ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, many U.S. colleges and universities have seen a dramatic increase in the number of students from immigrant families. This group of students is highly diverse: some students have been in the U.S. since birth while others arrived shortly before or even during their college years. Some enter college with complex bilingual or multilingual communicative repertoires while others enter college still strongly self-identifying as “ESL students.” Some have had nurturing and enriching kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) schooling experiences that promoted and validated their language and literacy development in both English and their home language(s) while others have experienced numerous educational injustices in the U.S.: crowded, poorly equipped, underfunded schools; monolingual English “submersion” policies that offer students little linguistic or cultural validation and little academic support; deficit-oriented “ability tracking” policies that can keep students out of “mainstream” classes and deny students access to a rich, engaging, reading and writing curriculum; and both subtle and overt racial, ethnic, and linguistic discrimination.
