In the real world outside of schools, contemporary students are routinely reading, writing, communicating, acting, and learning internationally, translingually, and multimodally, thanks to the prevalence of digital online communication; this has taken place across students’ racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities and national affiliations. Today, the global online contexts are considered as one of essential literacy environments, and the globally networked online contexts might become a main stage of future literacy practices.

In this sense, this study develops new three theories about literacies studies from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies in an increasingly digitalized and globalized contemporary world. To achieve this, first, I introduced the features of a global online affinity space as a new concept. Second, I developed the theoretical claim of “complexified diversity.” Finally, I developed the theoretical concept of “Border-Crossing Discourses” on the basis of Gee’s (1990/2015) seminal idea of capital “D” Discourses. I expanded the concept of capital “D” Discourses, looking across borders at a variety of languages, nations, and broader cultures under the global view. The concept of Border-Crossing Discourses was established on the basis of the new concepts that I put forth previously of global online affinity spaces and complexified diversity.

As an example of possible supplementary empirical studies, I conducted a small piece of discourse analysis. I observed and examined literacy practices in two global online affinity spaces. They are sites devoted to K-pop fanfiction sharing (hereafter, Asianfanfics) and to Japanese anime (hereafter, Crunchyroll). In particular, I explored the aspects of multimodal and translingual practices in these spaces. Both theoretical and empirical future research will contribute to the elaboration of these theories.

This study reports on research that explores local manifestations of Arizona's English-only language education policy by investigating the experiences of selected English language learners (ELLs) with reclassification into mainstream classrooms and four of their classroom teachers. In this study, I employed ethnographic methods (participant observation, document collection, interviewing, and focus groups) to investigate what practices emerge after ELLs are reclassified as "Fluent English Proficient" (FEP) students and moved from "the four-hour English Language Development (ELD) block" into mainstream classrooms. With a focus on the perspectives and experiences of twelve 5th and 6th grade elementary school students and four of their teachers, I examined how students and teachers viewed and responded to restrictive language policies and the practices that accompany them. One finding from this study is that students and teachers believed that the four-hour ELD block helped prepare students to learn English, but "proficiency" in English as determined by the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA) did not always indicate a solid understanding of the language used in the mainstream classrooms. A second finding from this study is that ideologies of language that position English over multilingualism are robust and further strengthened by language policies that prohibit the use of languages other than English in ELD and mainstream classrooms. A third finding from this study is that, in part because of the language restrictive policies in place, particular groups of students continued to engage in practices that enact ideologies of language that devalue multilingualism (e.g., "language policing"). At the same time, however, a close examination of student-to-student interaction indicates that these same students use their multiple linguistic and communicative resources in a variety of creative and purposeful ways (e.g., through language crossing and language sharing). The close examination of policy as practice in a restrictive educational language policy context conducted here has implications for debates about English-only as a method and medium of instruction, about how the ideologies of language operate in situated interactional contexts, and about how youth might use existing resources to challenge restrictive ideologies and policies.