This research investigated how a Critical Sociocultural Linguistics Literacy (CriSoLL) approach to authentic materials supports student literacy in a mixed Spanish heritage language (SHL) and additional language (L2) Spanish intermediate course at the university level. Using a qualitative approach (Cho, 2018; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021)…

Through the presentation of two bilingual reader profiles, this article will illustrate how miscue analysis can act as a culturally relevant assessment tool as it allows for the study of reading across different spoken and written languages. The research presented in this article integrates a socio-psycholinguistic perspective to reading and a…

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and…

High illiteracy rates among the Argentine deaf population, even after long years of schooling, point to the need to revise certain approaches to deaf literacy, particularly in school settings. Qualitative change in deaf literacy requires the use of multiple conceptual tools if learners are to be able to tackle its complexity without reductionism…

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching--or "Spanglish"--among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students' everyday use of "Spanglish" and the skills…

Thousands of students in California learn English as a second language in schools that utilize exclusively monolingual--English Only--literacy programs. With such programs students do not have the opportunity to use the knowledge of their first language in order to acquire and master their second language. The project of cooperative bi-literacy…

This article contains a description of the Dual Proficiency (DP) program in an urban elementary school located in the heart of a large south-western city, as well as the teachers who designed and now implement DP, and the immigrant community participating by choice in DP. We write from a context where, ironically, the number of English language…

The development of literacy in selected bilingual societies was investigated. Historical and comparative studies were conducted of medieval Jewish communities, the Navajo community, a northern New Mexico village, and the countries of Paraguay and Tonga. The goal of the case studies was to develop a model for the development of literacy in the…

The author takes issue with an unnamed supervisory educator who opposes bilingual education. Wilson points out that to avoid wasting human resources it is essential that better education be provided for Mexican-Americans in order to cut down the repeating of grades and dropping out by students whose "home language" is not English.…

This book asserts that under the right conditions multiliteracy can be developed and provides some of the tools and strategies to enable monolingual teachers to do so. The book is based on an in-depth longitudinal study of a first grade boy studying in a traditional English/Spanish bilingual classroom. The child's early literacy development is…