In here, I provide a description of a multiliteracies elementary classroom's ecology according to how an elementary bilingual teacher and bilingual language learners in her classroom interact and engage with traditional (linguistic) and alternative (multimodal) texts in language arts. This multiliteracies classroom ecology shows their dynamic…

Emergent bilingual children express their ideas in written language through meaningful marks on a page by leveraging their oral language and print focused skills from home and school languages. Because writing is a complex task, particularly for children learning more than one language, teachers must make decisions about how they guide children…

Educators consider guided reading one of the most powerful instructional tools in a reading teacher's arsenal. Yet, when it comes to emergent bilinguals in both monolingual English and bilingual settings, guided reading is implemented monolingually, or in one language at a time. As the field of reading instruction has moved toward a more…

Text-related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use--a class set of…

We begin this article with a brief look at opportunities to learn for the nation's growing numbers of Emerging Bilingual children. We briefly present the research literature that supports the use of children's languages other in English (LOTEs) in literacy instruction whether the children are participating in bilingual/dual language programs or…

Multilingual students arrive in classrooms with rich language knowledge and funds of knowledge. Educators must recognize that emergent bilinguals speak multiple languages. They have one unitary language system; their language is bilingualism. Whether in a monolingual classroom setting or a multilingual setting, when working with emergent…

With the unprecedented increase of forced displacement in recent years, there has been a growing concern with how children from migrant and refugee backgrounds adjust to resettlement in Western schools. Adopting a sociocultural approach to science education, the authors explore how scientific concepts related to the water cycle and practices such…

This article illustrates how two fourth-grade bilingual teachers transformed their writing instruction for bi/multilingual learners by integrating a functional approach to language and literacy teaching and learning. The authors use a systemic functional linguistics genre pedagogy to explore and elucidate the teachers' innovative instructional…