Becoming biliterate

Through the real-life context of one child (the author's daugher) learning to be bilingual and biliterate, this book raises questions and provides a context for pre-service and practicing teachers to understand and reflect on how children learn to read and write in multiple languages. Highlighting the social and cognitive advantages of biliteracy, this book addresses the complexity of writing across different writing systems; examines the writing and drawing forms that result from one child's active discovery when she was allowed to explore written forms of English and Japanese; situates written language as a cultural tool to raise the larger connection between writing and identity; looks at the relationships between learning to read and identity through a code-switching lens; describes what happened when Emma met the English-dominant world of school. Each chapter includes reaction questions and suggested activities.