Emergent bilinguals are faced with three daunting tasks: acquiring a new language, building academic knowledge in various subject areas, and bridging social connections with peers and school faculty. The difficulty of these tasks has contributed to a large academic achievement gap between emergent bilingual students and their native English -speaking [sic] peers. This mixed methods study focuses on creating translanguaging spaces through the implementation of cognates into daily classroom instruction, enabling emergent bilinguals to make use of their full linguistic repertoire and enabling teachers to make content knowledge accessible for emergent bilingual students. This dissertation examines the impact of three professional development trainings centered on cognate instruction and their effects on secondary educators measuring their opinions, beliefs, knowledge, and self-reported teaching practices for emergent bilinguals across different content areas. The findings indicated that the professional development training sessions left teachers with realistic and simple strategies to use in their classrooms, which have increased most of the participants’ confidence in meeting the needs of emergent bilingual students, positively changed their perceptions of emergent bilingual students, and led them to reconsider their teaching practices. Furthermore, there was also positive impact on the student experience as well, as teachers have reported that their emergent bilingual students’ engagement, participation, and attendance rate have increased. Findings and implications are discussed.

Key Terms: Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS), Classroom instruction, Cognates, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALPs), differentiation, emergent bilinguals, language acquisition, language modalities, linguistics, SIOP model, Spanish, student experience, student reactions, teacher experiences, teacher perceptions, TESOL, translanguaging[.]