Becoming Biliterate

Abstract

This book describes the development process and dynamics of change in the course of implementing a two-way bilingual immersion education program in two school communities. The focus is on the language and literacy learning of elementary-school students and on how it is influenced by parents, teachers, and policymakers. Pérez provides rich, highly detailed descriptions, both quantitative and qualitative, of the change process at the two schools involved, including student language and achievement data for five years of program implementation that were used to test the basic two-way bilingual theory, the specific school interventions, and the particular classroom instructional practices. The contribution of Becoming Biliterate: A Study of Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Education is to provide a comprehensive description of contextual and instructional factors that might help or hinder the attainment of successful literacy and student outcomes in both languages. The study has broad theoretical, policy, and practical instructional relevance for the many other U.S. school districts with large student populations of non-native speakers of English. This volume is highly relevant for researchers, teacher educators, and graduate students in bilingual and ESL education, language policy, linguistics, and language education, and as a text for master's- and doctoral-level classes in these areas.