Over the past 40 years, Jim Cummins has proposed a number of highly influential theoretical concepts, including the threshold and interdependence hypotheses and the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency. In this book, he provides a personal account of how these ideas developed and he examines the credibility…

Names are used every day in classrooms across the world as an important marker of personal and social identity but educators will, from time to time, encounter names that are unfamiliar or perceived as difficult to pronounce. The present study explores teachers' and students' language dispositions towards names and how naming practices impact…

The emergence in recent years of heteroglossic conceptions of bi/multilingualism and the related construct of translanguaging has raised questions about how these notions relate to more traditional conceptions of additive bilingualism, biliteracy, and the overall academic achievement of minoritized students. In this article, Jim Cummins provides a…

The 6 Principles are universal guidelines drawn from decades of research in language pedagogy and language acquisition theory that should undergird any program of English language instruction. These foundational principles are for all educators in any classroom where students are learning English as a new language or learning content through that…

Now available in a revised and expanded edition, this accessible guide introduces readers to the issues and controversies surrounding the education of language minority students in the United States. What makes this book a perennial favorite are the succinct descriptions of alternative practices for transforming our schools and students' futures,…

Background: Schools located in indigenous Irish-speaking areas collectively known as the "Gaeltacht" are unique in terms of their sociocultural and linguistic identity and important in the key role they play in the preservation of the language. Those situated in Category A Gaeltacht districts are Irish-medium schools in communities with…

This book documents a collaborative action research project in one school where researchers and practitioners worked together to develop multimodal literacies and pedagogies for diverse, multilingual elementary classrooms. Following chronologically from Lotherington's "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" (2011), this volume picks up after…

The demographics of the education system are quickly shifting and demonstrating a significant increase in the number of English learners in schools. Due to the exponential growth across the country and the state of Texas, it is evident the linguistic diversity of students is an area of interest to educators and educator preparation programs.…

The evolution of digital technologies has frequently been hailed as a 'game-changer' in education. However, like previous technological innovations, such as television, these recent developments have failed thus far to demonstrate any significant large-scale improvement in the quality of educational provision or in educational outcomes. The papers…

This exploratory study reports on the implementation of a novel web-based multilingual learning platform. This tool allows content to be delivered in different languages simultaneously, including languages of the students. In addition, it creates access to content knowledge aligned to the local curriculum, and in doing so, responds to an emerging…

My goal in this paper is to contribute to the process of bringing practice and theory into active dialogue. Initially, I review some early instructional examples of crosslinguistic pedagogy involving emergent bilingual students. I then focus on more recent examples from the Canadian context that illustrate the emerging role of classroom teachers…

This article reports on a study that examined the effectiveness of an intervention using text messages to enhance the academic vocabulary acquisition of English language learners (ELLs). With a random control trial design, we compared students' learning gain of target vocabulary (direct effect) and its subsequent impact on academic vocabulary…

This study examined university undergraduate English language learners' (ELLs) perspectives on an intervention, Word Matters, that aimed to enhance functional academic vocabulary learning critical to their cognitive academic language proficiency development (Cummins, 1989), a challenge faced by many ELLs in English-medium universities. This…

The aim of this article is to introduce a computer-assisted multiliteracies programme (CaMP) as an alternative approach to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction in order to overcome the educational limitations that are inherent in most EFL settings. In a number of monolingual societies with a dominant language other than English,…