ABSTRACT
For many emergent bilinguals who are learning to read in a new language and in a new cultural setting, some of the above dilemmas become immediately more problematic. The aim is to teach children to read, but as beginning reading is generally story based in Britain – while much of the language teaching, later on, is literature based – children will need particular cultural and linguistic knowledge from the earliest stages. First of all, this story-based approach may be very different to reading practices in other parts of the world. English stories and English literature have a very specific place in the reading development in the British educational system. This is so firmly grounded in our practice and our theoretical understanding of reading development, that we often fail to see it as one cultural practice amongst many, and accept it as the norm. Reading and understanding stories are two separate areas which the teacher needs to teach.
