Although researchers often acknowledge the importance of linguistically rich interactions in the academic language development of emergent bilingual students, few studies have explicitly examined the role of linguistic peer support and the underlying structure of social relationships in the second language learning experiences and outcomes of immigrant adolescents in schooling contexts. This mixed methods study investigates the role of peers-including bilingual peers-in the development of oral academic English during adolescence. Using social network analysis, this study describes the unique contribution of peer linguistic resources to the oral Academic English Proficiency of 102 adolescent Spanish-speaking immigrant students. Findings show that having bilingual peers who collaborated on academic tasks with participants, in English or Spanish, contributed to academic English proficiency beyond individual predictors of second language acquisition (age, time in the United States, gender, and maternal education). Peer social network composition indexed the opportunities adolescent English learners encountered at school to learn and use academic English.

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Background In schools, a major obstacle to drawing on emergent bilingual students’ knowledge and skills in their first language is a widespread lack of awareness about language use among adolescent English learners, including how peer talk can connect knowledge and abilities in both languages to school-based learning. Although research often acknowledges the importance of engaging students’ home language and culture to bridge to academic literacies in English, few have explicitly examined bilingual peer talk as a resource for language learning during adolescence. Purpose This study explores how emergent bilinguals engaged multiple linguistic codes to scaffold their own academic language development with peer support. Research Design Ethnography and discourse analysis of student interactions were used to contextualize and analyze the academic language use of four Spanish-speaking adolescent immigrant students, taking into account the affordances of classroom discourse structures and peer talk. Conclusions The study describes the linguistic resources available to Spanish-speaking adolescent immigrant students through their peers and shows that emergent bilingual youth used academic language in both Spanish and English most frequently—and in more elaborated interactions—while off-task or in less supervised spaces. Classroom discourse structures often limited student participation, particularly when students used nonstandard linguistic codes.

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