ABSTRACT
Drawing upon data from a video ethnographic project in a diverse middle school science classroom, this analysis examines the academic literacy practices of two emergent bilingual Latina students in Grade 8. Previous research on students’ achievement from this video ethnographic project indicated that the science curriculum helped all students perform better, except students designated as current or former ESOL (see Lynch, Kuipers, Pyke, & Szesze, 2005). However, it is not completely clear how or why this subgroup of students did not do as well. I take a multimodal view of academic literacy development, tracing the actions and interactions in which these two students engaged to develop science literacy in particular. I suggest that these two students may have struggled with some transformative multimodal processes, leading them to have difficulty representing their knowledge in valued ways on their end-of-unit tests. This may provide insight into the performance of other bilingual/emergent bilingual students who used this science curriculum with less success than others. Viewing academic literacy development as a multimodal social practice gives prominence to the kinds of sign systems with which students are expected to work and master, and, in turn, may provide insight into how bilingual and emergent bilingual students may be better supported in science settings.
