How do young children learn to read write speak and listen in two languages? How do emergent
readers and writers make meaning within multilingual communities? This book examines the
emergent biliteracy development of two kindergarteners growing up in a New Mexican
neighborhood. Using ethnographic accounts the book portrays the familial communal and
academic contexts in which the children appropriated dual proficiencies in English and Spanish
and provides a window into the homes and lives of these working-class boys and the political
philosophical and pedagogical world of their bilingual kindergarten. The complexity of
emergent biliteracy as a sociocultural-semiotic process is elaborated through Vygotskian theory
the multiple voices of these children and the action research of their teacher.
