Bobbie Kabuto

Building on Bobbie Kabuto’s groundbreaking 2010 book Becoming Biliterate, this book explores how identity impacts the development of bilingual readers and how reading practices are mediated by family and community contexts. Highlighting bilingual readers from Spanish, Greek, Japanese, and English language backgrounds, Kabuto offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of these readers’ behaviors and identities through the original approach of Biographic Biliteracy Profiles. The Profiles serve as a culturally relevant assessment tool for developing meaningful narratives and can reveal how bilingual readers make sense of texts in the context of their home and school environments. An ideal approach for unpacking the complexity of bilingual reading behaviors and how they change across time, the Profiles allow readers to explore what a bilingual reader’s identity means to becoming biliterate; the roles of code-switching and translanguaging; the influences of readers’ families and communities; and how they all interact and shape readers’ identities, behaviors, and meaning-making. Offering practical applications on observing and documenting bilingual readers, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students in courses on bilingualism, L2/ESL reading, and multilingualism.

Identity, Translanguaging, and Biographic Biliteracy Profiles

Becoming Bilingual Readers

Prisca Martens

Parents who are also educational researchers have access to a domain that is highly complex and not always available to other scholars. In this book, parent-researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into children’s learning in the home and at school. Readers are given a window into learning in the home context and how all family members organize or engage in that learning. Working on two levels, the book develops scholarly discussions about learning in the home (how is it organized, who the participants are, and what children are learning), and it illustrates the impacts that outside institutions, in particular schools, have on families It is unique in showcasing parent-research as a type of research paradigm with particular aspects and challenges. Both teachers and researchers can learn from these studies as they show the impact that schooling has on families and how institutional discourses and beliefs can both positively and negatively affect the dynamics of any family.

Bobbie Kabuto

Books

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