Arousing and sustaining young students' curiosity within school environments is an important concern in contemporary education. Our study investigated the triggers of curiosity in elementary classrooms centered around social constructivist discourse, specifically knowledge-building. To this end, we performed longitudinal network analysis on 4166…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bilingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. Research suggests this is harmful for students, but little empirical work has examined how teachers in English-dominant schools can support students' biliteracy. To address this problem, this qualitative…

Emergent bi/multilingual children have historically been afforded few opportunities to engage dialogically with peers and teachers in posing authentic questions and co-constructing interpretations of texts as their reading instruction has traditionally been skills driven. Additionally, more recent scholarship has identified increased opportunities…

The purpose of this study was to understand how the social and cultural practices of classroom literacy instruction afforded students opportunities to make meaning with texts. Research was conducted from a sociocultural perspective that focused on students as participants in social learning, in a context of interactive relations. This study was…

This paper defines the notion of "dialogic local space" and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local…

This article explores how a second-grade teacher's strategic talk moves supported her multilingual students, many of whom were designated as English Learners (ELs), to engage with complex content using purposeful, authentic communication during a 14-week read-aloud unit focused on historical changemakers. Collaborative coding of whole-class and…

In theory, engaging students in discussion helps them learn how to understand and think critically about texts. Researchers have sought to identify effective features of teacher-led text-based discussions by designing specific discussion-group programs and investigating their influence on students' comprehension in upper elementary classrooms.…

This article shows how various dialogic discourse strategies were used in read-alouds of English science information books in a 2nd-grade bilingual classroom. Using a variety of discursive strategies, Ibett encouraged her Spanish-speaking students to provide explanations and reasoning related to science ideas. Similarly, she used intertextual…

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom…

Two-way bilingual immersion education, offered in a fast-growing number of primary schools in the United States, provides primary language maintenance to minority language speakers while simultaneously offering an enrichment "foreign" language immersion experience to English-speaking children in the same classroom, generally with the same teacher.…

This teacher research inquiry is a critical discourse analysis of second grade classroom talk about racial identity and dialect difference within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy. Participants in the study, which took place in an urban public district in a Midwestern United States city, included ten African American students and a…

Two-way immersion is a model for bilingual education designed to help language-minority students develop additive bilingualism while at the same time offering language-majority students a chance to learn a second language. There is a great deal of rhetoric around two-way immersion that claims these programs aim to improve overall equity among…

This article examines the effect of a teacher's cultural representations and tacit communicative style on interactive practices in the classroom. We compare two second-grade classrooms constituted predominantly by Latino immigrant children and teachers with differing cultural representations of education. Through video and acoustic analyses of…

This study examined the functions that student talk served during partner reading events in a second grade classroom. Five major themes of talk emerged from the data including organizational, disputational, word strategy, meaning making and personal talk. All of these types of talk functioned to support partner reading except for personal talk,…