Abstract
“Biliteracy from the Start: Literacy Squared in Action,” authored by Kathy Escamilla, Susan Hopewell, Sandra Butvilofsky, Wendy Sparrow, Lucinda Soltero-Gonzalez, Olivida Ruiz-Figueroa, and Manuel Escamilla, introduces the “Literacy Squared” approach to teaching emergent bilinguals in the classroom. With a specific focus on bilingual English and Spanish speakers, the Literacy Squared framework provides an innovative and holistic approach to instruction and assessment which includes four essential components: instruction, assessment, professional development, and research. Given the diverse needs, cultural repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003), and linguistic capabilities of emergent bilingual students, the Literacy Squared framework provides strategies and practices rooted in sociocultural theories of learning. This will be useful for educators striving to design learning ecologies that leverage the language and strengths of these students. The main contribution of this book revolves around the presentation of its core elements of instruction, lesson plans, and assessment strategies that constitute the practical implementation of the Literacy Squared model. Its primary objective is to enable schools and educators to learn about an instructional framework tailored for grades K-5 that can be leveraged to enrich the development of biliteracy among emerging bilingual students.
Additionally, the book offers valuable insights into assessment practices designed to document the progress of young learners as they embark on their “trajectories toward biliteracy.” The book guides readers through the process of constructing units for biliteracy instruction, implementing lesson plans, and includes planning documents that educators can use to design culturally responsive learning ecologies. The book focuses on three key questions throughout: a) how does a holistic biliteracy perspective challenge the way schools structure literacy programs for emerging bilingual students? b) How does a focus on qualities of instruction shift the debate about effective practice in the bilingual education field? c) How can the notion of trajectories toward biliteracy inform the ways we teach the increasing numbers of simultaneous bilinguals in U.S. schools?
The distinctive quality of the Literacy Squared approach is that it aims to support simultaneous emergent bilinguals – children who develop two languages at the same time. The approach underscores the significance of building both oracy and metalinguistic abilities, alongside reading and writing, through its holistic development of biliteracy. The approach provides strategies and practices that mediate effective ways of monitoring student progress and enable emergent bilinguals to leverage their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 2006) and dual language resources to develop biliteracy.
The Literacy Squared approach highlights the language of instruction while also amplifying instruction and methods that align with the linguistic repertoires and practices of simultaneous emergent bilinguals. This form of syncretism (Gutiérrez, 2014) emphasizes cultural responsiveness and provides students with opportunities to draw on their everyday cultural repertoires of practice and semiotic resources toward the development of academic literacies in the classroom. This framework thereby challenges deficit-oriented perspectives and instead presents a strength-based approach. Focusing on the experiences of bilingual English and Spanish speakers the authors highlight the ways in which this approach enables them to incorporate their cultural and linguistic knowledges to navigate tensions and subvert racial ideologies embedded in curricula that often constrain the learning and development of Latinx learners (Pacheco, 2012).
Part I of the book presents the instructional framework and provides sample strategies for teachers implementing lessons for different facets of biliteracy. Chapter 2 introduces oracy as a foundational component of the holistic biliteracy framework. The chapter emphasizes the significance of oracy in the development of sentence structures, dialogue, and vocabulary. It also underscores that oracy lessons should be interwoven into the comprehensive biliteracy program rather than being isolated from its other aspects. Although the emphasis on oracy is key, it is important that programs address how talk is often framed under hegemonic understandings of what is acceptable. In other words, talk is measured in western societies as a universal set of skills governed by ‘standard’ ways of communicating. This orientation towards ‘standard’ forms of talk can lead to erasure of the particular oracies, rooted in particular ways of being in the world, that students bring to the classroom. As such, it is critical that a biliteracy framework undoes the notion that all forms of talk are universal and promotes a new vision of instruction around oracy that is situated in supporting heterogeneous ways of speaking and knowing (Gannaway, 2022).
Chapter 3 delves into instructional approaches for nurturing biliterate reading including practices such as interactive read-aloud, shared reading, collaborative reading, teacher-led small groups, and independent reading. These strategies place oracy, reading comprehension, and metalinguistic awareness at the core of instruction, highlighting the importance of progressing from modeling in a whole group setting to shared and collaborative practice, ultimately leading to independent reading. It also emphasizes that reading instruction must progress from modeling in a whole group setting, to shared and collaborative practice, to independent practice. As such, this approach highlights the importance of creating scaffolds that afford multiple forms of participation for emergent bilinguals. Chapter 4 underscores the significance of writing instruction in biliteracy development. It emphasizes the use of “Thedictado” method alongside modeled, shared, collaborative, and independent writing. Unlike process-oriented approaches like writers’ workshops, these methods allow educators to explicitly demonstrate the skills and linguistic knowledge involved in both the writing process and the final product. The Thedictado method draws on culturally responsive and sociocultural theories of learning (Vygotsky and Cole, 1978) and thus, puts students in situations where they can learn, build relationships, and draw on the expertise of their peers and adult educators. It is a method rooted in Latinx pedagogical tradition and, as such, puts Spanish-speaking Latinx students in learning ecologies and stances that they are familiar with. Through modeling and collaboration, students are able to travel through zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978; Engeström, 2015) to engage in higher order thinking and independently develop new language practices and forms of writing activity. Chapter 5 then highlights how emergent bilingual students can make cross-language connections to develop metalinguistic awareness. Taken together, these strategies and methods enable students to develop and think critically about language, communication, and interrelationships between the semiotic resources they use.
Part II of the book introduces an assessment protocol that offers a distinct approach to evaluating children’s progress in biliteracy. In Chapters 6 and 7, the book advocates for a significant paradigm shift in assessment and provides a foundation for understanding and evaluating a student’s language development in both Spanish and English as a unified process. The chapters emphasize the need for assessments that focus on students’ “trajectory toward biliteracy,” enabling a more comprehensive understanding of emerging bilingual students’ bourgeoning biliteracy skills and knowledge. This assessment approach draws on research in authentic literacy assessment for bilingual students, confirming that emerging bilingual students leverage their knowledge of both languages and cultures to develop literacy in both (Escamilla, 2000; Garcia et al., 2008). Through these innovative assessment approaches, teachers can learn to see anew (Gutiérrez et al., 2017) and shift their gaze from deficit toward strength-based approaches of what simultaneous bilingual students can do and learn by using Spanish and English.
In Part III of the book, the authors delve into the practical aspects of comprehensive biliteracy instruction at the curriculum level, focusing on lesson and unit planning. Chapter 8 introduces the Literacy Squared lesson plan template, which accommodates both Spanish literacy and literacy-based English Language Development (ELD) within each grade level. This lesson plan is easily adaptable and provides a frame for teachers to appropriate it and implement it within their own classrooms. Chapters 9 and 10 provide concrete examples of primary and intermediate biliteracy units, illustrating how the instructional components and strategies of Literacy Squared can be interwoven into a cohesive unit plan. Finally, Chapter 10 introduces a Grade 5 expository text unit designed to intentionally integrate Spanish literacy and literacy-based ELD. These lessons incorporate culturally relevant materials and offer opportunities for students to engage meaningfully and purposefully with both languages. This pedagogical approach emphasizes that students learn best when they can draw from their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 2006) to engage in meaningful activities and create hybrid texts in the classroom. Moreover, these chapters collectively exemplify how the holistic biliteracy framework of Literacy Squared can be applied in real-world educational contexts that support Spanish and English literacy development in the K-5 grades.
Overall, the Literacy Squared framework is rooted in sociocultural aspects of learning, and language development. It promotes constructing structures that mediate collaborative work and provide direct, explicit instruction. Direct instruction is promoted alongside peer-to-peer collaboration to enable emergent bilinguals to draw on their relational expertise (Edwards, 2011) to co-construct collective zones of proximal development (Cole, 1998) wherein they can engage in the kind of higher order thinking that mediates language development. Furthermore, it incorporates culturally responsive methods that enable emerging bilinguals to leverage their everyday linguistic repertoires. This approach supports their language development as well as the development of syncretic literacies (Gutiérrez and Jurow, 2016). These syncretic literacies are powerful forms of literacy that support both academic and everyday language and literacies. As a result, the Literacy Squared framework proves highly advantageous for simultaneous emergent bilinguals as it enables them to cultivate dual language proficiencies, harness their cultural knowledge, and acquire languages concurrently, enriching both their academic and everyday language capabilities.