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…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

Language revitalization efforts have been critiqued for creating and reproducing linguistic, epistemological, and pedagogical hierarchies that might run counter to a community's needs and interests. Drawing on a seven-year ethnographic and collaborative research with the Maya cultural promoters of the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco, Mexico, we…

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…