Biliteracy in a Monolingual School System? English and Gujarati in South London

Abstract

The paper draws on research with 4–7-year-olds in a South London primary school to provide a longitudinal case study of one child's relationship to mother tongue literacy within the classroom. The findings demonstrate how this child, from the age of 4, actively combined Gujarati and English to enhance her literacy learning, and to construct texts which synthesised home and school experience. It is argued that the current emphasis on a monolingual curriculum in English primary schools denies such opportunities to most bilingual children. Even for the child in this study, her biliteracy development was restricted by institutional constraints due to the lack of status afforded to literacies other than English in the educational system. The relevance of these issues for bilingual education in other English-dominant countries is considered.