The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered.…

Arising in Europe in the early 1990s, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become a popular educational approach. CLIL involves a dual focus on content and language learning with an additional language used as the medium of instruction. Although CLIL has received much attention and spread widely around the world, there is limited…

This article seeks to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind and the added values of the concept. I contextualize Translanguaging in the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language…

Across the globe, students increasingly use literacies to cross boundaries, locally and globally, virtually and geographically, willingly and involuntarily. They cross these boundaries with versatile linguistic backgrounds that allow them to effectively navigate new school and life worlds. Many students who cross boundaries are students of color…

Translanguaging supports emergent bilingual students to draw on languages they bring to the classroom to learn, even as they develop English. This practice also supports schools to develop stronger partnerships with students' communities. Mina Hernandez Garcia, Mary J. Schleppegrell, Hasna Sobh, and Chauncey Monte-Sano report on a…

Translanguaging pedagogy is an approach to educational equity that harnesses multilingual learners' communicative repertoires (e.g., home languages, non-standard varieties, and gestures) by strategically incorporating them in the classroom to ensure students' active participation and meaningful learning. This paper proposes a research-informed…

This article provides a "snapshot" of fourth grade English Language Arts (ELA) vocabulary instruction before and after implementation of college and career readiness standards. Our exploratory study's findings demonstrate the instructional shifts for teaching deep vocabulary knowledge as required by college and career readiness…

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the topic of assessing students who use two or more languages in their daily life. The book provides foundational information for assessing multilingual learners (MLs) in schools, with an emphasis on school language and content. Major assessment ideas are viewed through a framework called PUMI (Purpose,…

Engaging in discussions of texts featuring diverse expressions of bilingualism is important at the elementary level to move away from historical conceptions of bilingualism focused on language proficiency and instead embrace a translanguaging view focused on linguistic practices. To successfully engage in these conversations, understanding…

This commentary highlights major validation challenges raised, explicitly or implicitly, from the four articles in the special issue on "Validity Considerations for Assessing Language Proficiency in Young Language Minority Students." They are concerned with: (1) the construct definition in consideration of young language-minority (LM)…

The field of English as an additional language (EAL) advocates using authentic materials and meeting the needs of students. Yet often language in the EAL classroom appears to not reflect the linguistic variation (e.g., ethnic, regional, gender, sexual orientation, generational) of English typically encountered outside of the classroom. Therefore,…

The field of reading instruction has long valued storytelling for literacy development, but what kinds of stories are bi/multilingual students exposed to at school? Through the cognitive phenomena of conceptual metonymy and metaphor, this article links language to identity and exposes practices that act to fracture the identities of…

For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

The widespread degradation of immigrant communities of color in the Unites States has made the correlation between racial and linguistic discrimination increasingly clear. This paper describes some of the ways that the co-construction of race and language, or raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), further marginalize children of…

There has been increasing ambiguity and debate about the meaning and applicability of the terms "codeswitching" and "translanguaging" in English language classrooms. To address this issue, this article first offers a historical overview of the literature on codeswitching and translanguaging. This overview serves as the basis…