ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how a university-school partnership program, School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS), was implemented in an English language development class to foster multilingual students’ abilities to identify and analyze sociolinguistic discrimination and injustice. From the perspectives of the program instructors, we present pedagogical examples of the challenges and complexities involved in creating dialogic and participatory learning opportunities for multilingual learners who were in the earlier stages of English language development. We argue for the importance of leveraging students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge as a foundation upon which opportunities for dialogic interactions can be created to support students’ language growth and engagement with meaningful content. Based on our lessons learned, we suggest classroom and curricular conditions as well as teacher strategies to promote dialogic learning opportunities that can guide multilingual learners to engage critically within and beyond the classroom to challenge sociolinguistic injustice.
