ABSTRACT
Studies on monolinguals suggest that very young children's responses to literature are shaped by their experiences with literature. Little research has been done on the responses of preschool bilinguals. Researchers agree that in the process of becoming readers and writers, preschoolers practice what it is to be literate. Researchers have raised the issue of topic-specific code-switching in oral communication. More recently, researchers interested in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory have investigated how various contexts help to shape the reader's responses. From this sociocultural perspective, it is important to understand the readers' position culturally and historically in order to understand their responses to text. Researchers who have investigated children's preference for narrative versus nonnarrative texts have found that grade school children typically prefer narrative texts. This preference seems to be influenced by children's greater experience with narrative texts.
