The purposes of this exploratory case study were twofold: (1) to understand the strengths and challenges teachers experienced when designing and delivering language interpretation tasks for use with second- and third-grade bilingual students, and (2) to ascertain what teachers perceived to be the benefits and drawbacks of the instructional…

Emerging bilingual learners' biliteracy abilities are often underestimated when monolingual reading assessments, such as the DIBELS, are used to identify students as having difficulties in learning or to guide literacy instruction. The authors propose a holistic form of biliterate assessment that uses writing as a means to understand what emerging…

This paper is the first to examine the longitudinal results of six years of implementation of Literacy Squared, a biliteracy model for Spanish/English speaking emerging bilingual students. This model includes paired literacy instruction with grade-specific time allocations for Spanish literacy and literacy-based ELD. Furthermore, cross-language…

In this article the authors propose that biliteracy is a more challenging and rigorous form of literacy than the English-only orientation of the Common Core State Standards. Because learning to read and write in two languages differs from learning to read and write in one, they argue that biliteracy requires its own pedagogies, methodologies, and…

The Bilingual Education Act (BEA) was a signature piece of legislation and was especially significant as a legislative accomplishment for Latinos and Native Americans as part of the Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. While Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas and President Lyndon Johnson have historically been credited…

The purpose of this single-subject longitudinal study was to examine the Spanish and English biliterate development of U.S. Latino Spanish/English speaking students, who we call emerging bilingual students, as they participated in an innovative biliteracy instructional program titled Literacy Squared®. Findings indicate that across the three years…

Recent analyses of wide-scale writing assessment outcomes indicate that English writing achievement for fourth- and fifth-grade emerging bilingual learners continues to be an area of great concern. Utilizing the theory of holistic bilingualism and a mixed methods design, this study examines the writing skills of 44 emerging bilingual fourth and…

This longitudinal study examined whether the implementation of a Spanish-English paired literacy approach provides an academic advantage to emerging bilingual students over a sequential literacy approach. The study employed a quasi-experimental design. It compared the biliteracy outcomes of third-grade emerging bilingual learners participating in…