Ana Christina DaSilva Iddings

In the Arid Zone: Drying Out Educational Resources for English Language Learners Through Policy and Practice

This article presents a variety of issues related to the effects of restrictive language and educational policies that ultimately limits important resources for English language learners (i.e., services, funding, time, and information). The authors spotlight the state of Arizona as an unfortunate case of language control through policies, which has the promise of being replicated in other areas of the United States. As these forms of control make their way into everyday classroom life, English language learners are further stripped from essential educational opportunities when denied the right to draw on their own social, cultural, and linguistic resources for learning.

Bridging Home and School Literacy Practices: Empowering Families of Recent Immigrant Children

This article reports on a family literacy program that began with the creation and implementation of a Welcome Center in an elementary school in the Southwest United States. This center was intended to be a place where recent immigrant students and their families, teachers, as well as other community members, came together to participate in literacy activities. While serving the intended purposes, the Welcome Center also proved to be a useful venue for the recent immigrant students and their families to develop language and literacy. Overall, this report points to the need for schools to provide explicit spaces and planned opportunities for newcomers to meaningfully enter in dialogue with their new linguistic and cultural communities.

Promoting educational equity for a recent immigrant Mexican student in an English-dominant classroom what does it take?

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The Social Genesis of Self-Regulation: The Case of Two Korean Adolescents Learning English as a Second Language

From a sociocultural perspective the concept of self-regulation is associated to voluntary control over higher and culturally organized mental functions such as, for example, focusing attention, planning a course of action, solving a problem, or deliberately remembering something. Thus, the ability to self-regulate is highly related to school success. The present article examines the ways by which two newly arrived immigrant Korean students, learning English as a second language while enrolled in a middle school in the United States, made use of old and new systems of signs (i.e., native and target languages) to (re)gain and maintain self-regulation in a new cultural and linguistic context. We conducted a microgenetic analysis of student–teacher and student–student interactions during two specific classroom writing practices that occurred regularly in the classroom. We found that the development (or activation) of self-regulation for the students was tightly intertwined with social and cultural contextual factors of the English-dominant classroom environment, which in turn afforded or constrained the use and acquisition of newly formed semiotic resources (e.g., hybrid sign systems) for the creation and expression of meaning.

Inaugural Editorial for Volume 46

As we officially begin our tenure as the incoming editors of Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), we want to provide some background and the key principles that will guide our editorship. JLR has historically been one of the very top journals in literacy research, and we intend to continue this tradition. To accomplish this, we have developed an ambitious set of goals that include reviewing and publishing research drawing on the highest standards in education, securing an interdisciplinary space for literacy research, balancing the need for conceptual, basic, applied, and policy-related work, promoting new and diverse voices, and constructively utilizing social media and other means to raise the impact of JLR. However, before we detail these goals, we begin with some history and background to our team.

Special Issue on Second and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: An Introduction

As the site of confluence of several disciplines interested in language acquisition and use, the field of applied linguistics is the overarching domain of research dedicated to the study of second and foreign language (L2) theory and practice (Kramsch, 2000). Traditionally, much of the applied linguistics research has been aligned with psycholinguistics, and more specifically with information processing theory and with dominant varieties of formal linguistics (e.g., inspired by Chomskian traditions). Chomskian formal linguistics, as a field of inquiry, envisions the development of language as facilitated by an innate biological endowment (i.e., Language Acquisition Device) located in the human brain. In addition, it postulates that a general underlying linguistic structure shared by all languages (i.e., Universal Grammar) governs language acquisition processes. Similarly, from the point of view of information processing theory, language development is most often understood as an internally driven phenomenon, largely independent from the social, historical, and cultural context where it takes place. This theoretical stance treats the human mind as an apparatus analogous to computers and generally regards language as a code that enables the processing of information. From these perspectives, L2 acquisition is often associated with discreet grammatical parameters (e.g., whether or not linguistic production approximates native speaker norms), with measurable behaviors (e.g., quality and quantity of linguistic input/output), or with fixed traits (e.g., personality, linguistic aptitude). A shift from psycholinguistic models for studying L2 acquisition began to occur in the mid1980s when researchers in applied linguistics (e.g. Lantolf & Frawley, 1984) began to explore the potential applications of sociocultural theory (SCT) to the study of second and foreign language acquisition and use. Herein, the inextricable connections between language, the development

Learning with immigrant children, families and communities: the imperative of early childhood teacher education

Abstract This article reports on a longitudinal study spanning over 5 years, involving the design and implementation of an early childhood teacher education program model that engages a critical-ecological theoretical approach, a funds of knowledge perspective, and design-based methodology. This project aimed to promote equitable education for all children, and especially for young immigrant children encountering situations of oppression within the national and local educational contexts in Arizona. In this teacher education program, families, community members, researchers, pre-service teachers and teachers worked together to develop new modes of curricular activity, new spaces, new relationships, and new forms of movement among participants, as well as new circulations of literacy artefacts.

Advancing the Field of Literacy Studies

We stated in our inaugural editorial (March 2014, Vol. 46, Issue 1) that our goal is to publish articles representing both new and cutting-edge research and those pieces that “illuminate traditional findings in ways that open up new research areas, pursue novel questions, or promote the development of more sophisticated and promising methodologies.” The articles in this issue address previously well-researched topics (young children’s writing, critical literacy, and vocabulary learning), but they advance the field substantially by providing new depths of understanding with additional implications for alternative approaches in classrooms from preschool through the secondary years, both in the United States and internationally. For example, Deborah Rowe’s article “The Development of a Descriptive Measure of Early Childhood Writing: Results From the Write Start! Writing Assessment” adds considerable texture to a landscape of previous research in early writing by carefully analyzing preschoolers’ initial writing attempts to develop the first comprehensive, research-based descriptive measure of 2to 5-year-olds’ writing. Drawing from data collected in response to a standard task used in the Write Start! Writing Assessment, Rowe begins with a set of research-based descriptions of children’s early writing drawn from 15 well-known studies, and then carefully crafts a set of integrated categories across four important features of print—form, directionality, intentionality, and message content—resulting in a tool that provides a basis for comparing group and individual trajectories of change for each writing feature. With this tool, educators should better understand the capabilities of young children through developing a multi-dimensional profile that shows the child’s emergent understandings of different print features. Another example illuminating young children’s writing is Maria Ghiso’s “Arguing From Experience: Young Children’s Embodied Knowledge and Writing as Inquiry.” She finds that first graders can address a controversial issue such as gun control by taking a position, providing evidence, and considering opposing perspectives. If only a developmental perspective was theorized to explore young children’s capacity to grapple with difficult topics, one might suggest that children are too immature to address such issues at a young age. However, Ghiso finds otherwise as she utilizes feminist epistemologies to understand how first graders enact an alternative rationality by drawing on knowledge from their own personal experiences as central to the arguments they were constructing. Ghiso found that these students were not making a formalist argument about the constitutional right to bear arms, but were conceptualizing their arguments from their own personal experiences of being vulnerable to gun violence. Hence, Ghiso cautions that a

Promoting Educational Equity for a Recent Immigrant Mexican Student in an English-Dominant Classroom

According to the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA, 2006) there are about 5 million students identified as English-language learners (ELLs) currently enrolled in American public schools in grades pre-K through twelve. This number represents about 10 percent of the total enrollment in U.S. public schools. Within the last fifteen years, the numbers of ELLs have increased at a rate almost eight times greater than the total public-school enrollment. It is estimated that about nineteen million ELLs will be attending public schools in the year 2020 (Trueba, 1999). More startling, by the year 2030 the school-aged children of immigrants, many of whom are ELLs, will total nearly twenty-six million (Tienda & Mitchell, 2006). In view of the rapid growth of ELL populations in American schools, in recent years the educational circumstances of these students have been of national concern (see Snow, 2002).

Young bilingual learners at home and school: researching multilingual voices

at the end of each chapter, and are encouraged to reflect carefully on their own practice. This book offers a refreshing perspective on educating non-native speakers of English in an atmosphere of additive, rather than subtractive, bilingualism, and student-centered, rather than didactic, instruction. Bilingual education: an introductory reader also provides a wealth of online and other resources for further study and exploration, and is an excellent overview of the field of bilingual education.Young bilingual learners at home and school: researching multilingual voices, by Rose Drury, Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Trenthan Books, 2007, iv+113 pp.,