Language is Identity Awareness (LiIA) activities can lead to literacy practices that facilitate students telling and reading stories that represent their bi/multilingual lived realities and support their positive identity creation.

This chapter overviews the components of a course unit on dialectical variation within a culture and education ESOL course designed to advance pre-service elementary education students' knowledge concerning the linguistic nature of various dialects of American English while also expanding their awareness of issues surrounding cultural attitudes and stereotypes associated with speakers of these linguistic varieties. The chapter begins with a discussion of various theoretical concepts that frame the course unit and provides an overview of several prevailing attitudes concerning dialectical variation and how the course unit works to counter these narratives. The chapter then highlights the resources, activities, and assignments that constitute the course unit along with an examination of how and why they are included and utilized in the unit. The chapter ends with an examination of possible resources and activities that may possibly be included in future iterations of the course unit.

For most of the 20 th century, literary criticism has focused on uncovering the author's intended meanings of a given text. In contrast, reader-response theorists have concentrated on the role of the reader in literary interpretation. This article details an exploratory study which documents second-semester university Spanish students' perceptions of their experiences reading children's novels in Spanish. Learners participated in curricular engagements designed to facilitate their understanding and promote the development of their own interpretations of the books. Results of the study suggest that such engagements may either contribute or impede students' comprehension and interpretation of literary texts due to various contextual factors.

This chapter outlines a research study designed to document and understand the relevancy of children's literature in Spanish to elementary-level university students' linguistic and cultural competencies. Participants in the study were enrolled in three second-semester Spanish courses at a large land-grant university in the southwestern United States. During the study, students read two children's books and participated in a series of class activities designed to deepen their understanding and appreciation of various grammatical structures and cultural phenomena in the books. Data for the study were obtained and triangulated through journal entries, surveys, and focus-group interviews. Findings from the study demonstrated that, from the students' perspectives, the children's books contributed to their linguistic proficiency by providing them with multiple opportunities to access input and produce output in Spanish in meaningful ways while also promoting their cultural proficiency by immersing them in the cultural story worlds of the books.