McGill education research shows children's biliteracy potential underestimated

"It’s very easy for me to write Persian. I never did, never get mixed up.... Whenever I’m starting to write Persian I never go from left to right. So it’s not a problem having both languages at the same time."

This excerpt is from a young Iranian girl’s conversations with a researcher in a project led by Professor Mary Maguire at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. She is one of the participants in a longitudinal study of how minority language children acquire the social practices that surround written language in different sociocultural, linguistic contexts and in two domains, home and school. The study is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Are the voices of young bilingual learners heard? Do all bilingual children have equal access to literacy practices and resources that enhance biliteracy? What practical advice can viewing children as reliable informants provide to teachers so that they may better engage them in meaningful literacy practices? These are some of the questions addressed by Professor Maguire in an interpretive inquiry into biliteracy and school success of minority language children in different contexts. According to Professor Maguire, becoming and being biliterate are complex, dynamic relational processes that are "context specific, and deserve careful attention."

One of the findings from the McGill research suggests that many teachers’ classroom discourse and literacy practices in both English and French ignored children’s personal roots and attitudes towards biliteracy and certainly underestimated their biliteracy potential. The contradictions between teacher’s espoused beliefs about biliteracy and actual literacy practices in their classrooms could be traced to their initial teaching experiences in mainstream Canadian teacher programs and the particular politics of their teaching situations.

Different provincial contexts, educational policies, teacher’s literacy practices affect the biliteracy development and experiences of both first- and second-generation immigrants, according to Dr Maguire. "Traditional types of school literacy practices fail to appreciate children’s home literacy accomplishments and the complexity of their thinking," she says. "Bilingual children’s conversations and written texts offer insights into their abilities to construct the worlds they notice, understand and name in their own process of self-definition and construction of identity."