ABSTRACT
The Multicultural Literacy Program (MLP) was funded through the Fund for the Improvement and Reform of School and Teachers (FIRST), United States Department of Education for 3 years. The author designed the program to provide a variety of literacy experiences that emerged from our students' language and cultural backgrounds. Teachers engaged students in multicultural literacy activities to reinforce learning through writing process activities, as well as paired and repeated reading activities, dramatic and choral reading activities, and storytelling activities. The teachers shifted from merely gaining an awareness of multicultural literature and its connection with culture to the effective use of multicultural teaching strategies in their classrooms. The MLP Manual included various literacy activities that the author developed to be used with the multicultural books. Specific literacy measures included pre- and postreading as well as pre-and postvocabulary California Achievement Test (CAT) measures.
