ABSTRACT
Academic literacies-in English and students’ home languages-have been constructed as the specific literacy practices and discourses needed for students to participate effectively in schools and classrooms, but this construction has been questioned as overly simplistic (Valdés, 2004; Zamel, 1998). Indeed, English academic literacies for adolescent bilinguals include school-based reading, writing, and oral discourses that vary across diverse content areas, text genres, text-based practices, and multimodal forms of engagement in literacy activity. A growing body of research has expanded oversimplified constructions and documented the heterogeneous literacy practices characteristic of classrooms that serve emergent bilingual students (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999; Martinez, Orellana, Pacheco, & Carbone, 2008; Martinez, 2010; Pacheco, 2010a, 2010b; Gutiérrez, Morales, & Martinez, 2009). These studies show that in classrooms serving emergent bilingual students what “counts” as academic literacy is affected by the extent to which students’ home languages are utilized in the classroom, teachers’ beliefs about literacy teaching and learning, accountability policies, and mandated curricula. Further, these studies illustrate that the instantiation of academic literacies in classrooms is coordinated, organized, facilitated, and coconstructed by teachers and students alike and that language practices play a fundamental role in literacy teaching and learning.
