This article focuses on teachers’ key role as implementers of language policy. It looks at how teachers uphold, modify, or even reject language policy through their teaching practice. First, we touch on the English-only movement in the United States, which influenced the creation and implementation of the 4-hour English Language Development (ELD) model in Arizona. Next, we present the components of the 4-hour ELD model (i.e., Discrete Skills Inventory, Super SEI Strategies, time allocations). We turn to Ricento and Hornberger’s piece (1996), which discusses how policy formation and implementation consists of many layers; teachers’ roles are often underemphasized. We then describe the methods and purpose of the Lillie et al. (2010) study and explain how the present study emerged from it. We move on to present three vignettes that capture the varying ways in which teachers enact the 4-hour ELD model. Key findings were that although the 4-hour ELD model was prescriptive, teachers ultimately shaped curriculum in their own classrooms, thereby playing a pivotal role in language policy implementation.

This ten-month ethnographic study examines how four Latina immigrant mothers and their young children employed literacy practices within and beyond a two-generation program. Two-generation programs generally serve marginalized families by instructing them on school-based language and literacy practices. This study approaches literacy from sociocultural (i.e., what people do with literacy) and multimodal perspectives (i.e., print, visual, oral, media, and online literacies). The study examines a) the kinds of school-based literacy practices--or aspects of them--that mothers took up in out-of-school contexts; b) the kinds of out-of-school-literacy practices--or aspects of them--that mothers brought to the school site; and c) the continuities and discontinuities of literacy practices across contexts. Data was collected through observations, ethnographic interviews, document analysis, and video. Findings reveal that in out-of-school contexts, some of the school-based literacy practices learned at Nuestra Comunidad were replicated, and/or modified, while others were not taken up. The varying ways that mothers took up school-based literacy practices was most often influenced by participants' cultural values related to language and literacy and their purposes or goals for engaging in particular literacy activities. The study also found that when mothers employed out-of-school literacy practices at Nuestra Comunidad they were met with resistance due to conflicting ideologies regarding appropriate language and literacy activities and curricula. Mothers still brought in their out-of-school literacy practices in clandestine manners or had to modify their practices. When focusing on marginalized groups, traditional family literacy research has either a) privileged school-based literacy practices and their replication in the home setting; or b) emphasized the cultural and linguistic wealth of marginalized families' home literacy practices but highlighted the differences between these practices and those employed and valued in school (Auerbach, 1989; Gadsden, 1998, 2001). This study looks beyond the simple replication of literacy practices from school to home and vice versa. Rather, this research provides insight into the rich literacy practices that Latino families engage in throughout the many contexts of their lives by highlighting the complex ways in which literacy practices move across spaces.

This study examines the implementation and organization of the state mandated curriculum in the 4-hour SEI block in 18 K-12 classrooms in 5 different districts. We focus on the effects of grouping by language proficiency, the delivery of the structure-based ESL curriculum, the provision of resources and limiting of access to grade-level curriculum, and problems of promotion and graduation for ELLs. In each of these areas, the implementation of the SEI 4- hour block raises concerns with regard to equal educational opportunity and access to English. Key among the findings of this study are: ELLs are physically, socially, and educationally isolated from their non-ELL peers; they are not exiting the program in one year, raising serious questions about the time these students must remain in these segregated settings; reclassification rates are a poor indicator of success in mainstream classrooms; and the four-hour model places ELLs at a severe disadvantage for high school graduation. The only means for these students to graduate with their peers appears to be through after school and summer school programs that either did not exist or had been cut.

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