Some argue that supporting minoritized students' "academic language" (AL) development fosters equity in education. Others contend that AL is hegemonic, and that attempts to teach it perpetuate inequities across racial, ethnic, social class, immigrant, and related sociocultural and linguistic student differences. In this article, we frame…

In this article, I argue that academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation. I propose language architecture as an alternative framing of language that can serve as a point of entry for resisting these raciolinguistic ideologies in both research and practice.…

In this article, we show how close attention to language throughout a socio-scientific investigation supports upper elementary Arabic-speaking students to learn English while participating in valued disciplinary practices in science. Engagement in reading and writing with a focus on language also enables them to bring critical perspectives to the…

Although there is now a good deal of research on whether, when, and how to teach Academic Language (AL), we still have a limited understanding of the various ways and reasons we might teach AL to refugee-background students enrolled in U.S. schools--and how to do so without devaluing their existing repertoires, resources, and lived experiences. A…

The definitions of "academic language" available to teachers and teacher educators often invoke generalized assumptions about the supposed gap between complex, discipline-specific forms of language and the everyday language of Latina/o/x students. In this article, we advance an alternative hypothesis -- that Latina/o/x students boast…

This article addresses the importance of supporting specific language practices of emergent bilingual students in classroom settings that are tied to the development of disciplinary knowledge. The author focuses on explanatory talk support in teaching by contingent responding and encouraging children to make meaning of mathematics concepts and…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student's academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary…

In this article I introduce a framework that centers indigenous educational sovereignty in university-school partnerships. Developed from collaborative work with Indigenous Maya families who are migrants from Yucatan, Mexico, the framework operates from an understanding that Indigenous parents have knowledge that is important for their children to…