8 - Transgenerational Bilingual Reading Practices: A Case Study of an Undocumented Mixteco Family

Summary

This chapter focuses on an immigrant father, proficient only in Spanish, while reading English texts with his daughter, who is bilingual (English/Spanish), but only learns to read in English at school. The authors describe Mixteco parents deciding whether to pass on Mixtec or only Spanish to their children. The choice is Spanish in most cases, even when the parents continue to use Mixtec with each other and with extended family. In this study about literacy, the father seizes the opportunity to teach his daughter how to read in Spanish, while the daughter helps her father read in English. The authors describe the use of family RMA, based on Retrospective Miscue Analysis, whereby readers reflect on their reading by discussing their reading behaviors with one another. The authors introduce the concept of transgenerational biliterate reading practices to show that learning to read is not unidirectional from parent to child, but that it includes blended practices, where family history, societal roles, readers’ beliefs, and communication in more than one language come into play and are used by both readers in co-constructing knowledge.