Exploring Peer Interaction Among Multilingual Youth: New Possibilities and Challenges for Language and Literacy Learning

ABSTRACT

Peer interactions are central to student experiences and present tremendous opportunities for language learning and consequences for educational equity, yet these opportunities have often been unrecognized and under-examined. This special issue offers new perspectives examining the potential of peer interaction to foster language, literacy and identity development. Peer interaction provides an interesting context for students to play with language and try out new ideas, thus allowing educators and researchers to broaden our view of learning opportunities. By providing a nuanced and close examination of interactions multilingual students experience in diverse classrooms, the articles in this special issue advance the field, reveal challenges, and offer new directions for future research. This introduction discusses how the articles in this special issue are situated in a larger scholarly conversation that has implications for the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer interaction
• emerging bilinguals
• English language learners
• multilingual youth

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the work of the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments, questions, and suggestions strengthened each of the manuscripts included here. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to all of the authors of the articles, Amanda Kibler for her commentary, and the IMRJ editor, Jeff MacSwan, for making this special issue possible. Finally, thank you to Natalia Guzmán, the IMRJ editorial assistant, for her important support throughout the process.