Becoming Bilingual Readers

Abstract

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.

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