Bilingual students' language and literacy skills were compared across three classroom events in a special day classroom for students with language learning disabilities. Events ranged from the teacher-structured, formal class openings to the informal, peer-structured sociodramatic play. Results showed that certain contextual features were associated with enhanced student performance, whereas others were associated with communicative breakdowns and problems with literacy tasks. This ethnographic study, in conjunction with other naturalistic research on bilingual special education classrooms, undergirds the Optimal Learning Environment (OLE) Project by identifying effective instructional contexts for bilingual students identified as having language learning disabilities.
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