Joyful Biliteracy

This book showcases how classroom talk about bilingual picturebooks offers a powerful, joyful, and intellectually rich tool for elementary literacy instruction when teachers adopt culturally sustaining approaches and leverage the full value of children's home languages. Drawing on data from two years of small-group reading instruction in a bilingual elementary school, this project elucidates a specific instructional protocol that centers, values, and builds on students’ experiences and home languages. Through reading, translanguaging, discussion, and structured translation activities, children actively drew on and developed their home language while thinking deeply about ideas in texts. Building on the strategies presented in this study, teachers can support children to grow their metalinguistic awareness which strengthens their capacity for language and literacy learning. By incorporating bilingual books into instruction, teachers can affirm children’s identities, deepen comprehension, build linguistic knowledge in two languages, and create meaningful, collaborative learning moments rooted in both joy and language growth. This is a key volume for scholars of literacy and language education, teacher educators, as well as for students in undergraduate and graduate bilingualism and biliteracy courses.