In the United States, there exists a chronic shortage of qualified special education teachers to provide instructional services to students with disabilities. One policy solution developed to increase the number of qualified teachers is Alternative Routes (ARs), which are broadly defined as nontraditional and accelerated preparation paths to…

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…

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…

Despite some rises and falls in the numbers due to various reasons, including the political climate in the Trump era and the COVID-19 pandemic (Laws & Ammigan, 2020), each year universities in the United States host a large number of multilingual international students from different parts of the world. Based on their TOEFL scores, many are…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Perspectives from educators and students elucidate how systemic language discrimination and oppression (i.e., linguicism) are perpetuated in the New York education system, even though it has one of the most comprehensive approaches to supporting multilingual students in the nation (Sugarman, 2016). The legacy of teaching English as a colonizing…

Given the increasing number of multilingual learners enrolled in U.S. secondary schools and persistent disparities in access to quality STEM education for these students, teacher education programs must prepare secondary science teachers capable of teaching multilingual learners in equitable ways. There is a consensus in science education…

Linguistic stereotyping research posits that native speaker favor standard variety speakers which results in discrimination against non-native speakers (Rubin 2002, Kang & Rubin, 2009). However, it may be possible to improve native speaker attitudes towards accented speech, and through that, accented speakers. Research on improving native…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

The United States is a multilingual society. In addition to over 200 named languages such as Spanish and English, Americans also speak hundreds of varieties of these languages based on regional or social group affiliations (United States Census, 2013). In the context of this linguistic diversity, education scholars and practitioners are working…

Second Language (L2) teacher education serves as a pivotal site for examining language ideologies that shape teacher candidates' conceptualization and enactments of L2 pedagogy. Informed by the theory of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2004, 2010) and the concept of language socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), this dissertation research…

Linguistic ideologies are informed by social stereotyping to maintain the "standard" variety which is often interpreted as morally superior to "nonstandard" varieties. Consequently, these ideologies racialize "nonstandard" varieties, leading to even more negative stereotypes. One outlet of such stereotypes can be…

This dissertation explores the way Kotiria/Wanano (E. Tukanoan, Kotiria hereafter) women of the Brazilian "Alto Rio Negro" (ARN) contrive (McDowell 1990) "kaya basa" "sad songs" using linguistic and musical resources to construct songs that express loneliness and other private emotions, while also creating alliances…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…