Abstract
It is our pleasure to introduce this special issue on emergent biliteracy in early childhood. The volume includes five articles, all original contributions, based on new research examining issues related to the biliteracy development and engagements of preschool- to elementary school-aged children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds across a variety of learning contexts. Emphasizing the sociocultural and sociolinguistic analysis of biliteracy as constituted and manifested in the social contexts of schooling, the articles offer conceptual and methodological innovations for exploring the course and processes of language and literacy development for children growing up with multiple languages, as well as implications for research and practice, setting an agenda for future research.
In the first article, Christopher Wagner explores the early formation of reading identities of three emergent bilingual preschoolers with diverse language backgrounds, instructional language experiences, and bilingual profiles, including Spanish-English, English-Cape Verdean Creole, and Vietnamese-English. Next, Alain Bengochea, Sabrina Sembiante, and Mileidis Gort present a case study that offers critical insights into children’s use of their rich and expansive linguistic resources to solve problems, extend storylines, designate roles, and plan and initiate events in the context of sociodramatic play. Leah Durán follows with an analysis of the factors that facilitated Spanish-English first graders’ biliteracy development in an English-only instructional context. Situated in a two-way dual language first grade classroom, Adriana Alvarez’s qualitative study of Mexican-American emerging bilingual children’s depictions of their social contexts and life experiences via their drawings and written narratives follows. Lastly, Ysaaca Axelrod and Mikel Cole examine the ways in which children in a before-school program for Latinx students engaged their full linguistic repertoire, and negotiated across and between cultural communities, to create texts for real audiences within and beyond their local communities.
While individually situated in different social practices and contexts, collectively the articles highlight the diversity of young emergent bilinguals’ literate experiences in schools, as well as opportunities to build on and cultivate children’s bilingual and biliteracy potential, and possibilities for developing local pedagogies that position bilingual children as capable and dynamic users of language regardless of the officially sanctioned language/s of instruction.
Together, this collection makes a significant contribution to advancing new knowledge for understanding and fostering young children’s biliteracy. In so doing, the authors have embraced children’s multiple contexts to understand how children use all their available linguistic resources to engage in multilingual, multimodal literacy acts. Positioned thus, the knowledge generated in these articles informs local pedagogies, and can enlighten policy guidelines, for recognizing and building on bilingual children’s strengths in formal and informal education settings.