“Going up there”: Challenges and opportunities for language minority students during a mainstream classroom speech event

This article explores challenges and opportunities for language minority students and their monolingual English-speaking classmates during oral presentations in mainstream 7th grade social studies classrooms. The classrooms were designed to provide access to rigorous content and opportunities to develop English for use in academic settings. Student groups simultaneously used presentational language and managed interpersonal interaction with several distinct audiences, manifested through participant structures that required them to sustain extended discourse and respond to interjections from the teacher. Delivering presentations as a group provided students with supports and additional challenges. Viewing oral presentations as speech events provides a productive lens for (a) highlighting academic language challenges that go beyond vocabulary and grammar, (b) recognizing the opportunities for language development inherent in those challenges, and (c) envisioning supports to assist with the challenges without eliminating the opportunities.