Language Arts - Volume 77, Issue 5, 2000

Describes a Hawaiian language immersion program classroom (a second- and third-grade combination classroom) that acknowledges both the language and culture of students while supporting the development of a culturally grounded community of learners. Notes historical information, discusses ownership and authenticity, and describes aspects of Hawaiian language and literacy using authentic oral and written texts from the Hawaiian tradition.

Examines the author’s daughter’s spontaneous responses to information books, especially those responses that occurred outside book-sharing sessions. Investigates response episodes as: casual conversations, a reevaluation of facts, reflections of complex thinking, transactions between life and literature, and portraits of personal inquiry.

Investigates how culture might influence the choice and reading of children’s texts to children. Describes a two-year, longitudinal, qualitative case study of the storybook experiences of a US-born Chinese girl, describing the social, moral, and literacy practices in her family (which included the girl, her parents, and her grandparents).

Traces the author’s own literacy development to her girlhood in a village in rural Jamaica. Looks at storytelling, singing, and rhymes in the rhythm of the village; reading from the Bible and stories told at home; rhythms of song and language in church; and the rhythm of poems and stories in school. Looks at implications for literacy instruction.

Describes how the author participated in her son Carl’s writing process at home when she realized his growing resistance to writing in school in the second grade. Examines the in-class composing process and Carl’s frustrations. Describes how she became Carl’s scribe at home as he gradually discovered that writing could be a symbolic representation of his own voice.

Interviews poor urban parents and first-grade students about attitudes toward school and education. Finds parents are committed to their children’s success in school. Examines things parents do to keep their children on track; parents’ descriptions of teachers in their own lives; how grandparents help keep students “on track”; and the teacher’s role from the perspective of students and parents.

Explores how family literacy practices are connected to social institutions that sustain or transform participants’ awareness or reproduction of class identities and the inequities inherent in these interactions. Looks at the complexity of one African-American, working-poor family’s literacy practices in their connections to social institutions.

Offers brief descriptions of 20 outstanding nonfiction for children, including the 1999 Orbis Pictus Award winner, and four Orbis Pictus honor books as well as a number of other outstanding nonfiction titles dealing mainly with history and biography.