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In this article I argue that both sociocultural theories and those that address academic literacies must be invoked to adequately understand language and literacy development in schools. Through exploring the histories, school lives, and viewpoints of two kindergarten students, I show how identity work negotiated in classroom interactions can afford or deny access to the language and practices of school. My argument views language and literacy development as a socialization process and classrooms as complex ecological systems-spaces where multiple discourses and languages come into contact, interacting in complex ways. For children to acquire school-affiliated identities, they must acquire the language as well as the behaviors, attitudes, resources, and ways of engaging needed to recognizably display the identity of a successful student. The findings show that for these children, the ability to engage successfully with academic literacies was distinct from their ability to engage successfully in social interactions. Their language and literacy development was not necessarily determined by economic and cultural capital nor by their social status within the classroom. The study challenges researchers and teachers to re-envision viable classroom ecologies that provide access to school languages and literacies.

There is a curious disjuncture in the current discourse(s) on the schooling of immigrant and minority students. The official discourse, as has been communicated through the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 rhetoric and the concomitant focus on standards and assessment, says that minority children, especially English language learners (ELLs) must gain "standard" English language skills in an unreasonably short time frame, while achieving on par with native English speaking students in academic content areas. Policy decisions at federal, state, and local levels are being made without input from educational researchers and professionals who have expertise in these areas. However, even within educational circles there is heated debate about how best to educate ELLs, and what "best practices" and "best programs" look like. W e are experiencing an unprecedented wave of immigration nationally. Data from the United States Department of Education show that the number of students with "limited English skills" in U.S. schools has doubled in the last decade, with the current count at 5 million. Current data simultaneously identify a shortage of teachers across the nation who are qualified or trained to teach these children. A recent New York Times article (Zhao, 2002) claims that there is currently one qualified teacher available for every 100 ELLs.This places these controversies at the forefront of the crises facing education today. Not only do we have contradictory (and sometimes uninformed) discourses at play, which are shaping educational policy, we also have little unity among opinions within the field of education itself. And we now have the majority of classroom teachers in this country serving ELLs with no preparation or professional knowledge in how best to do so.This article focuses on research on second language acquisition (SLA) in classrooms and school environments where English is the language of instruction, and addresses the disjuncture between what is known (and by whom) and what it is that we need to know and take into account to make informed decisions about schooling and instructional designs for ELLs. It proposes a theoretical framework within which research might be conducted that ultimately could inform all stakeholders as to best educational policies and practices for immigrant and non-native English-speaking students.

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