The purpose of this qualitative action research study was to explore improving first semester training practices for graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in the Spanish program at Arizona State University's (ASU) Tempe Campus. Adding to research on TA training in higher education, a communities of practice (CoP) framework was combined with concrete…

Latinx who do not feel confident speaking Spanish are usually questioned. To fight these ideologies, Pascual and Cabo and Prada (2018) suggest new pedagogical approaches to incorporate in the curriculum the experiences of the heritage language learner (HLL). Latinx in higher education expect a culturally relevant curriculum to critically listen…

Purpose: Little research has been done exploring the nature of multilingual students who are not categorized as English language learners (ELLs) in English language arts (ELA) classes. This study about a group of multilingual girls in an ELA class led by a monolingual white teacher aims to show how, when a teacher makes space for translanguaging…

When teaching multilingual learners, it is critical for teachers to use instructional strategies that engage and nurture language and biliteracy skills. In this practice-based paper, we address how teachers can utilize translanguaging strategies to recognize and build multilingual practices while offering all learners opportunities to share their…

Context: Transnational emergent multilingual (TEM) adolescents are young people who maintain emotional, social, economic, and physical connections and networks to more than one country, often a home country and a host country. Because of their linguistic identities and varied schooling experiences, when they enroll in U.S. public schools, many are…

This article examines the culminating activity--"la cosecha" or the harvest--in a yearlong project in which teachers at a bilingual afterschool program and staff from a citywide environmental advocacy group taught students to plant, harvest, and sell produce grown at the school site. The authors show how students are socialized to become…

In this article, Jennifer Jones describes how at Pine Street School in New York City, they have dispensed with the traditional industrial model of schooling and are looking ahead to the future. The entire school was designed with optional learning environments. Jones describes innovative elements from varied seating (floor cushions, modular…

This study presents data gathered from a service-learning trip to Costa Rica designed for teacher candidates. Data include participant responses to writing prompts, field notes, and follow-up questionnaires. Results show that participants' experience with the language barrier raised their empathy toward English learners. However, participants…

Six classes at a selective liberal arts college in the Midwest, two each in chemistry, educational studies, and Spanish, used cooperative groups as part of the students' learning experiences. One class from each discipline used VIEW to formulate these cooperative groups, while those that constituted the control groups used more traditional ways of…

Many university lecturers are encouraged to implement innovative teaching tools and methodologies such as clickers in order to create an interactive learning environment and improve student learning, but its performance must be evaluated. The aim of this paper is to test empirically the impact of the use of clickers on students' learning…

Test accommodations are changes to test administration, responses, or the test itself that are offered to emergent bilingual students for standardized tests and also for classroom assessments in some states in the USA. Currently there is a lack of research examining the use of test accommodations as a pedagogical practice. This paper presents a…

This article reports on a comparative study of teacher and student perceptions on effective instructional practices in the Spanish heritage language classroom. The data were collected through an online questionnaire administered to 460 students in different Spanish courses and 9 instructors at a large university as well as focus groups. Based on…

Trauma pedagogy occupies an intriguing space within the discourse about effective teaching of culturally and linguistically diverse students, particularly in relation to preservice teacher notions of power. One set of messages received by future teachers strongly advocates for asserting authority within the classroom by taking control via strict…

Little research has been conducted in the United States to explore male motivation to learn Spanish. In response, we conducted a study to investigate gender differences in motivation to learn Spanish among students in a southeastern United States high school. Building upon Gardner's (1985) influential model of second language (L2) motivation, we…

The question going into this action research was, "How can a language teacher encourage more positive attitudes toward language learning while building a learning community?" After incorporating "I Can" statements into the curriculum, more than 100 third grade students were surveyed. The survey asked what they thought they could do in Spanish.…