Preservice Teachers’ Encounters with Dual Language Picturebooks

Abstract

Our action research explored the potentialities of dual language picturebooks related to language inquiries with preservice teachers. For six weeks, preservice teachers browsed picturebooks featuring English and another language, starting with a familiar language and moving to unfamiliar languages. After browsing, we shared our responses to the books, made connections across books, and engaged in experiences to think about language. Initial comments indicated that readers were not familiar with dual language picturebooks and connected to their own complex personal relationships with language. The preservice teachers engaged in inquiries around audience and book design, including issues such as Indigenous books signalling a resistance to prioritising English as a stance that differed from Spanish-English books where the design signalled a higher status to English. In this article, we discuss our findings using Ruiz’s (1984) language-as-resource framework, showing how the preservice teachers used dual language picturebooks to develop their critical awareness of language-as-resource.