This article presents a qualitative case study of a sevenyear-old Mexican American student and his family. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine both the child’s emergent ideas about language, as expressed in bilingual literature discussions, and his parents’ ideological discourses about the use of a minority language in public schools. Vygotsky’s theory of learning oriented this research on language ideologies, focusing on how parents’ ideological discourses shape both literacy development and identity formation in early childhood. Our findings illustrate the importance of looking beyond the classroom and school contexts to identify diverse factors that may affect children’s development of biliteracy in early childhood, such as the role of language ideologies. This study demonstrates the complex relationships between literacy, language ideologies, and issues of identity within the broader contexts of controversies over bilingual education and official English laws in the USA.

This study examines the biliteracy development of a group of bilingual Latino third graders in an elementary school in the south-west USA. It focuses on the role of language in children’s reading comprehension of narrative texts in Spanish and English in a school context. The authors frame their analysis within the ‘Continua of Biliteracy’ model (Hornberger, 1989, 2003), highlighting how the youngsters drew on their linguistic resources to negotiate the contexts and contents of biliteracy. Data come from the students’ 24 retellings of story books, alternating between Spanish and English. The data were analyzed using story grammar and sociolinguistic analysis. The findings of the study show how, for young bilingual and bicultural students, their languages themselves exist on a continuum.That is, in developing their biliteracy, these children navigate linguistic borderlands through their use of Spanglish, reflecting their sociolinguistic and sociocultural realities where there are not necessarily strong distinctions between Spanish and English.

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