Language Learning Practices: Assessments, Third Spaces, and Community Partnerships

Emphasizing the central role of relationships between researcher and communities, this presentation shares findings from a community-based ethnography project that examined the experiences of plurilingual students, their parents’ and their teachers’ in K-12 third-tier city classrooms. Researchers, teachers, students and parents came together in the spirit of participatory collaboration and practitioner inquiry methodology as a means to respond to the academic, social and cultural challenges experienced by immigrant and refugee students. The community-based approach in this study and the plurilingual practices provided opportunities for participation, engagement and agency for immigrant and refugee students and their parents.

Our research focuses on the language and literacy practices of young emergent bilingual children. Using ethnographic methods we explore the complexity and richness of their language and literacy practices over time, as situated within classrooms, families and communities. In this paper we examine our multiple identities and consider our positioning and interactions in research partnerships and how these impact our engagement in dialogue and co-construction of ideas. We present dilemmas in our research that illustrate challenges in our work towards creating a “third space” for social change and transformative reform in partnership with children, families, schools and communities.

This study examines the relationship between scores on the TOEFL Internet-Based Test (TOEFL iBT®) writing tasks and academic performance in required university academic writing courses for NNES (non-native English speaker) education graduate students. Interviews are conducted with teachers and students in a graduate school of education, regarding comparisons of composing strategies between TOEFL writing tasks and academic writing courses they take. This study illustrates the disjunctions and similarities of strategies applied for TOEFL writing and university academic writing, providing implications for teachers and students to bridge the gap and utilize strategies learned from TOEFL to academic writing practice.