Abstract
This article discusses the findings of a 2-year ethnographic study that explored how peer and teacher-student interactions in a linguistically diverse high school English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom affected English learners whose first languages were not spoken by many of the other ESL students. The primary languages of the students who participated in the study were French, Lingala, and Tshiluba; the dominant language spoken by the students in the ESL class was Spanish. The findings revealed that initially the non-Spanish speakers resented the predominant use of Spanish by teachers and peers. However, in Year 2 of the study, the French, Lingala, and Tshiluba students began using Spanish for peer socialization and learning English.