Bilingual Literacy Development at Home: A Longitudinal Ethnographic Exploration of Bilingual Reading and Writing

This book explores pedagogical implications for how children read, write, respond to literature, and begin to learn an additional language in the home context.

Using a longitudinal ethnographic study, it explores a bilingual child’s literacy development over a span of four years from kindergarten to the third grade in a real-life home context in the United States. Written from a parent-researcher’s perspective, it illustrates the child’s Mandarin Chinese and English language support at home and in the community during the pandemic, and charts the development in bilingual reading and writing, multimodal reading responses to children’s literature, and learning Spanish as a third language. Through rich and detailed descriptions, the case study methodology allows a clear articulation of the project’s focus and foregrounds the exploration of reading as a sociopsycholinguistic process, as well as highlighting multimodality in reading and writing responses, translanguaging, and bilingual and bicultural identities to study and teach culturally and linguistically diverse children.

It will be a valuable resource for literacy researchers, scholars, and bilingual educators with interests in sociolinguistics, literacy education, bilingualism, and translanguaging.

Yang Wang is Professor in Language and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of South Carolina, USA.