As teacher educators on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, our goal is to (re)conceptualize a pedagogical approach for bilingual teacher development informed by teacher education research in the borderlands and anchored in the myriad of historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic realities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands -- a border pedagogy.…

Purpose: Best practices recommend promoting the use of the home language and allowing caregivers to choose the language(s) that they want to use with their child who is deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We examined whether Spanish-speaking caregivers of children who are DHH receive professional recommendations on oral bilingualism that follow best…

Children continuously engage in developing theories about how the world works as they inquire through play and interactions with others. In this study, we investigated children's in-process thinking in the form of working theories about language as they participated in engagements around dual language picturebooks in an afterschool club. Our…

Early oral language development lays an essential foundation for academic and socioemotional competencies but is vulnerable to the impact of family stress. Despite robust evidence that family stress affects early oral language development in monolingual samples, little is known about whether the family stress processes affecting language…

Preserving the Navajo language, or "Diné bizaad," is of profound importance for all Indigenous people in the United States, as Navajo is one of the more widely spoken Native languages yet is still facing the early stages of endangerment. Currently, the Navajo Nation, like other tribes, lacks a significant presence of community-based…

A great amount of sociolinguistic research in contact situations has centered on phonological and morphosyntactic variables, but studies of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations are scarce and incipient. Discourse-pragmatic features are syntactically optional elements that are used to guide, structure, or express a stance towards…

This article examines the language ideologies of the lead teacher and of five Mexican mothers of Spanish-speaking, emergent bilingual children in a Head Start program in Arizona. Data from semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant-observation field notes were analyzed using the interrelated concepts of language ideologies…

Public schools across the country are increasingly working with children who enter schools speaking a language other than English. Using a case study methodology, the authors examined Dual Language Program (DLP) implementation in Arizona, which by law supports English-only education. Several benefits (bilingualism, bi-literacy, biculturalism,…

This qualitative case study explored the perspectives of school administrators on implementing structured English immersion (SEI) and dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) programs serving emergent bilingual learners at one urban Arizona elementary school. Using a sociocultural policy perspective, I analyzed findings from a series of interviews…

As critical approaches to Heritage Language (HL) instruction are increasingly more widespread, it is now more pertinent than ever to conduct research on Spanish linguistic variation that reveals systematicity and refutes hegemonic notions of 'incorrectness'. This variationist study examines the use and distribution of the Preterite and Imperfect…

Children learn the words of their native language(s) from interactions with their caregivers. Although previous research has found that the language children hear during those interactions predicts vocabulary outcomes, few studies have investigated how qualitative features of social interactions work together to affect children's vocabulary…

Using a lexical decision task, Wolter and Yamashita (2015) showed that collocations that exist only in L1 but not in L2 were not processed faster than collocations that only exist in L2 but not in L1 or a random combination of two words. This result seems to support the age/order of acquisition effects (Carroll & White, 1973) over Jiang's…

This qualitative study explored multimodal biliteracy found in the Arizona-Sonora borderland, a region thriving with linguistic and cultural diversity despite having an English-only policy. According to Reyes (2012) biliteracy is to think, speak, read, and write in two or more languages, and there are various modes for reading and writing in the…

This paper explores how two dual language preschool teachers demonstrated critical consciousness in their dual language education (DLE) classroom in Arizona. DLE has historically been grounded in equity for language minoritized students and promises to support students' bilingualism, biliteracy, sociocultural competence, and academic achievement.…

Research Findings: We examined the amount of preschool lead/assistant teachers' English/Spanish language use and relations between quality of teacher-child interactions, and Dual Language Learners' (DLLs) English/Spanish bilingual vocabulary in 31 English-medium Head Start classrooms. Measures in this study included (a) children's conceptual…