While considering Makoni and Pennycook's (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the…

Despite the widespread use and effectiveness of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) composite score in predicting individual differences in L2 achievement and proficiency, there has been little examination of MLAT subtests, although they have potential for illuminating components of L2 aptitude and the mechanism of prediction. Here we use…

Language ideologies are a powerful way of perpetuating inequalities, as peripheralized speakers who have internalized the lack of legitimacy attributed to them often end up reproducing censure rather than resisting it. Foregrounding the affective dimension, this paper explores the role of shame as a fulcrum articulating the individual with the…

To date, most classroom-based research into the learning of a third language (L3) in the US has examined patterns of acquisition among various groups of bilinguals. Situated mainly within the context of "Portuguese for Spanish Speakers" (PSS), studies typically group learners based on the sequence / age of onset of their main background…

Social studies teachers in language immersion settings are tasked with simultaneously teaching students social studies content while also scaffolding target language acquisition. An abundance of resources exists for teaching social studies, yet language immersion teachers often rely on collaboration with colleagues to create lessons and translate…

The purposes of this exploratory case study were twofold: (1) to understand the strengths and challenges teachers experienced when designing and delivering language interpretation tasks for use with second- and third-grade bilingual students, and (2) to ascertain what teachers perceived to be the benefits and drawbacks of the instructional…

This study investigates the cross-linguistic transfer of literacy skills in Spanish-English, Chinese-English bilingual, and English monolingual children (N = 283, 5-10 years). Research question 1 examines English literacy and asks how phonological and morpho-semantic skills contribute to word reading as a function of children's language…

Contextualized within our "Projects in Humanization" in language teacher education and part of our on-going collaborative self-study of our language teacher educator practices, we used multiple case study to examine multimodal representations of cultural and linguistic identities curated by three language teachers--Daniel, Yuseva, and…

If maximal exposure were the key to success in language learning, then adult learners at the university level would be doomed to fail. Not only are they presumably too old to learn additional languages effectively, but target language (TL) input appears to be insufficient, especially when other languages are allowed in class. Nevertheless,…

Language teachers cannot help their students develop high levels of metalinguistic knowledge and language aptitude if they themselves are found lacking in these abilities. This article reports on a study that utilised a descriptive correlational mixed-methods research design to gather data from 89 multilingual teachers of English, Chinese, French,…

Sentence frames are a frequently used form of pedagogical scaffolding in language education. Yet there is debate around whether sentence frames offer the opportunity for analysis and internalisation of authentic language use, or simply facilitate rote, 'plug and play' language use. This paper takes a linguistic ethnography approach informed by…

There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California's Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brought Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more…

The current work investigates whether language dominance predicts transfer of skills across cognitive-linguistic levels from the native language (Spanish) to the second language (English) in bilingual preschoolers. Sensitivity to cognates ("elephant/elefante" in English/Spanish) and metalinguistic awareness (MLA) have both been shown to…

Translanguaging pedagogy is gaining widespread recognition as an approach that recognizes and builds on multilingual students' linguistic resources. Research on translanguaging pedagogy has predominantly focused on classroom language practices, while studies on the design and enactment of translanguaged instruction are limited. This pilot study…

Although translanguaging has become a central issue in the multilingual education literature, research on pedagogical translanguaging practices remains underdeveloped. This article describes a study of 72 primary school students (age = 10.68) who participated in an intervention based on translanguaging pedagogies. During the intervention, the…