Introduction to Volume 46, Issues 3–4

The Bilingual Research Journal has a long history of excellence. Starting in 1975 as NABE, then the NABE Journal, the journal has been known as the Bilingual Research Journal: The Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) since 1992. Thanks to the efforts of previous editors, editorial board members, volunteer reviewers, the NABE Board, and countless others, the Bilingual Research Journal (BRJ) is a top ranked (Q1) journal, known for publishing rigorous and relevant research on bilingual education. As a leading research journal, one role of the BRJ is to disseminate rigorous research that expands our knowledge, provides direction for more equitable policies and practices, and is a forum for different perspectives.

As the journal’s new editorial team, we are excited to continue the legacy, acknowledging we stand on the shoulders of those who have kept the journal going at such a high level of quality and impact. We are deeply grateful to the previous editorial team of 10+ years, led by Drs. María Franquiz, Alba Ortiz, Gilberto Lara, Patricia Abril-González, and Adelmira Ynostroza Ochoa. Our vision for the journal builds on this legacy moving forward.

The BRJ will continue to be the flagship journal for rigorous research related to bilingual development, bilingual education, with a commitment to the experiences and schooling of minoritized language speakers. We want to ensure that the BRJ creates a space for the voices of those traditionally marginalized to be heard and made visible. Much knowledge has been gained in the last few years on critical elements that can increase equitable educational opportunities for bilingual learners. However, there remain enduring barriers to the development of the full potential of bilingual children and youth. This requires that scholars in the field examine questions with far-reaching implications using innovative research methods. Thus, we wish to encourage and invite scholarship that addresses key issues in the field and sets an agenda for future scholarship. The following are some examples of areas where we hope the BRJ articles can make a contribution (see also Freire, Alfaro, & de Jong, 2023).

• Power, status, and equity. An enduring issue in the field is the intersection between power, status, and equity. The dominant monolingual, English-only narrative has historically constrained bilingual education in the United States – and similar discourses have had the same impact in other nation-states. Research that analyzes power dynamics and their impact on educational opportunities for bilingual students as well as efforts to resist hegemonic practices at the school, district and community settings is greatly needed.

• Dynamic and intersectional identities. Critical awareness of the role of culture, language, and identities as they intersect with gender, class, religion, and other identities in children and youth is a central issue for research moving forward. Examining this dimension of our field calls for research and exploration of new research methodologies.

• Sociocultural contexts of bilingualism and biliteracy: Increasing our knowledge of the sociocultural contexts in which bilingual children and students participate and develop (including schools) can bring insights to inform language and biliteracy development, and pedagogies and approaches to assessment that challenge deficit views.

• Community and family engagement. We see a great need for research that crosses traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries in an effort to collectively work toward more equity and educational outcomes for our bilingual learners. Research on building authentic partnerships among community-based organizations, higher education, families, early childhood programs and schools, to support bilingual development and dual language education is woefully needed.

• Teacher development and preparation. Research on bilingual teacher and leadership preparation is surprisingly lacking and there is a great need to better understand how to prepare teachers and educational leaders to design and implement quality bilingual education programs and resist the monolingual ideologies and English hegemony while doing so. It is also important to understand the pervasive and racist structures that undermine the access of teachers of Color (who are often bilingual) to teacher preparation.

• Pedagogical approaches in bilingual education. Questions persist on the relationship between federal and state policies and the implementation of bilingual education, the use of the different languages in the classroom, the influence of teachers’ language ideologies in the implementation of bilingual practices, and the social dynamics in bilingual classrooms.

We invite you, the reader of the BRJ, to join us in exploring these issues and expanding the knowledge base so that our work may inform policy, practice, professional learning, as well as future research.

This issue

In our first issue as a newly gathered editorial team, manuscripts include a variety of topics from historical analysis of the impact of federal district court cases for bilingual education, family language and literacy practices, the development of social competence in bilingual learners to the impact of COVID-19 on teachers of multilingual learners. The first article presents an important case in language policy that underscores the role of bilingual education in young learners and parents’ determination to offer their children the best education possible. As a continuation to the theme of families’ important role, several articles are included that describe family efforts to promote their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy. Three articles report how these different language and literacy practices in the home and school might explain differences in children’s lexical and literacy engagement, narrative patterns and social competence between bilingual boys and girls and between bilinguals and monolinguals. We end this issue with an analysis of the consequences of COVID on teachers of multilingual learners.

More specifically, Mia Sosa-Provencio and Rebecca Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico examine the segregated and exclusionary context of Portales, New Mexico from the 1950s to the present within the community and its schools resulting in the language policy case of Serna v. Portales (1974), which prevailed. Judy Serna, was a young seven year old child, excluded from school. Her mother, Ramona Serna, led the lawsuit in the federal 10th circuit, demonstrating that her child could not be enrolled at her area public schools because she did not speak English. Working in partnership with community agencies, activists alongside the area university, and the Mexican American Defense League, the outcomes of the case yielded to both integrated schooling and the provision of bilingual education. The case also set the stage for increased representation of Mexican American teachers who had long been barred from the profession. Sosa-Provencio and Sanchez end the captivating narrative of the policy architects with lessons learned and how to invoke the spirit of Serna in our present-day contexts. To embrace Serna’s multilingual spirit, the next articles highlight the varied language practices among multilingual families.

Within the theme of family language beliefs and practices, in an article that examined parents’ decision-making process, Lenny Sánchez and collaborators described parents’ “investments” of social and cultural resources to ensure their children’s development of bilingualism. Parents of children attending a dual language immersion school were interviewed to explore their beliefs regarding being bilingual and supporting their children’s bilingualism. Findings revealed that parents’ ideological investments in an asset-based stance on bilingualism, in cultural practices that promote bilingualism and language development, and in their belief that bilingualism has long-term benefits, shaped their actions and time allocated to different practices that were conducive to children’s development as bilinguals.

Similarly, using Bourdieu’s concept of language habitus as a theoretical framework, Thi Minh Thu Bui examined the language policy of a Vietnamese immigrant family in Melbourne. Findings revealed that the children’s multilingual habitus was shaped by a linguistic environment that valued the use of the home language and children’s own agency. This was manifested in children’s participation in everyday experiences in the home and other social contexts such as Vietnamese school and frequent interactions with relatives. Bui argues that adults’ and children’s lived experiences in the different social contexts as well as their habitus and capital are important elements to consider in family language policy research.

Articles within this theme also examined family literacy practices. In a mixed-methods study, Li and collaborators investigated the less explored gender differences in Chinese-Canadians first graders’ bilingual lexical and literacy engagement in the context of home literacy environments. Chinese-Canadian girls demonstrated higher levels in L1 and L2 vocabulary than boys. Interestingly, these gender differences were associated with how parents engaged with their children in literacy practices. Unlike other studies, the quantity of language exposure in English and Chinese in the home was not associated with receptive vocabulary. Rather, parents’ engagement in quality home literacy practices using Chinese seemed to make a positive difference in boys’ English and Chinese vocabulary. Parents’ beliefs that girls had a higher ability to be bilingual than boys, shaped differential literacy practices and selection of literacy materials as they engaged with their children.

As a result of children’s participation in these cultural practices, bilingual children might exhibit different patterns of development to their monolingual counterparts. Lucía Méndez, Dana Bitetti and Jamie Perry compared the similarities and differences between micro-and-macro structural components in the narrative retells of a group of typically developing Latine dual language learners and Caucasian kindergartners. Results suggested comparable patterns across groups in the children’s narrative microstructural components such as narrative length, vocabulary diversity, sentence length, and grammatical complexity. However, differences were found between the two groups in the macrostructural components of character development and mental states. Spanish-English bilingual children tended to place greater emphasis on the characters’ characteristics, thoughts, and feelings than Caucasian monolinguals. Findings of the study highlight cultural variations in children’s development of narratives and the strengths in narrative styles found in young Spanish-English bilingual children.

These differences do not only manifest in children’s language development. One important goal of two-way immersion programs is the development of social competence. Using Social Network Analysis, Erika Feinauer, Rich DeJordy and Elizabeth Howard aimed to examine the sociocultural competence of a group of kindergartners in a two-way immersion program in Central America. Findings revealed that bilingual children demonstrated higher levels of sociocultural competence than their monolingual peers as they tended to select more cross-group friendships. The authors advocate for the use of Social Network Theory as a useful method to examine sociocultural competence in two-way immersion programs.

The COVID pandemic greatly and disproportionately affected bilingual learners, their families, and their teachers. A recent report by UnidosUS (2022) shows how the move to online learning had a particularly strong negative impact on designated English language learners (ELLs). In a study that focused on teachers rather than learners and their families, Elizabeth Vera and Amy Heineke point out that the pandemic affected teachers of bilingual learners as well. In their study, they examine the unique impact of the pandemic on teachers of multilingual learners in the midwest. They show how teachers negotiated additional stress factors as they tried to ensure access to multilingual services when such resources were limited. The study’s findings draw attention to teacher resilience in the face of the pandemic, the development of empathy, and the importance of self-care.

Finally, we have a review of two important books in the field: Dual Language Education in the US: Rethinking Pedagogy, Curricula, and Teacher Education to Support Dual Language Learning for All, edited by Pablo C. Ramírez and Christian J. Faltis and reviewed by Syukron Fajriansyah and Yopi Malagola, and, Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals: Speaking Back to Print-Centric Practices edited by Lin Hao and Sally Brown, reviewed by Chenlu Jin.