This book presents results from a four year project addressing the central question: What factors, challenges, and contexts contribute to and constrain literacy achievement among at risk adolescent learners with culturally diverse backgrounds? Researchers consider the importance of several, interrelated factors that support the development of adolescents literacies in multilingual contexts: support from educators, community groups, families, and peers; recognition of the multi faceted complexity of literacy through multiple, complementary methods of research and assessment; approaches to pedagogy that engage learners zones of proximal development in humanistic and purposeful ways; and promoting students vocabulary knowledge, strategies for reading, writing, and learning, and orientations to engaging with epistemic purposes of literacy critically, through multiple media, and with self confidence.