ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a multiyear ethnographic study of a bilingual Latina youth and analyzes her participation in religious language practices and discourses at the church service her family attended on a weekly basis. Our detailed analysis reveals that figurative and metaphorical language practices created opportunities for bilingual children and youth to participate in and experience the complex and nuanced ways that members of this Christian community constructed their relationship to God. Specifically, we focus on the figurative and metaphorical language practices they employed to venerate and worship God and to link bodies, symbolically, to God. We end with explicit connections to the Common Core State Standards to demonstrate that the language practices in which bilingual children and youth already engage in their out-of-school lives can align with our expectations for language use and skills in the classroom.
