Conceptualizing Biliteracy within Bilingual Programs

Abstract

One explicit goal of most bilingual education is for students to become biliterate. For the purposes of this review, biliteracy will be defined as " any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing " (Hornberger, 1990, p. 213). The devel-opment of biliteracy will be conceptualized as occurring in a broad social context. Thus, this review will focus on the development of biliteracy in multilingual educational environments and the conditions of the learning context and interaction that aid the acquisition of literacy in two or more languages. This conceptualization of biliteracy is based on a sociocultural view of literacy, a model that assumes literacies are multiple and situated in a social context. As a result, most of the research cited draws from work in areas such as the ethnography of communication, sociolinguistics, and anthropology that have devel-oped methodologies to study communities and their local practices Early research in the development of biliteracy in educational environ-ments focused primarily on the impact of the way that participation is organized within a classroom setting, and the variety of ways in which multiple languages can be acquired and used as a resource for personal expression and instruction within bilingual classrooms. In the early 1980s key research was done in a variety of cultural settings that showed that different communities had varying oral and written partici-pation styles, and instructional effectiveness could be improved by drawing on participation styles that were congruent with minority students' cultural background. For example, in Hawaii, the staff of the Kamehameha Elementary Education Program showed that reading lessons that were organized in a way that was similar to the traditional Hawaiian " talkstory " discourse structure increased student partici-pation and reading scores (Au, 1980). Research on classroom participa-tion structure on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation showed that