ABSTRACT
This chapter examines preschool-age, English-Spanish emergent bilingual children’s literate and languaging practices during retell performances of Spanish- or English-medium stories previously read aloud by their teacher. Narrative development plays a crucial role in young children’s educational experiences as it has shown to be predictive of later literacy acquisition and to provide opportunities for children to expand their repertoires of language as they develop as readers and writers. Translanguaging allows us to understand and conceptualize the broad range of language practices of bilinguals, as well as they ways bilinguals use their language repertoires to make sense of their multilingual worlds, without reference to existing notions of grammaticality. Children’s narrative productions were elicited by three Spanish–English bilingual research assistants who helped collect data for the larger research project and with whom the children were familiar due to their weekly presence in the preschool classrooms. Children’s oral retell languaging practices also demonstrated their developing understanding of narrative structure over time.
