High School Spanish Heritage Language Learners’ Perceptions of their Writing Abilities

Spanish as a Heritage Language · 2025-07-02

The state of Illinois is home to the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population in the United States. The state’s board of education includes Spanish heritage language (SHL) classes among its high school elective options, and 158 out of roughly 800 total public high schools in Illinois offer SHL classes (Potowski, 2020). These programs serve SHL learners from a variety of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds and proficiency levels (Montrul, 2015). While research has explored English language and world language learner language ideologies and beliefs about their proficiency in the target language (Garrett, 2010), fewer studies have explored this topic among adolescent heritage language (HL) learners, particularly with regard to writing (Del Carpio & Ochoa, 2022; Magaña, 2021; Martínez, 2005). This article analyzes qualitative data from an open-ended questionnaire administered to a group of SHLstudents attending a suburban public high school in Illinois (N = 29) focusing on their language ideologies and beliefs about their speaking, reading, and writing abilities. With particular attention to SHL literacy, we analyze how students express uncertainty, or hedge, about their writing abilities according to their perceived audience and genre of use. We conclude this article by offering implications for HL curricular design and teacher training.

“Nothing Shows Up As It Would in the Book”: Medical Students and Professional Identity Development

2025-01-01

Embodied reflexivity and researching the literacy practices of an adolescent multilingual refugee who is d/Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing

Research methods in applied linguistics · 2025-03-18

Abstract In this chapter I extend recent scholarship on researcher subjectivities in Applied Linguistics by considering affective, spatial, and corporeal dimensions of reflexivity and positionality. I draw from ethnographic research on the multisemiotic language and literacy practices of Madou (a pseudonym), an adolescent refugee student from the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who was diagnosed as having a severe hearing impairment upon his arrival to the United States as a middle schooler. I conclude by presenting implications for how considering positionality as embodied can yield novel analyses and foster relational ethics in research on the literacy development of multilingual learners from immigrant, transnational, and refugee backgrounds, including those who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DML).

Immigrant-serving leaders’ perspectives on bridging home and school in crisis situations

Equity in Education & Society · 2025-02-10

This article analyzes findings from a qualitative interview-based study that explored the perspectives of leaders of four immigrant-serving non-profit organizations in the United States on facilitating educational access for immigrant and refugee families with school-aged children and youth over the 2020–2021 school year, during which, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public school instruction took place online, or in a hybrid format. These organizations primarily serve low-income, newcomer Mexican, Guatemalan, Congolese, and Southeast Asian families whose children represent the highest proportion of multilingual learners of English (MLEs) in schools in the regions where this research took place. Interviews with organization leaders and staff are analyzed using emotional capital framings that center affect as a resource for action. Findings highlight the emotional labor, adaptability, and innovation that undergird each organization’s efforts to facilitate remote learning, address mental health concerns related to school, and provide families with basic needs. By centering leaders’ emotional responses to every-day and emergency situations, this research offers nuanced understandings of how mutually beneficial partnerships between community organizations and schools can be nurtured and sustained to support immigrant children and their families. We conclude by offering implications for future research, and education policy and practice.

Immigrant Outreach and Language Access During First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Applied Linguistics · 2023-07-12 · 3 citations

Abstract This article applies cultural translation (Kramsch and Hua 2020) and geohistorical frameworks (Braudel 1949; Scott 2018) to analyze the interplay between linguistic, cultural, physical, and ideological proximities and distances in immigrant advocacy and outreach efforts. Data are taken from ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou 2010, 2015) shared by directors of immigrant-serving organizations in a small metropolitan area in the USA during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These stories demonstrate directors’ situated perspectives on new and changing demands for communicating information in the face of persistent challenges associated with the digital divide, reaching clients with limited literacy and who speak indigenous languages of Central America and Africa, and cultivating trust among staff and between staff and clients around COVID-19 mitigation and relief. Findings trace how local, state, and national policies were taken up by individual participants and the communities they serve and bring to light the value of applied linguistics research in amplifying the complexities of language access in times of crisis as well as community resilience that are often hiding in plain sight.

Introduction to special issue: Researching language teaching, learning and policy in refugee resettlement contexts in the United States

Linguistics and Education · 2022-05-14

Immigration Debated: Central African Immigrant Youth’s Discourses of Fairness and Civic Belonging in the United States

Equity & Excellence in Education · 2021-12-23

For the past several decades, public attitudes toward immigrants in the United States have centered on questions of legality and documentation, as well as economic and social impacts of immigration, whether real or imagined, such as employment and criminality. How immigrants, writ large, perceive of and contribute to these debates is insufficiently understood and has been underexplored in research. In this article, we analyze the responses of Central African newcomer immigrant and refugee adolescents in the United States to anti-immigrant political discourse in the year and a half after the 2016 Trump presidential election. Through critical discourse analysis of focus group interviews with these youth, findings are interpreted through an integrated Western and postcolonial philosophical framework of fairness as it relates to legality, race, and inclusion. We conclude by offering implications for schools and their constituents, including civic education that occurs across the curriculum and affords students opportunities to grapple with global challenges related to distribution of power and resources, rights and responsibilities, and justice and injustice.

Multimodal and Multilingual Co-authoring in High School Social Studies ESL Classrooms

2021-01-01 · 4 citations

Om språk, resiliens och inkludering av nyanlända ungdomar i USA

2021-01-01

‘It has to be in a natural way’: a critical exploration of co-teaching relationships in trilingual preschool classrooms in Hong Kong

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development · 2021 · 13 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Pedagogy

Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and education, this article explores relational practices among bilingual co-teachers at a private, international early years programme in Hong Kong that emphasizes democratic philosophies of learning in their efforts to promote trilingualism. Findings point to co-teachers’ interest in developing collaborative relationships, and prompting interest in additional language use through promotion of children’s interests, along with tensions they experience as they grapple with instruction in multiple languages. Findings point to a need for more nuanced understandings of co-teaching dynamics in post-colonial multilingual learning contexts.