Abstract
Eurydice Bouchereau Bauer and Mileidis Gort (2012) (eds) Early Biliteracy Development: Exploring Young Learners’ Use of their Linguistic Resources. London: Routledge, 2012; 203 pp.: ISBN 978-0-415-88018-3 (pbk)
This book is a fascinating and much needed look at bilingualism and biliteracy development in preschool and early elementary children. The goal of the book is to highlight the abilities of bilingual children to use the linguistic resources available to them in their learning, and the chapters include insightful research on a variety of topics, such as the role of caregivers and parents in children’s biliteracy development, how children use two languages in different learning environments, and how children use both languages in learning to read and write. The editors, Drs Bauer and Gort, have included research that highlights a rich variety of bilingual environments, such as Chinese/English, Turkish/English, Spanish/English and German/English, and each study contributes uniquely to the overall theme of biliteracy while also revealing common themes. The book is a compilation of current, original research that dispels enduring myths about bilingualism and biliteracy for an audience of teachers, graduate students and researchers working with emergent bilingual children.
An engaging introduction by the editors provides an overview of the state of current research and introduces readers to the concepts of emergent bilingual and biliterate learners, emphasizing the need for teachers to be educated specifically in supporting the learning of bilingual children. Bauer and Gort define emergent bilinguals as children who are learning two or more languages at an early age, including simultaneous bilinguals (learning two languages simultaneously from birth) and sequential bilinguals (learning one language first followed by a second language). They also draw on Reyes (2006) to form their definition of emergent biliteracy as ‘the ongoing, dynamic development of concepts and expertise for thinking, listening, speaking, reading, and writing in two languages’ (p. 2). The research presented throughout the book is framed in an overarching conceptual framework of ‘constructivism within a sociocultural context’ where children are viewed as active participants in ‘purposeful and authentic meaning making’ (p. 5). The editors’ rationale for the book is to address the imbalance between the comparative lack of research on emergent bilingual learners compared to the plethora of research on monolingual learners, clearly stating their belief that bilingual learners must be understood from a bilingual perspective, which means conducting research on both languages and not, as has been done traditionally, just English.
The book is organized into three sections: part one focuses on emergent biliteracy in preschool; part two focuses on biliteracy development in children aged five to eight years; and part three is a conclusion about bilingual education from Drs Bauer and Gort. The first two sections begin with a short vignette by the editors that introduces readers to the key topics to be explored through the words of parents and teachers, and the questions and beliefs they have about bilingual learners. The vignettes are followed by studies that answer the questions through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. Each study is presented in a similar fashion, making it easier for readers to compare methods, findings and implications for teaching.
The first section is introduced with a short vignette designed to give readers an idea of some of the common questions about and conceptualizations of bilingual learners. The editors ask readers to consider their own language and literacy development, and to compare those experiences with what they will learn about emergent bilinguals. The section ends with questions that frame the three empirical research chapters that follow, focusing on how children learn and develop in bilingual environments, whether bilingual development is similar to monolingual development and how emergent biliteracy impacts children’s learning.
Chapter two, the first empirical chapter, is a qualitative case study by Bauer and Mkhize of a young German- and English-speaking girl named Elena (who is also Bauer’s daughter). The case study offers an insightful examination of how parents and caregivers help children’s bilingual and biliterate development through rich and varied home literacy practices. The authors analyse Elena’s ongoing bilingual and biliterate development between the ages of two years one month and three years 11 months through her one-on-one interactions with both parents and a caregiver. The interactions investigated in this study take place in either German or English, depending on the context and which adult is involved, and are all centred around interactions with books in either language.
Chapter three, by Soltero-Gonzales and Reyes, uses a case study methodology to observe emergent bilingual children whose first language (L1) is Spanish and their literacy practices in English preschool. The authors premise the study with the concept of a bilingual perspective for understanding the literacy development of bilingual children. They emphasize that trying to understand bilingual literacy development from a monolingual perspective invites a deficit model of learning where the first language (L1) is viewed as detrimental to learning the second language (L2). The authors provide strong support for the benefits of encouraging children to acquire literacy through the use of both their L1 and L2, and show how such exploration occurred naturally in young bilingual children even in an English-only school environment. The bilingual children in the study often chose Spanish to represent ideas and meaning-making, to interact socially with peers, and to explore concepts of emerging literacy (such as letter names and sound–symbol relationships) through their own names, which also led to greater understanding of these concepts in English. The authors advocate for instruction in the similarities and differences in students’ first and second languages to support metacognitive understanding and growth.
Chapter four, by Yaden and Tsai, explores how Chinese/English bilingual children conceptualize learning to write in the different scripts of each language. The theoretical framework for the study is based on Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1982) seminal study, but adapted to multiple trials, using the methodology of ‘clinical interview’ (p. 59) used by Piaget (1955/1977b) and by Vygotsky (1987, 1997). The rationale for the study is the lack of research on Chinese/English simultaneous bilingual children learning to write. In an attempt to delve deeper into understanding children’s conceptualizations of writing in two languages, they apply a microgenetic perspective in addition to the socio-psychogenetic method of earlier studies of writing in other languages. The microgenetic method includes three important factors: making more than one observation and striving for many observations around a change, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis of change (p. 62). The authors conclude that children are able to use similarities in the two languages where appropriate and distinguish differences in ways that help them acquire writing skills in both languages.
The vignette that begins the second section on early elementary education describes a teacher who is interested in helping her students develop literacy using all resources available to them, including multiple languages, but she is also concerned about using practices from current research. This section frames four empirical research chapters and concludes with questions on topics such as the interaction between languages and how children use more than one language in learning, whether multiple languages support each other or interfere with literacy development, the role of code-switching, and the role of context in learning. The editors ask readers to consider how they would answer the questions and how they would help the teacher in the vignette after reading the studies that follow.
Chapter 5, by Gort, examines the biliteracy practices of children in a two-way bilingual teaching programme in Spanish and English. This year-long qualitative study takes a close look at the writing of six-year-old children in two classes, who are learning to write in the context of Writing Workshop (Graves, 1994; Calkins, 1994), and their ability to evaluate and revise their writing. Writing Workshop is a ‘process-based approach to writing instruction that stresses the notion of writing as a craft and engages writers in a number of individual and interactive stages to develop an idea and express it in writing’ (p. 196). Gort’s rationale for the study is the lack of multilingual research on bilingual students and revising writing. The study uses excerpts from conversations between teachers and students, students and peers in the classroom and even students’ self-directed talk, to demonstrate how six bilingual six-year-old students use biliteracy as a strength in revising to make meaning, to clarify or add to ideas, to entertain, or to make writing more coherent to the audience, and supports her observations and conclusions with reference to established studies in bilingualism and biliteracy. Gort concludes by proposing ways by which educators can promote biliteracy in their classrooms and assist students in utilizing the resources of biliteracy to learn.
Chapter 6, by Çamlibel and Garcia, is a case study of a six-year-old child named Zehra, whose first language is Turkish (L1) and whose second language is English (L2). The study focuses on how children adjust when entering a new school environment, acquiring a second language while continuing to develop their first language, and developing literacy in both L1 and L2. This particular school offered a transitional programme for bilingual learners that included native language instruction in Turkish for 30 minutes a day, content-based English language instruction in an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom for 110 minutes a day, and English instruction in a mainstream all-English classroom setting for 185 minutes a day. The ultimate goal is for children to integrate fully into the mainstream English-only instructional setting. The authors describe Zehra’s literacy learning throughout the school year in Turkish class, ESL class and the mainstream English classroom. They also include her parents’ perspectives on language learning and Zehra’s responses to learning in two languages. The findings and subsequent implications for teaching are clear and are supported by prior research in the field, suggesting that: L2 learners adapt to new environments at their own pace, which may include a silent period (Krashen, 1981); it takes L2 learners time to develop their second language socially and academically (Cummins, 1981; Thomas and Collier, 2001); and students can develop literacy in two languages simultaneously. The authors recommend that all teachers should be knowledgeable of second language acquisition research and should create learning opportunities that are common to both L1 and ESL classrooms to support bilingual children’s development of language and content knowledge.
Chapter 7, by Fránquiz, aims to broaden understanding of how bilingualism in daily lives can help individuals construct strong bilingual identities, as well as aid in daily communication and meaning-making through an ethnographic study. Fránquiz highlights the importance of furthering our understanding of the positive aspects of bilingualism in a time and a context where bilingualism is sometimes portrayed as potentially detrimental to learning, and clarifies that being bilingual does not simply mean having monolingual skills in two languages, but means going beyond the monolingual ‘and requires the ability to employ language resources from two codes strategically and with great sensitivity to contextual factors’ (Martínez-Roldán and Fránquiz, 2009: 135). This study examines how literature and culturally relevant art forms can be used to promote students’ bilingual and biliterate identities in a predominantly monolingual school environment through collaboration with a local community arts centre.
In Chapter 8, Sparrow, Butvilofsky and Escamilla examine bilingual instruction for children aged six to eight in which paired literacy instruction is used so that children are emerging as biliterate in Spanish and English with ‘an interplay between both languages’ (p. 158). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, the authors found that “emerging bilingual students receiving paired literacy instruction benefitted from such instruction” and showed developing writing skill in both languages (p. 176). Students were able to use each language to scaffold their writing development in the other language ‘as the languages act[ed] symbiotically with one another’ (p. 178) and they also demonstrated the ability to transfer knowledge about language and literacy from either language to the other as relevant. The authors emphasize that young children are able to develop and express complex ideas before they gain fluency in the grammar and mechanics, and that teachers can gain a more holistic understanding of children’s literacy development in both languages by approaching their writing development from a bilingual perspective.
In the third and final section of this volume, Bauer and Gort conclude by restating the importance of understanding how to support and encourage bilingualism and biliteracy, and of adopting a bilingual perspective when teaching bilingual children. They also remind readers of the urgency of understanding emergent bilingual learners and their emergent biliteracy development in the USA in light of the lack of consensus surrounding bilingual education. This lack of consensus leads to variation in educational contexts. Contexts are influential in learning language and literacy and their role needs to be better understood through future research. Bauer and Gort emphasize that with increasing diversity in schools educators need to be prepared to teach culturally and linguistically diverse children by understanding them as unique individuals and by embracing the potential of their knowledge of multiple languages in helping them to develop literacy skills.