This article examines Swedish civics teachers' perspectives on difficulties and opportunities that their second-language (L2) students encounter when reading textbook texts in civics. The study is based on individual semi-structured interviews with teachers in Grade 9. Civics teachers report uncertainty about identifying the source of difficulties…

The ability to communicate in different languages is increasingly essential in today's interconnected world. However, language learning outcomes can often suffer due to low engagement and participation, especially among students from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. To address this challenge, it is crucial to create a culturally…

Classrooms in Czechia are changing. What used to be a relatively ethnically homogeneous environment changed after 1989 and became much more diverse. How are children, both of Czech, as well as migrant origin, coping? What strategies do they use to negotiate their everyday lives in the classroom? We conducted an ethnographic study in two classes of…

This article examines how students from immigrant families position themselves during language brokering acts that blur the boundaries between home and school. It draws upon a community cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005), which attends to the cultivation and uptake of rich forms of capital from culturally and linguistically diverse…

This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The focus of this report is on comparisons between ninth grade newcomers and other groups of English language learners (ELLs). Analyses compare newcomers to 1) long-term ELLs who were…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…