ABSTRACT
Biliteracy is an important area of study that promises much in terms of helping us to better understand children's language and literacy development, yet it has received relatively little attention from researchers and scholars. One of the most significant implications of biliteracy lies with its potential intellectual consequences, particularly students' ability to establish mediated relationships between symbol systems and the social world to create knowledge and transform it for meaningful purposes. Students' biliterate abilities, therefore, represent key linguistic and cultural tools that may greatly assist their intellectual development in ways not readily available in monolingual English classrooms. Biliteracy is an important component for the development of a culturally relevant pedagogy for Latina/o children. Biliteracy development for Anglophone students is possible, nonetheless, and does occur in bilingual settings. The bilingual person may experience a wider range and variety of literacy practices than the monolingual person because of participation in different social networks.
