Toward Linguistic Justice: Immigrant Students' and Families' Languaging as Pedagogical Disruption of School‐Based Literacy Instruction

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine immigrant families' language and literacy practices against the backdrop of school‐based literacy instruction in two dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs: Vietnamese/English and Portuguese/English. We draw upon raciolinguistics and translanguaging scholarship to analyze interviews, classroom observations, and home visits to five Vietnamese families and five Brazilian families whose children attended the DLBE programs in the same state. Our findings highlight that families' language and literacy practices were often devalued as “inappropriate” and “uneducated” in schools despite serving as rich cultural and linguistic resources in multilingual students' everyday lives. We also document the transnational, translingual, and multimodal literacies that immigrant families cultivated across home, community, and transnational contexts. Although situated within DLBE contexts, these findings have broad implications for educators who serve multilingual learners in both bilingual and English‐medium classrooms. We argue that diversifying literacy instruction requires critical listening and equitable family engagement to honor linguistic sovereignty and account for the complexity and assets existing within each multilingual immigrant community.