ABSTRACT
There is evidence that as young children participate in everyday events involving written language, they come to understand how particular texts are used within particular patterns of social interaction. The project described in this chapter aims to discover what kinds of understandings three and four year olds were bringing from their home literacy experiences to school. As well as looking at literacy knowledge in English, it is interesting to find out whether bilingual children at this age recognised that writing in their home languages was used in specific practices within their families and communities, and whether they already had some knowledge about the visual appearance of different types of script. Although school and home contexts inevitably differ, it is important for teachers to construct a 'home–school discourse', open to children's everyday literacy experiences, and to provide opportunities for multilingual writing, which can help children from different social and cultural backgrounds develop their literacy knowledge to its fullest potential.
