| Teachers and students in the United States face evolving challenges as growing numbers of language minority students enroll in schools, particularly in locations where immigrant and language minority communities have previously been few in number. One such challenge is posed by the enrollment of newly arrived language minority students after the start of the school year. This dissertation documents the experiences of a group of latecomers—students who enter the US school system for the first time as teenagers, but also matriculate late in the school year—a subgroup of emergent bilinguals that represents an acute case of the newcomer experience but which, to date, has received no focused scholarly attention. In order to contribute to increased awareness of and improved instruction for this group, I present a portrait of their experiences, drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, and documents from one year of ethnographic study at a suburban high school in the New Latino Diaspora. The majority of the latecomers in this context were teenage labor migrants from Mexico who enrolled in high school hoping to learn English and thus improve their job prospects. These students faced a number of challenges related to late entry in the school year, but their most enduring challenges were related instead to their backgrounds as "sojourners"—transnational, undocumented, labor migrants—as well as to aspects of their schooling context: hyper-segregation and limited access to English, narrow foci of language classes, and curriculum and pedagogy that failed to reflect their experiences, interests, or draw on their personal resources. Spanish-language use and a rich network of peer-supports buffered latecomers from many challenges they may have otherwise faced but also unintentionally reduced their opportunities to use English. Unable to meet their goals under these conditions, many latecomers withdrew before the end of the school year. This study has curricular and pedagogical implications for teaching immigrant students at the high school level in and beyond the New Latino Diaspora. Furthermore, it adds to the knowledge base on heterogeneity of backgrounds and needs among adolescent learners of English. |
