Persistent educational inequity for immigrant and refugee students and their families calls for instructional practices centering on access, quality, and social justice. Drawing on two qualitative case studies, this article examines how three U.S. urban school teachers attended to the systemic inequalities and unique challenges confronting immigrant and refugee students both inside their classrooms and outside the school. Our analyses show that the teachers strategically enacted various critical instructional practices, including linguistically responsive pedagogy, translanguaging, and sociopolitically responsive pedagogy. The teachers’ agentic practices have important implications for teacher education and professional development for immigrant and refugee learners in urban settings.

As the world moves to a post-COVID stage and movement of goods and people across borders resumes, we need to rethink how we communicate and educate students about communication in a superdiverse world with increased presence of minoritized languages and varieties. The growing evidence of translanguaging practices among plurilingual speakers in multilingual societies and linguistic minority communities across the globe (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2017; Oliver et al., 2020; Seals & Olsen-Reeder, 2020; Straszer et al., 2022) has prompted greater attention to equity and linguistic social justice issues in language education. Pedagogical translanguaging has been put forward as an “all encompassing” (Li, 2018, p. 9) practice to address linguistic inequities and injustices in the classroom. While it is a step forward in countering monolingual ideology and the dominant-language-exclusive policy and sanction, I draw attention to the “selective” nature of much of the current pedagogical translanguaging approach and argue for “inclusive translanguaging” that capitalizes on all of the languages, cultures, and identities of plurilingual speakers who have historically received marginalization, including their non-dominant dialects or mother tongues.

This study was designed to examine the role of early bilingual home literacy experiences (HLE) (including parent–child shared reading, parents’ direct teaching in Chinese and English, the availability of books in both languages, and children’s access to digital devices for bilingual learning) in the biliteracy development of 66 Chinese–Canadian first graders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive analyses reveal that overall, parents report higher engagement in English than in Chinese across the four HLE measures. Parent’s engagement in bilingual HLE differs by gender, SES, and immigration status. Pearson correlational analyses of English reading, decoding, and bilingual oral receptive vocabulary reveal that the four dimensions of HLE are not strongly related to English early literacy skills but are positively related to Chinese receptive vocabulary. Finally, hierarchical regression analyses indicate that the availability of books in Chinese and parent–child shared reading in Chinese are key factors associated with Chinese receptive vocabulary score variance; the amount of time using digital devices is found to be significantly related to English reading comprehension, but not Chinese vocabulary; and parents’ direct teaching is not significant with either English early literacy skills or Chinese receptive vocabulary. These findings have important implications for parental engagement in early bilingual home literacy activities and early literacy instruction in school.

Translanguaging involves the use of the first language in the second or foreign language classroom. Such language use has been a matter of debate with regards to vocabulary learning, but the research findings are clear. Using the first language to explain the meanings of foreign or second language words is highly effective and has a positive effect on the learning of vocabulary. The primary reason for this positive effect is that first language translations are clear and comprehensible. For the same reason, hard-copy or electronic bilingual dictionaries are a very useful resource for elementary and intermediate level learners of English as a foreign language. Learners at the elementary and intermediate levels do not have a large enough vocabulary to cope with monolingual English dictionaries, because even dictionaries which have been specially prepared for learners of English as a foreign language use a defining vocabulary of around 2000 words.

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