Call for Book Chapters: “Advancing Multilingual Learners’ Academic Discursive Proficiency and Disciplinary Literacy Skills in Educational Contexts"

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals for a forthcoming edited volume, “Advancing Multilingual Learners’ Academic Discursive Proficiency and Disciplinary Literacy Skills in Educational Contexts” (editor, Brian Hibbs).

Academic discourse can be defined more generally as “the language (e.g., spoken, written, visual images) [that is] often used in school or higher education contexts [that] involves both content specific terminology, registers, and representations as well as cross-disciplinary lexico-grammatical structures and systems” (Romero, 2023, p. 68) and more specifically as “classroom thinking, writing, and dialogue between and among students and teachers that support socialized learning processes to deepen students’ understanding of key ideas and concepts” (Simon et al., 2021, p. 296). Such discourse typically involves supporting students’ understanding of the variety of ways that language is used in academic settings with the goal of them ultimately seeing themselves as part of such communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). One concrete yet viable avenue for doing so is promoting their knowledge and abilities in disciplinary literacy, or “the knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within the disciplines” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012, p. 8). In contrast to content-area literacy, which tends to focus on the language domains of reading and writing for the purpose of acquiring content knowledge, disciplinary literacy instead involves the linguistic resources utilized by researchers and scholars in a specific academic field. Language consists of different registers or varieties of a given language that are utilized to achieve specific communicative aims in a particular social context; in order to become academic literate, students should thus be acquainted with the linguistic behaviors and conventions within and across academic disciplines.

The purpose of this book is thus to add to the current knowledge base regarding best practices in developing multilingual learners’ academic language proficiency and literacy skills in specific disciplinary fields in a variety of educational levels (e.g., elementary, secondary, postsecondary). The primary objective of the book is to familiarize readers with a variety of methods and approaches to foster the growth of plurilingual learners’ academic language and/or literacy skills in a variety of academic disciplines, (b) include a collection of empirical studies and instructional pieces with different populations of multilingual learners from a variety of domestic and international contexts and/or various educational levels, and (c) provide readers with easy access to an array of research studies and pedagogical applications in these areas within one volume. The ultimate aim of this book is to gather a wide array of both empirical investigations and pedagogical applications concerning the progression of multilingual students’ academic language proficiency and their disciplinary literacy skills in a multitude of educational environments.

Possible Topics

• Examining the power dynamics of academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Identifying classroom features that support the development of students’ academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy skills
• Exploring the development of students’ multicultural/multilingual identities through academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Investigating
• Designing and implementing instructional activities that facilitate the advancement of pluricultural/plurilingual students’ language proficiency through academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Employing academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy to affirm and sustain learners’ funds of knowledge/identity
• Establishing a learner-centered environment that encourages and supports students to participate in academic conversations
• Expand students’ academic discursive and/or disciplinary literacy skills via a dialogic approach
• Planning and implementing professional development for pre-service and/or in-service language teachers on academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Discovering strategies and techniques that simultaneously advance learners’ content knowledge and language proficiency
• Honoring and valuing students’ perspectives and voices through academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Initiating avenues for using classroom language in culturally and linguistically affirming, responsive, and sustaining ways
• Fostering students’ linguistic comprehension and/or production via academic discourse and/or disciplinary literacy
• Exploring one or more approaches (i.e., CLIL, functional language, multiliteracies) to advance learners’ academic discursive and/or disciplinary literacy skills

Proposal Submission Guidelines

• Please submit a 500-word proposal clearly outlining your chapter's focus, methodological approach, and significance to the volume's theme; the proposal should also include a 100-word biographical statement for each author.
• Proposals (and questions) should be sent/addressed to Dr. Brian Hibbs (bhibbs@daltonstate.edu).
• Proposal deadline: May 1st, 2026