ABSTRACT This study investigates how translanguaging practices emerged and evolved among bilingual preservice English language teachers during a three-month teaching practicum with young emergent bilinguals in Brunei primary schools. Framed within teacher language awareness (TLA), it examines how teachers’ awareness of classroom language use developed organically in a context where teachers and learners share a home language that is central to interaction yet absent from the formal curriculum. Drawing on written reflection journals and selected stimulated recall interviews, the analysis traces shifts in how and why 45 preservice teachers engaged in translanguaging, based on their own reflections regarding whether their practices were planned or reactive to classroom situations. Findings reveal that teachers became increasingly conscious of their language choices, navigating tensions between identities, institutional expectations and learner needs. They gradually shifted from reactive, intuitive responses to more intentional, strategic use of their multilingual repertoires. Five themes emerged from the data: repositioning teacher identity, responding to learner needs, affirming learner identities, negotiating language policy and developing through reflective practice. These themes illustrate the situated and evolving nature of teachers’ language decision-making. The study highlights how preservice teachers begin to develop professional competence in multilingual settings and support learners’ access to academic language.

ABSTRACT In recent years, neoliberal interests in U.S. Chinese/English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs have emphasized white, English-speakers’ use of Mandarin for economic and political gains. Such interests reify white supremacy and contribute to the erasure of Chinese and Chinese American voices, histories, and cultures in curriculum and instruction. While early literature on Chinese DLBE contexts examined program success based on students’ academic achievement and biliteracy development, there has been limited attention to cultivating critical consciousness to resist the commodification of language and multiculturalism for capitalist enterprise. Therefore, we propose a cohesive programmatic framework informed by Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) for Chinese DLBE programs to cultivate critical consciousness as a foundational educational goal. In this conceptual paper, we apply the seven tenets of AsianCrit to U.S. Chinese DLBE contexts to reimagine a community-based, historically-situated, and equity-oriented educational space. We hope this proposal will inform efforts toward just and innovative Chinese DLBE pedagogies and inspire new lines of critical research in the field of bilingual education.

ABSTRACT Calls to prepare all teachers to effectively teach multilingual learners are not new. Nevertheless, preservice preparation programs continue to fall short of this goal, despite enormous effort from teacher educators and researchers alike. This commentary leverages this IMRJ special issue on Critical Multilingual Awareness/Critical Consciousness in teacher preparation to both interrogate and consider solutions to this longstanding problem. Building on the featured articles’ valuable contributions to the field’s understandings about possibilities and challenges surrounding the development of teacher candidates’ critical consciousness, the commentary argues the importance of working toward program-level, rather than incremental, change. Grounded in recent, firsthand experience with the redesign of the elementary teacher education program at their own university, the authors offer insights for cultivating program coherence centered on teaching multilingual learners, while also noting necessary areas for growth and raising complex questions about the interplay between institutions of higher education and critical teacher education programs.

ABSTRACT Asian students are often rendered voiceless and invisible in mainstream schools and society in North America due to prevailing racialized model minority discourses. This qualitative inquiry aims to center 16 recently arrived Chinese transnational youths’ (ages 10–16) experiences of negotiating multiple sociocultural, sociohistorical, and sociolinguistic discourses surrounding Asians in Canadian schools using Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) as a theoretical lens. Thematic analyses of interviews with the youths reveal they were subjected to the intersectional harms of transnational school and home discourses, such as transnational differences in curriculum and instruction, double bind of the Asian model minority and forever foreigner stereotypes, racism, linguicism, social isolation in school, and high academic pressure and expectations from home. Central to their experiences was the perceived importance of English proficiency, which the youths strategically tried to gain by exiting and avoiding the stigmatized English as a second language programs and losing their first language, Chinese. The findings illuminate the struggles and compromises experienced by transnational students as they negotiate the multiple constraining discourses in Canadian schools, and that the flexible global citizenship they sought through transnational education may be unattainable in this climate of othering and without genuine multilingualism.

ABSTRACT To ensure equitable access to education for emergent multilingual learners, teachers should hold certain beliefs (Lucas et al., 2015) about language, including sociolinguistic consciousness, a value for linguistic diversity, and knowledge of the sociopolitical positioning of language (Lucas, 2011). This study examines possible effects of critical language awareness (CLA) (Fairclough, 1992) coursework on the development of critical consciousness related to language, identity, ideologies and culturally sustaining pedagogies multilingual preservice teachers of color. The research question is: What are some effects of the CMLA coursework on multilingual preservice teachers’ perceptions about the following measures: language ideologies, supporting students’ multiple languages outside the classroom, advocating for students’ multiple languages in the classroom, and critical perspectives? ANOVA analyses on pre- and post-survey data from 48 preservice teachers suggest that CLA coursework had a significant impact on three of the four critical consciousness measures, at varying levels of significance. This study shows that critical content delivered through well-designed pedagogical treatments can help improve preservice teachers’ understanding of the language use in their future classrooms, empower them through reflection on their language, identities, and ideologies, and guide them toward more asset-based approaches to teaching and learning.

ABSTRACT Employing transnationalism and transnational literacies as theoretical perspectives, this study explores how two focal students from Asian immigrant families construct their transnational and transcultural identities by reflecting on their dynamic border-crossing experiences. The students’ creation of artifacts (illustrating self-portraits and composing “I Am” poems) and collection of their oral narratives are analyzed to seek how they construct and negotiate their hybrid, sophisticated, and multifaceted identities by moving across both geographical and metaphorical borders. The findings show that Asian American students shape their collective identities when engaging in authentic and meaningful literacy practices that support them to reflect on and make connections to their transnational experiences and (hi)stories. Since the literature on transnationalism has focused on Latinx immigrants, this study narrows the gap in the literature by examining how students from Asian immigrant families build, negotiate, and embody their transnational identities when participating in literacy practices that reflect their unique transnational experiences. The findings provide implications for educators that including literacy practices in transnational contexts can be powerful pedagogy as it offers ample opportunities for transnational students to reflect on their richly diverse life experiences and to connect each facet of their collective identities to make meanings of their transnational lifeworld.

ABSTRACT STEM preparation – especially high school math course-taking – is a key predictor of college entrance. Previous research suggests that high school English learners (ELs) not only take fewer advanced math courses but also enroll in college at much lower rates than non-ELs – a group that includes former ELs. In the present study, we alter the analytic lens to examine whether ever-EL status, i.e. ever being identified for and receiving EL services, moderates the relationship between advanced math and college enrollment. Essentially, do ever-EL students experience the same boost to college enrollment from advanced math as their peers? We employ multilevel models to analyze statewide, longitudinal, administrative K–12 and higher education data to examine how ever-EL status and advanced math – and the interaction between the two – predict high school graduation, college application and enrollment, and level of college attended. Results show that both measures are associated with a greater likelihood of graduating from high school, applying to a four-year college, and enrolling in any college. We also find that ever-EL status moderates the relationship between advanced math and college enrollment, with important implications for students’ access to four-year colleges. Ultimately, ever-EL students experience different returns on advanced math relative to never-ELs.

ABSTRACT Translanguaging in classrooms opens spaces for multilingual students to engage in learning across the full range of their linguistic repertoire. We argue that one result of translanguaging pedagogy is that it can transform the talk-for-learning in the classroom and create a corriente or flow of ideas that is more free and less constrained than traditional classroom interactional patterns. However, what has been lacking in the translanguaging literature to date is an examination of if, when, and how teacher-student translanguaging actually does disrupt the traditional interactional structures of classrooms in ways that enhance student meaning-making. This article theorizes the translanguaging corriente at the discourse level using moment analysis to analyze data from two video datasets of elementary-grade lessons with emergent bilingual students in Texas and México with two extended excerpts illustrating the creative and critical potential of the translanguaging corriente. Pedagogical practices facilitating the corriente are also identified.

ABSTRACT Pedagogical strategies intended for monolingual classes may not adequately address the educational needs and aspirations of culturally and linguistically diverse learners, as multilingual and bilingual learners differ from monolinguals. This article sought to understand multilingual teachers’ pedagogical approaches to helping non-speakers of the language of instruction learn initial reading (decoding) skills in diverse classes of Lusaka District of Zambia. Qualitative data was collected through face-to-face interviews, focus groups, and lesson observations with 23 Grade One teachers. Data collected were transcribed and qualitative content analysis was performed through a meaning condensation process . Findings of the study revealed that teachers in multilingual classes used translanguaging, bilingual materials, remediation and reading interventions strategies to teach literacy among early graders. Further, parents, multilingual teachers, and bilingual learners were also used as resources in multilingual classes. The study recommended that the government should develop and implement a strong simultaneous bilingual or multilingual literacy programme to reflect community languages and avoid imposing monoglossic language ideologies across schools. Early grade teachers should be allowed to use diverse pedagogical approaches in the teaching of reading in multilingual classes within the mainstream curriculum.