ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors posit that to support both language and literacy development in emerging bilingual students, picturebooks offer a pathway for meaningful engagement with texts. The chapter features as a series of vignettes that document literacy engagements from an afterschool program with upper elementary emerging bilingual students. The authors found that the students used the illustrations to not only further their strategic approach to understanding texts, but they also used language to express their connections, disconnections, wonderings, and confusion. Secondly, while the students’ understandings of text were transformed through their transactions with picturebook illustrations, they in turn employed illustrations to create new texts of meaning. Thus, the authors found that picturebooks provided bountiful pathways for students to develop profound insights about both the text they are reading and about themselves as people. The authors argue that the illustrations are rich resources for mediating students’ meaning-making of texts.
