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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 as knowledge-generators. Through their practice, these educators have challenged the assumption that schools serving multilingual students have no option but to be English-only zones. Finally, I explore some of the ways in which these instructional innovations illuminate theoretical understandings of translanguaging and crosslinguistic pedagogy more generally.

This paper describes a qualitative study conducted over the course of one school year in an ethnically diverse school. Aimed at exploring the conditions under which parents of low socioeconomic status (SES) immigrant-background children will engage actively with the school, we involved parents and facilitators in story-telling sessions, sharing personal experiences and reading and writing stories about identity and diversity. An interactional space for these exchanges was created within the school where parents' linguistic and cultural talents were valued. We conclude, on the basis of interviews and group discussions with parents, that parental engagement will be productive in supporting student achievement only when their relationships with educators in the school are identity-affirming.

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 learning (transfer effect) with and without the intervention treatment. The study included 108 undergraduate ELLs in a large Canadian university in Ontario. The intervention was aligned with the lesson plans of two comparable content-based courses on English for academic purposes required for the ELLs and aimed at teaching frequently used academic words embedded within the assigned course readings. The results indicated that, with the intervention, students learned significantly more target words. However, there was no difference between the treatment and control groups on academic vocabulary post-test performance measuring the transfer effect. The pedagogical implication of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Framed at the intersection of activist and Indigenous research methodologies, this article explores the way two First Nations senior high school students made sense of their visual and literary identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011). An Ojibwe artist-in-residence at an urban secondary school in southwestern Ontario and a university-based researcher facilitated the creation of these texts, which helped students form concrete understandings of their life experiences as rooted in social, cultural, political, and historical understandings. Dialoguing about students' visual and literary identity texts proved to be an innovative and engaging way to explore what it means to place Aboriginal students' identities at the center of the curriculum. Insights into the students' experiences are detailed in terms of context, process, output, and impact. (Contains 4 figures and 6 footnotes.)

Most school systems around the world prioritize the teaching of languages and aim to develop bilingual or multilingual proficiencies among their students. However, in a large number of contexts, schools also systematically and intentionally undermine the potential of immigrant-background and minoritized students to develop multilingual abilities. This undermining of multilingualism operates either by explicitly prohibiting students from using their home languages (L1) within the school or through ignoring the languages that students bring to school (benign neglect). In some cases, exclusion of students’ L1 is rationalized on the grounds that maintenance of L1 will hinder students’ integration into the mainstream society. In other cases, exclusion is based on the conviction that there is competition between languages and use of the L1 either in school or home will reduce students’ exposure to the school language (L2). The validity of this time-on-task argument is critically analyzed in the present paper. I argue that the research shows no consistent relationship between immigrant students’ academic achievement (in L2) and use of L1 in the home or in the school. By contrast, several research syntheses have highlighted the positive academic outcomes of bilingual programs for minoritized students and also the feasibility of implementing multilingual or translanguaging pedagogies in the mainstream classroom.

This article attempts to provide ESL teachers, school administrators, and policymakers with a concise overview of what matters in promoting academic success among learners of English in Canadian schools. We review research focused on bilingual and biliteracy development, the nature of academic language, and the roles of societal power relations and identity negotiation in determining the academic achievement of English language learners (ELL). On the basis of this research, we propose the Literacy Engagement framework that identifies literacy engagement as a major determinant of literacy achievement for ELL and non-ELL students. In order to enable ELL students to engage with literacy, the framework highlights the importance of teachers scaffolding meaning, connecting with students' lives, affirming student identities, and extending their awareness and knowledge of language across the curriculum. The application of the framework is illustrated with reference to the literacy and academic learning experiences of two ELL students in the Toronto area. (Contains 6 figures.)

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 need of both teachers and learners, in particular in light of an increasing linguistically and culturally diverse context. Our pilot research aimed to examine implementation elements and the perceived potential impact of the platform in mathematics. We conducted our study in an elementary school in the region of Toronto, Canada, attended by a significant number of students with a refugee background. A language biographical approach allowed us to highlight the role of the multilingual access to content knowledge, particularly on learning autonomy. Our results suggest that the use of this multilingual web-based platform may stimulate the learning autonomy of students and a positive attitude towards maths. In addition, our results suggest that additional strategies may be needed to improve the teachers' ability to implement digital as well as language friendly strategies in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 in this special issue suggest that there is potential to change this scenario. Digital platforms such as Binogi have been able to exploit technological advances such as vastly improved crosslinguistic machine translation ushered in by artificial intelligence to make curriculum content much more accessible to multilingual students. Drawing on the papers in this special issue, I highlight three dimensions of digital learning environments that have demonstrated pedagogical credibility to enhance multilingual learners' development of literacy and their acquisition of academic content in the target language: (a) they provide extensive access to and promote engagement with written (and oral) input in the target language, (b) they provide instructional scaffolds within the digital environment to promote both awareness of how language works and intentional learning of academic concepts and subject matter content, and (c) they encourage and enable students to become autonomous learners who are capable of self-regulating and evaluating their own learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 intervention provided undergraduate ELLs with instructional support of their vocabulary learning through the use of texting. It focused on their acquisition of academic and low-frequency words that appeared in the readings assigned by two content-based English for academic purposes (EAP) courses required for ELLs at a large Canadian university. The intervention was aligned with the lesson plans of the courses. Data in this study were collected from follow-up interviews (n = 10) and a post-treatment survey (n = 40) from a total of 48 students who participated in the intervention. The results revealed students' overall positive experience with the intervention, the feasibility of the intervention design and its effectiveness in supporting ELLs' vocabulary learning. The findings, students' suggestions for improving the intervention, and directions for future research are discussed.

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 critical examination of both additive bilingualism and additive approaches to language education to clarify the nature of these constructs and to elucidate their instructional implications. He proposes a synthesis of perspectives that replaces the term "additive bilingualism" with "active bilingualism", that acknowledges the dynamic nature of bilingual and multilingual language practices and the instructional implications of this conceptualization, and that insists that education initiatives designed to promote academic achievement among minoritized students can claim empirical legitimacy only when they explicitly challenge raciolinguistic ideologies and, more generally, coercive relations of power.

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, students have had unequal access to authentic English communication opportunities and consequently have a limited understanding of English as American English or native speakers' English. Although communication technologies have been regarded as a promising solution, the limitations within EFL education have not been fully addressed. In this article, multiliteracies pedagogy is offered as a promising solution enabling students to improve English and both cultural and media literacies. This article provides an in-depth description of effective ways to integrate the multiliteracies pedagogy in EFL instruction and its potential effects on EFL students' learning experiences.

The construct of "identity text" conjoins notions of identity affirmation and literacy engagement as equally relevant to addressing causes of underachievement among low socioeconomic status, multilingual, and marginalized group students. Despite extensive empirical evidence supporting the impact on academic achievement of both identity affirmation and literacy engagement, these variables have been largely ignored in educational policies and instructional practices. The authors propose a framework for identifying major causes of underachievement among these three overlapping groups and for implementing evidence-based instructional responses. The framework argues that schools can respond to the devaluation of identity experienced by many students and communities by exploring instructional policies and strategies that enable students to use their emerging academic language and multilingual repertoires for powerful identity-affirming purposes. Drawing on projects involving First Nations and immigrant-background multilingual students, the authors document the profound transformations in academic, intellectual, and personal identity that multimodal identity text work is capable of engendering.

The authors of papers in this special issue are in agreement that if schools are to reverse underachievement among rural and township students in the South African context the instructional space must be expanded to include students' and teachers' multilingual repertoires together with a focus on explicitly demystifying how academic language works. This paper builds on these perspectives by highlighting evidence-based high-impact educational responses that respond not only to linguistic diversity but also to socioeconomic disparities and the marginalized status of many underachieving groups. Specifically, I argue that schools can respond to the lack of print access in many socioeconomically challenged communities by ensuring that all students gain ample access to print and become actively engaged with literacy. Schools can also respond to the devaluation of identity experienced by many marginalized communities by exploring instructional policies and strategies that enable students to use their emerging academic language and multilingual repertoires for powerful identity-affirming purposes.

Research on issues concerning the assessment of school-age English language learners (ELLs) in curriculum-learning contexts has been relatively less productive than assessment of adult language learners. A growing demand for assessing school-age ELLs has led to the development of assessment frameworks that provide the opportunity to examine the extent to which such frameworks represent the developmental continuum of these learners' language acquisition and literacy learning. Steps to English Proficiency (STEP) assessment framework were developed in Ontario, Canada, to be used by its teachers to assess, track, and support the language proficiency development of English language learners. STEP comprises three sets of descriptor-based developmental continua related to oral communication, reading, and writing, for each of four different grade clusters across Kindergarten to Grade 12. In this article we focus mainly on the characteristics of STEP language proficiency descriptors concerning: (a) the extent to which the descriptors are distinguishable across the skills of oral communication, reading, and writing; (b) the extent to which the STEP descriptors are distinguishable across the six proficiency levels; and (c) the extent to which the descriptors are homogeneous within each proficiency level. Our findings reveal that overall, the STEP scales are stable with six distinguishable STEPs and that there are strong correlational relationships among the three represented skills. Our research highlights the urgent need for research geared to understanding the relationship between oral and literacy skills for school-age language learners.

The paper reviews quantitative and qualitative research evidence regarding the relationship between intercultural education and academic achievement among students from socially marginalized communities. Intercultural education is conceptualized as including a focus both on generating understanding and respect for diverse cultural traditions and challenging inequitable distribution of resources and educational opportunities across social groups. As such, intercultural education incorporates notions such as critical literacy and culturally responsive education. By definition, socially marginalized communities have experienced social exclusion and discrimination, often over generations. Thus, educators who adopt an intercultural education orientation are also committed to challenging the operation of coercive relations of power within their school environments. The operation of societal power relations that affect marginalized group students' academic achievement can be conceptualized along a continuum ranging from "structural/societal," through "structural/educational," to "interpersonal." Structural/societal forms of discrimination are largely outside the scope of what educators can influence directly (e.g. housing segregation). However, the research evidence suggests that educators have considerable power to resist and challenge coercive power relations operating at both structural/educational (e.g. curriculum materials) and interpersonal (e.g. classroom interactions) dimensions of the continuum. Thus, the proposed framework represents an explanatory model to account for patterns of school success and failure among marginalized group students and a predictive model to specify educator behaviors that are likely to promote academic achievement.

Recent scholarship within the field of applied linguistics highlights the fact that identities are not static but are fluid, multiple, changeable across time and space, and always constructed in relationship to interactions with others. In other words, identities are constantly in motion. This paper presents a framework for examining the notion of "identities in motion" as a core analytic construct in understanding patterns of educational success and failure. This framework is contrasted with the implicit frameworks that have operated in many countries that consign notions of identity negotiation to the margins and focus on "educational effectiveness" as a process of instructional and organisational efficiency in isolation from the historical and current social context.