This year-long study explored the linguistic and cognitive transactions of immigrant language-minority kindergarten students in the social context of classroom collaborative talk in their native language. Collaborative talk transactions were selected from 13 videotaped sessions involving 27 Hispanic kindergarten students, mostly recent arrivals from Mexico, in a Chicago public school. Findings were threefold. First, the collaborative talk transactions, framed within a cognitive and linguistic stance, demonstrated how meanings and new understandings were constructed and restructured; showed how the teacher and students made use of their cultural values, assumptions, attitudes, and experiences to construct new meanings and shared understandings; and revealed how learners engaged in oral literacies in collaboration with the teacher and then began to formulate and test hypotheses without the teacher's mediation. Second, the collaborative discourse situated within an empowerment and voice perspective showed how culturally responsive teaching and learning maximized the use of language-minority students' linguistic, cultural, and cognitive resources; revealed that these learners displayed high motivation and interest when the topics were relevant to their lives; and illustrated how learners made connections between the concepts embedded in discourse and their own experiences and understandings. Finally, the discursive practices reflected the importance of native language use in allowing culturally and linguistic diverse students to express their thinking and understandings in their more competent linguistic system and in the language of their cultural and social worlds. Thirteen appendices present the collaborative talk transactions. (Contains 161 references.) (Author/TD)