Literacy Practices and Language Use among Latino Emergent Bilingual Children in Preschool Contexts

Preschool teachers are facing the challenge of serving the nation’s growing number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in an increasingly restrictive climate that dismisses native language instruction. In the U.S. over two million of these children attend pre-kindergarten through grade 3 classrooms (Abedi et al., 2004). Although the number of English-language learners (ELLs) entering pre-kindergarten continues to grow, the early literacy development of these children has not been thoroughly investigated (but see Kenner et al., 2004; Reyes, 2006; Reyes & Azuara, 2008; Soltero-González, 2008, 2009).