Necessary but not sufficient: collaborative participant structures for fostering dialogic interaction among immigrant multilingual youth

For immigrant students learning a new language, interaction with peers can provide important opportunities for both language development and content-area learning. Yet little research has examined the nature of interaction among so-called “newcomers” in classroom settings. This study draws on ecological and sociocultural lenses to analyze peer interactions among recently arrived multilingual immigrant youth in two high school “newcomer” programs in California. Analysis of the data indicated that, not surprisingly, students had far more opportunities to interact with peers in classrooms that more frequently asked students to engage in collaborative participant structures. However, the assigned participant structures alone revealed little about the quality of students’ interactions. Closer analysis made clear that some instructional activities, while positioned as collaborative, provided few opportunities for extended discourse. At the same time, when tasks calling for individual student work were designed to be intellectually engaging and not meant exclusively to elicit and evaluate grammatical accuracy, students often participated in spontaneous and extended interactions with each other. The richest discourse occurred during collaborative activities designed to facilitate students’ sense-making, agentive participation, and utilization of the range of semiotic resources at students’ disposal. These findings point to the necessity of considering the nature of the content and intellectual “asks” of multilingual learners in addition to providing structured opportunities for interaction with peers.