Californians often take for granted a split between ethnic and linguistic identities, expecting immigrants to maintain strong ethnic identities while becoming monolingual in English. However, recent immigration has led to increasing diversity at California universities, with no majority ethnic group and many students bilingual. This study explores…

In this article, we demonstrate how ethnodramatic writing can offer critically needed insights into the language learning and educational trajectories of a significant yet little researched group of immigrant English learners in community college settings. The participants' reflections and impressions about learning English and about U.S.…

This article presents the results of an analysis of student perceptions about speakers of Spanish in the United States before and after participation in a university course on U.S. Spanish that incorporates a hands-on research component. Three arguments are made here: That these perceptions influence their day-to-day relationship with bilingual…

This article reports some main findings of a year-long participatory action research study of critical literacy (CL) practices with middle school recent immigrant English language learners (ELLs) in Ontario, Canada. The CL program followed an integrated instructional model informed by Cummins' (2001) "Academic Expertise Framework" and Janks'…

This article tells the story of a child immigrant's L2 acquisition process. The narrative demonstrates the effects of social and academic factors on motivation to acquire an L2 and the result of immigration at a young age on cultural identity formation. The article begins by discussing the need for research into sociocultural factors in the second…

Using a sociocritical approach to the study of language and literacy and discourse analysis, this article examines student initiated challenges in a sheltered English course with two types of English learners: native+, ESL students; and, recently, arriving ESL students. The analysis draws on 19 hours of video-recorded observations of…

This study focuses on a specific Chinese immigrant subgroup, immigrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Arizona, and details the impact of different immigrant experiences and settlement patterns on parents' attitudes toward Mandarin maintenance. Data were collected through an eight-month-long ethnographic research in Arizona. The…

This article examines teachers' relationships with foreign students during eras marked by large waves of immigration to the United States and by policies that shifted from cultural assimilation (1900-1920) to present-day accountability. We compare teachers' understandings of and instructional practices regarding foreign-born English language…

This article investigates the construction and maintenance of ideologies regarding the legitimacy of English as the dominant language in the United States in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English. As both the researcher and these students' English as second language (ESL) instructor, I am a participant in the ESL classroom and…

Educational interventions designed to serve the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. public schools are developed within a fractured social context. Recent language and immigration policy debates in the U.S. have focused on the importance of English in attaining socio-economic success. On the other hand, research in applied…

In this paper, I examine the ways in which young Yemeni and Iraqi immigrant and refugee women and men strive to become literate as they negotiate transnational spaces. I investigate the social and literate connections they forge as they search for the appropriate spouses. Transnationalism, the phenomenon of living locally with global connections,…

From a critical language perspective, the main issues facing education of immigrant populations are the ways in which these populations are segregated as the Other and how educational practices often work to perpetuate a fringe status. In this paper, I draw upon both discursive perspectives on policymaking and pedagogical practices to address the…

This article pursues two main lines of inquiry: How might postcolonial theory, feminist and postcolonial translation studies sharpen our critical understandings of the micro- and geopolitics of English language learning? What kinds of pedagogical practice might such new developments ground in order to foster our learners' critical ways of knowing…

Seeking renewed articulation of praxis in cross-linguistic on texts, I turn to postcolonality, social theory, and feminism to illuminate and critique common practices with language--learning, teaching, and writing. Additionally drawing on my experience teaching immigrant youth and adults in the US, I reiterate and attempt to answer Gayatri…

This article reports on a diary study conducted to explore third language acquisition in the immersion setting in Mexico as experienced by a bilingual Russian/English learner of Spanish who had recently immigrated to the USA from Russia. Language learning is approached as a socialization process that involves negotiation of meaning (Vygotsky,…