Increasingly, speakers of minoritized languages around the world are becoming uprooted due to economic pressures, political forces, and environmental destabilization. As communities leave their traditional homelands, they often experience accelerated language shift. Although youth are in a critical position to further transmit their languages to…

Integrating emergent bilingual students into K-12 mainstream classrooms where linguistic support is not provided has the potential to lead to their academic underperformance. This is because the content is delivered in English, which may not be understandable to immigrant students with limited English proficiency, possibly leading to psychological…

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…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…

The Los Angeles Unified School District has undertaken an experiment in the education of immigrant students learning English. Over the 2021-2023 school years, the district opened three new high school Academies for recently-immigrated students explicitly tasked with centering their home languages to support their success in school. The students…

This study explores the experiences of second-generation Latine adolescents by examining the impact of bilingualism on self-esteem and depressive symptoms. Drawing on Suarez-Orozco and colleagues' (2018) model, this study shows the multifaceted acculturation process, emphasizing linguistic acculturation as crucial for navigating two cultures. The…

In this work, based on an oral corpus of semi-directed interviews conducted in French with 40 L1 Chinese speakers learning French in France and in English with 29 L1 Chinese speakers learning English in the United States, I investigated the quotative system in non-native speech of English and French as it is used in the Chinese diaspora in Paris…

This dissertation investigated how a bilingual's experiences can affect how their first language pronunciation can differ from monolingual speakers of their two languages. We used a methodology incorporating quantitative phonetic measurements of voice onset time and vowel formants, grammar and vocabulary tests, and qualitative measures of language…

Many Hispanic adult immigrants to the United States acquire sufficient English skills to enable them to function in daily life but are left feeling that their skills are inadequate for college work. The problem addressed by the study is that the factors that are predictive of successful acquisition of college-level English skills had not been…

Upon acquiring or learning another language, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is an inevitable phenomenon with which a bilingual speaker lives. One key aspect of CLI is its bidirectionality, flowing between both the first (L1) and second languages (L2) mutually affecting each other. However, investigations of L1 CLI on L2 have dominated previous…

Immigrant parents are being challenged in several different ways to maintain their heritage language (HL) in the United States. Majority White, affluent communities are one of the many complex language ecologies that exist across the variety of U.S. societies. The research setting of this study, Southern California, is one of the wealthiest…

This three-article dissertation examined how policy choices in three key policy areas -- initial enrollment, service provision, and reclassification -- impact English learner (EL)-classified students. The first article examined the national landscape of state statutes, regulations, and state education agencies' (SEA) guidance that support…

The growth of the adult immigrant population in the U.S. necessitates adult English language teachers who can meet the academic needs of diverse learners in the multilingual ESL classroom. The purpose of this interpretivist study is to discover what teaching practices adult non-native English language teachers utilize in the teaching and learning…

This empirical study examines the growth and characteristics of newcomer schools, as well as the associations between newcomer school characteristics and student outcomes. Newcomer schools are specialized schools for children newly arrived in the U.S. with limited English language proficiency and often interrupted education. To conduct this study,…

Child Language Brokering is a very common phenomenon for Latinx/a/o children of immigrants, who usually begin language serving as translators and interpreters at a young age and carry these roles into adulthood. Yet, despite the prevalence of Child Language Brokering, the findings of existing research still do not agree on the impact of this…