Teaching Multilingual Immigrant Youth

Catalog description

Immigrant youth often face the dual challenge of learning a new language and learning academic content in that language simultaneously. Many educators, however, struggle to identify and implement instructional practices that acknowledge immigrant learners’ strengths, while also attending to their linguistic, academic, and social needs. This course brings insights and findings from sociolinguistics to bear on research on teaching practices to develop a situated, interactionally mindful approach to supporting the language and literacy development of multilingual youth in contexts of migration. An intensive service-learning project offers course participants the opportunity to “learn by doing” by working closely with multilingual youth in a community-based, immigrant-serving organization. Although the course takes the case of immigrant and first-generation students attending U.S. elementary and secondary schools as its starting point, discussion of the implications and applications to other educational and national contexts is encouraged. The goal of this course is to prepare educators to work with multilingual immigrant youth in contextually sensitive, theoretically informed, interactionally attuned, and humanizing ways.