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Reading through linguistic borderlands: Latino students’ transactions with narrative texts

Arizona State University, USA

Peter Sayer

Arizona State University, 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.

Key Words: Latinos/as • linguistic borderlands • reading comprehension • Spanglish

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