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Theorizing classrooms as contexts of reception shaped by ideological, relational, and pedagogical dimensions, and drawing on ethnographic data from a yearlong study of recent‐arrival immigrant youths' educational experiences in an urban U.S. high school, this paper describes how a group of recent‐arrival youth acted upon the discourses, pedagogical practices, and identity categories in their content‐area and ESL classes. It challenges traditional depictions of school engagement that focus on youths' personal traits and individual attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawn from a two-year critical ethnography, the author explores how Mexican-origin students in a U. S. southwest charter high school resisted Spanish heritage language instruction. Resistance was rooted in students' perception that their teacher unfairly characterized their linguistic and social identities. Students also constructed their non-native Spanish teacher to be a Spanish-language learner, disqualifying her to teach their heritage language, despite her proficiency. Misunderstandings arose from teacher's and students' limited imaginings of Spanish-language discourse communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the complicated relationship between ideologies of language and language learning, discourses of immigration and belonging, and the actual lived experiences of individual language learners. The analysis demonstrates how questions of educational access, economic stability, and social membership are all influenced by a range of social, political, and historical factors, particularly for recently arrived immigrants and refugees from war-torn African contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we investigate language ideology in a department of Spanish. We are concerned with examining the acquisition and transmission of linguistic culture in departments of foreign languages within university settings and the ways in which views about non-English languages that are part of the American cultural dialogue are maintained and nurtured by educational institutions. Using long-term participant-observation data and focused interviews, we contend that foreign language departments in U.S. colleges and universities, although involved in a nonhegemonic practice-that is, in the teaching of non-English languages-are nevertheless working in concert with deeply held American ideologies about bilingualism and monolingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]