As teacher educators on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, our goal is to (re)conceptualize a pedagogical approach for bilingual teacher development informed by teacher education research in the borderlands and anchored in the myriad of historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic realities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands -- a border pedagogy.…

Purpose: Best practices recommend promoting the use of the home language and allowing caregivers to choose the language(s) that they want to use with their child who is deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We examined whether Spanish-speaking caregivers of children who are DHH receive professional recommendations on oral bilingualism that follow best…

Children continuously engage in developing theories about how the world works as they inquire through play and interactions with others. In this study, we investigated children's in-process thinking in the form of working theories about language as they participated in engagements around dual language picturebooks in an afterschool club. Our…

Early oral language development lays an essential foundation for academic and socioemotional competencies but is vulnerable to the impact of family stress. Despite robust evidence that family stress affects early oral language development in monolingual samples, little is known about whether the family stress processes affecting language…

A great amount of sociolinguistic research in contact situations has centered on phonological and morphosyntactic variables, but studies of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations are scarce and incipient. Discourse-pragmatic features are syntactically optional elements that are used to guide, structure, or express a stance towards…

This article examines the language ideologies of the lead teacher and of five Mexican mothers of Spanish-speaking, emergent bilingual children in a Head Start program in Arizona. Data from semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant-observation field notes were analyzed using the interrelated concepts of language ideologies…

As critical approaches to Heritage Language (HL) instruction are increasingly more widespread, it is now more pertinent than ever to conduct research on Spanish linguistic variation that reveals systematicity and refutes hegemonic notions of 'incorrectness'. This variationist study examines the use and distribution of the Preterite and Imperfect…

Children learn the words of their native language(s) from interactions with their caregivers. Although previous research has found that the language children hear during those interactions predicts vocabulary outcomes, few studies have investigated how qualitative features of social interactions work together to affect children's vocabulary…

This study investigates how fluent second-language (L2) learners of English produce and perceive the /ae/-/?/ vowel contrast of Southwestern American English. Two learner groups are examined: (1) early, proficient English speakers who were raised by Spanish-speaking families but who became dominant in English during childhood and, as adults, lack…

This qualitative study explored multimodal biliteracy found in the Arizona-Sonora borderland, a region thriving with linguistic and cultural diversity despite having an English-only policy. According to Reyes (2012) biliteracy is to think, speak, read, and write in two or more languages, and there are various modes for reading and writing in the…

This paper explores how two dual language preschool teachers demonstrated critical consciousness in their dual language education (DLE) classroom in Arizona. DLE has historically been grounded in equity for language minoritized students and promises to support students' bilingualism, biliteracy, sociocultural competence, and academic achievement.…

Research Findings: We examined the amount of preschool lead/assistant teachers' English/Spanish language use and relations between quality of teacher-child interactions, and Dual Language Learners' (DLLs) English/Spanish bilingual vocabulary in 31 English-medium Head Start classrooms. Measures in this study included (a) children's conceptual…

Using data from Arizona, United States, the present study seeks to further our understanding of lone other language items (LOLIs) in bilingual discourse and their status as either borrowings or codeswitches by measuring the degree of incorporation that can indicate a LOLI's status as a borrowing or codeswitching. To accomplish this aim, nouns from…

In spring 2019, without controversy or fanfare and without violating the voter mandate of Proposition 203, emergent bilinguals in Arizona were once again granted unrestricted access to dual language bilingual education after nearly 20 years. The policy change was accomplished through a seemingly small piece of legislation that reduced the daily…

Federal and Arizona educational policies challenge U.S.-Mexico border educators to meet the diverse needs of bilingual, bicultural students while also being required to use instructional pedagogies that offer monolingual and monocultural schooling experiences. Ethnographic research captures American schooling experiences of Latino…