We seek to understand how bilingual adolescent students leverage multiple languages and modes in digital composition. Using a translingual and multimodal perspective of composition, this study reports on the distinct communicative affordances associated with four students' multimodal codemeshing practices. Through analysis of students' digital…

Cummins suggested that within a social context of unequal power relations, classroom interactions are never neutral, but located on a continuum ranging between the reinforcement of coercive relations of power and the promotion of collaborative relations of power. Drawing on this understanding, the purpose of this paper is to examine instructional…

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in early bilingual development and the unique role of the educational setting's language policy in this development. In this article, we describe how one dual language preschool teacher, in partnership with two co-teachers, navigated the tensions…

Numerous studies hold that interaction has beneficial effects on second language acquisition among adults and children in second language contexts. However, data from children learning English as a foreign language are still unavailable. In order to fill this research niche, this study examines the conversational interactions of 8 pairs of young…

Within dual language education programs, well-structured peer interactions can facilitate the learning of language and curricular content simultaneously. Research has found that even very young bilingual students can engage in peer linguistic mediation to help less proficient classmates participate in small group work. In this article, I analyze…

Narratives require the integration of many different linguistic skills and can be used as an ecologically valid measure of child language development. This study investigated the narrative skills of 18 six- to seven-year-old prelingually deaf children who received simultaneous bilateral cochlear implants (CI) between 5 and 18 months of age. No…

This case study examined how one instructor navigated between two competing discourses in an intermediate Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom: on the one hand, teaching "Standard Spanish" to help students achieve professional success, and legitimizing home linguistic practices on the other. In addition to expressing both…

Analyses of second language (L2) classroom interaction often categorize joking and other humorous talk by students as disruptive, off-task behavior, thereby rendering it important only from a classroom management perspective. Studies of language play, however, have illustrated that such jocular talk not only allows students to construct a broader…

Being an effective and engaging leader of a band, orchestra, or choir involves both the application of appropriate, purposeful techniques and successful communication on a variety of levels. Tackling problems regarding tone, dynamics, and difficult passages requires a good "game plan" that one can convey clearly to the group, so that optimal…

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback.…

This paper explores how five third-graders constructed meaning in three school-based literacy participation structures, also examining teachers' invitations and the space they make for students' talk and students' comprehension practices. High-stakes assessments and mandated reading curriculum influence how comprehension is framed and how students…

This article examines multilingual interactions in the complementary school classroom for ethnic Chinese children in the UK. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the children and their teachers, the study aims to demonstrate how they alternate between different varieties of Chinese and English and different modes of…

This paper discusses the social positioning work three Appalachian adolescents engaged in during two literacy events drawn from a year-long critical teacher-researcher ethnographic study in a twelfth-grade English class in a rural Appalachian high school. Data analysis indicates that in these literacy events, the focal students positioned…

This study focused on ways teachers and students in an urban high school used technologies often labeled as disruptive (i.e. social media and mobile phones) as learning and relationship building tools, inside and outside the classroom. In this teacher research study, secondary teachers discussed digital literacies, the digital divide, and digital…

This study investigated the instructional talk of three math teachers from two urban middle schools as they implemented a curriculum designed to develop students' knowledge of academic vocabulary and encourage word use during classroom discussions. Data were drawn from audio- and video-recordings, classroom observations, and teacher…