Search

The study of families and educators who successfully sustain children's linguistic resources is a novelty in current educational research, where focus has largely been on the development of students'English language skills. In this book, Alison L. Bailey and Anna V. Osipova provide a systematic examination of the beliefs and practices of parents and educators who share the common goal of improving educational and social outcomes for multilingual children. Giving voice to parents and educators, they explore the strategies being devised to foster multilingualism and support its development both at home and in the classroom. This book presents new research findings and combines these with compelling firsthand accounts of the successes and concerns of both families and educators, making its content pertinent to a wide audience of researchers and a range of higher education courses.

This book is divided into three main topical sections: (1) Parent-child construction of narrative, which focuses on aspects of the social interaction that facilitate oral narrative development in Spanish-speaking children; (2) Developing independent narration by Spanish-speaking children; and (3) Narrative links between Latino children's oral narration and their emergent literacy and other school achievements. Chapters address narration to and by Latino children aged six months to eleven years old and in low, middle, and upper socioeconomic groups. Nationalities of speakers include the following: Costa Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, and Spanish-English bilingual children who are citizens or residents of the United States. Narratives studied include those in conversations, personal and fictional stories, and those prompted by wordless picture books or videos. Thus, the current project includes diverse nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and genres of narrative.