Profiles in Emergent Biliteracy - Children Making Meaning in a Chicano Community

How do young children learn to read, write, speak, and listen in two languages ? How do emergent readers and writers make meaning within multilingual communities ? This book examines the emergent biliteracy development of two kindergarteners growing up in a New Mexican neighborhood. Using ethnographic accounts, the book portrays the familial, communal, and academic contexts in which the children appropriated dual proficiencies in English and Spanish, and provides a window into the homes and lives of these working-class boys and the political, philosophical, and pedagogical world of their bilingual kindergarten.
The complexity of emergent biliteracy as a sociocultural-semiotic process is elaborated through Vygotskian theory, the multiple voices of these children, and the action research of their teacher.