Picturebooks and beyond: multilingual parents and children’s family literacy practices

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the family literacy practices of five multilingual families engaging with picturebooks at home. Using sociocultural theory, translanguaging, and multimodality, the study explores how multilingual parents and young children co-construct literacy experiences beyond traditional print-centric and monolingual paradigms. Data from questionnaires, interviews, reading recordings, and multimodal artifacts reveal rich literacy-as-events that incorporate oral languages, gestures, visual cues, and embodied interactions. Findings indicate that picturebooks serve as dynamic tools for language development, cultural building, and highlighting translanguaging as an integral part of meaning-making. The study demonstrates that family literacy practices are deeply embedded in relational and social interactions, supporting children's emerging bilingual competencies and multimodal literacies. By centreing multilingual families’ lived experiences, the research disrupts deficit-based views of bilingualism and positions home literacy as valuable knowledge for informing inclusive educational practices. This work contributes to ongoing conversations about bridging home-school literacy practices and advocates for educators to recognise and integrate diverse, multimodal, and culturally sustaining family literacy practices in classroom instruction.

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