Midadolescents' Language Learning at School: A Response to Open Peer Commentaries

Language-in-education research can contribute to transformative progress toward educational equity and excellence. Although this assertion is likely uncontroversial within the field of language in education, agreeing on which types of research lead to which transformative progress is much less straightforward. The thought-provoking commentaries on my original article provided a range of important perspectives on this issue. Among the many relevant insights raised by commentators, I focus in this reply on seven claims related to my work on midadolescents' school-relevant language learning with connections to the larger language-in-education research field. My goal is to state my own position clearly on issues often interpreted differently through various lenses, prone to misguided assumptions, or insufficiently discussed. I draw from years of work in research-practice partnerships with public schools in the United States and abroad as well as from my accumulated personal experiences as an adult immigrant to the United States, as a mother of two Spanish-English bilingual and biliterate young women, and as an educator. To my readers, I ask that they interpret the claims discussed below not as isolated reflections but within the context of my call for moving from pedagogies of silence (Oliveira, 2022) to pedagogies of voices as described in my original article (Uccelli, 2023). Below, I first introduce and discuss each of the seven claims. I close this reply by inviting readers to work across practice and research and across paradigms and methods in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams committed to working and learning together towards transforming education.