ABSTRACT
The number of students from bilingual homes continues to grow in classrooms throughout the United States, currently representing an unprecedented proportion of the total school enrollment nationwide. This national trend is not expected to abate anytime soon, paralleling demographic shift on a grander scale: the number of bilinguals worldwide is now claimed to outnumber the number of monolinguals, a rise expected to continue through the current century (Hamers & Blanc, 2000; Padilla, 1990). In marked contrast to the increased presence of bilingual students in U.S. schools (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001) stands the continued relative absence of educational research on questions and phenomena of a bilingual nature, even in the crucial areas of language and literacy (Bialystok, 2001). This is particularly true in the field of early literacy (García, 2000; Jiménez, Moll, Rodriguez-Brown, & Barrera, 1999; Vernon-Feagans, Hammer, Miccio, & Manlove, 2001), an area presently receiving major attention at the national, state, and local levels.
