Language Arts - Volume 83, Issue 4, 2006

A father reflects on his daughter’s acquisition of a new language during her first year in the United States after a move with her family from China. This article reflects on how the parents and the teachers helped Yisha, a 9-year-old Chinese girl, with her English acquisition. Within the year, Yisha became fluent in English and finished all her courses with straight A’s.

The article describes a project involving teachers, parents, and university researchers in collaborations to support multilingual children’s development and use of language. Strategies for fostering an inclusive climate included building on the interests and resources of the local community, involving community members in curriculum development, and creating a work environment supportive of collegial dialogue.

This article examines urban and bilingual children’s dialogue about children’s literature in the home context as first and second graders talked in literature circles with their families. The article focuses on the issues about language diversity and culture that children and their families discussed about children’s literature. The findings from this research demonstrate that young working class bilingual children and their families do have the resources to construct rich literacy experiences through dialogue related to complex issues of language diversity and culture. Key issues that parents and children discussed in the home included literacy, positionality within society, and resistance to structural inequality. Children used their linguistic resources from the home and ultimately used their first and second languages as a resource.

This article examines the lives of four multilingual students, their classmates, and teacher as they use a range of semiotic systems to learn from, with, and about each other and their surrounding social worlds. Research reveals how literacy practices not only built on students’ resources but also invited critique and change.

This article provides evidence from our work as teachers, drama facilitators and researchers that drama potentially affords a generative nexus between the students’ own identities and more expansive understandings school-based literacy practices. We examined data from two separate fifth grade classroom studies on drama and literacy to show how drama may in fact open critical spaces within which students negotiate diverse perspectives and collaboratively generate knowledge. These perspectives and knowledge can then be put in the service of their own educational and social empowerment.

This article draws upon multiple genres including theoretical scholarship, personal narrative, interview data, and poetry to reflect on experiences of language variation among Latino bilingual youth. The author shares insights acquired through the process of scholARTistry, and concludes with arguments for increased reading, living, and writing of poetry as a form of professional development for teachers working with bilingual youth.