Scholars who study Southeast Asian American (SEAA) communities are in consensus that this group's realities diverge from their Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) counterparts. In fact, nearly four decades after large-scale immigration as political refugees from Southeast Asia (SEA), this population composed of Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians,…

In the United States, English is not the official language but the dominant one. But for many students, the dominance of English instruction has come at the expense of losing their first language. For much of our history of schooling in the United States, students have been forced to leave their heritage or home languages at the door when they…

This research identifies how anti-immigrant sentiment and racism, which have historically been reflected and transmitted through nativist language policies and school curriculum, affect second-linguistic-generation Hmong Americans--not via overtly xenophobic and discriminatory acts but via subtle yet hurtful racial microaggressions. Interviews…

Longitudinal word learning studies which control for experience can advance understanding of language learning and potential intra- and inter-language relationships in developing bilinguals. We examined novel word learning in both the first (L1) and the second (L2) languages of bilingual children. The rate and shape of change as well as the role…

This narrative research study involving 13 Hmong college women reveals some of the challenges that multilingual students may face in the American educational system. Using stories told by the participants about their language- and literacy-development experiences, the author identifies commonalities in those experiences. The similarities in their…

This study examined how providing either primary- or English-language storybooks for home reading followed by classroom storybook reading and vocabulary instruction in English influenced English vocabulary acquisition. Participants in the study were preschool children (N = 33), from low socioeconomic status families, whose primary language was…