Based on year‐long ethnographic case studies following U.S. immigrants in their last year of secondary school and first year in a 2‐year community college, this article contrasts prevalent institutional images of what it means to be an English language learner in these two educational settings. The article draws on the notion of representation, or archetypal images of learner identity, arguing that representation offers a means of understanding how seemingly self‐evident and unchanging identities emerge in a particular social context out of ever‐evolving processes of identity (re)creation. The article compares representations of ESL student identity in the two educational institutions and illustrates the manifestation of these representations in class curricula and spoken and written interactions. Prevalent institutional images of ESL student identities were appropriated and recreated by students and educators in one context and resisted by students in another. Contending that representation is an inevitable part of human meaning making and identity formation, the article suggests that images of students and of their backgrounds, experiences, and needs not only inform curriculum but also have significant consequences for students' identities and attitudes toward classroom learning.

Language minority students are often placed in mainstream, English‐medium classrooms long before they develop the degree of language proficiency necessary to compete on an equal footing with native speakers of the school language. With the ever‐increasing presence of such students in U.S. schools, ESL and content‐area educators are working to better integrate their respective curricula and instructional roles. In order to accomplish this integration, significant instructional differences in these two contexts must be identified, and systematic comparisons must detail how L2 learners fare in each of these instructional environments. What do students lose and gain in their transition from ESL to the mainstream? This question was addressed in a 3 ½ year ethnography of the L2 learning experiences of newcomer students attending a high school in northern California. The study, which followed 4 Chinese ethnic immigrant students as they made the transition from ESL to mainstream classes, contrasted patterns of spoken and written language use in classrooms, identified significant differences in the content and goals of the ESL versus mainstream curricula, and documented language instruction and feedback in both contexts. Both contexts were also evaluated in terms of the socializing features of schooling, such as counseling and peer networks. As in many other U.S. public schools, the isolated and marginalized position of the ESL program in an institution that otherwise made no adjustment for nonnative speakers produced a makeshift system in which there was no appropriate instructional environment for learners of the school language.

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