Educating Emergent Bilingual Youth in High School

This book revolves around educating recently arrived immigrant youth in the United States who are emergent bilinguals. Drawing on a seven-year research collaboration with three ESL teachers in an urban secondary school in the United States, it addresses questions around taking a critical approach to language and literacy education, including what this looks like in everyday practice and what emergent bilingual youth can learn from it. The chapters illustrate the praxis of critical language and literacy education undertaken by everyday ESL teachers, curricular materials and pedagogical practices that promote emergent bilingual youths' engagement with words and worlds, and finally, a methodological and relational approach to researching with classroom teachers. The book introduces teaching practices such as dialogic problem-posing, translanguaging and translation, the use of multimodal texts, and youth research on language. Arguing for the potential power of critical language and literacy education for immigrant youth and their teachers, this book will benefit educators, researchers, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy, second language acquisition (SLA), ESL and TESOL pedagogy, and in curriculum studies, education of immigrant children and youth, and multicultural issues in education.

Jie Y. Park is Associate Professor of Education at Clark University, USA.

1. The Foundation and Framework: Critical Approaches to Language and Literacy Education 2. The Context: The ESL Classroom, Teachers, and Emergent Bilingual Youth at Community Middle and High 3. Critical Multilingual Pedagogies in Action: From Principles to Practice 4. Who is American? What is Race?: Dialogic Problem-Posing for Emergent Bilinguals 5. Found in Translation: Discovering Language, Meaning, Self, and Worlds in Poetry Translation 6. Seeing (through) Multimodal Texts: Graphic Novels and Documentaries in Critical Multilingual Education (with Lori Simpson) 7. "The History Behind Our Language": Youth Research on Language (with Lori Simpson) 8. From the Margins to Power: The Promise of Critical Language and Literacy Education