172 pages
247mm x 168mm
ISBN-10: 1 85856 319 4
ISBN-13: 978 185856 319 0
December 2004

'Teachers, teacher educators, researchers, students and even parents who are keen to promote early language learning will find Kenner's book is enlightening, encouraging and very practical.' Educational Review
'I highly recommend this book to be included in teacher preparation programs. It is a fine book for practicing teachers, as well as fore researchers in the field and policy makers. The language is accessible, the examples are inspiring, and the content is critical to deepening our understanding about the worlds, lives and minds of young bilinguals.' - The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

This exciting book reveals for the first time the wealth and complexities of the knowledge, connections and creativity that young children use in the process of becoming biliterate. The stories of London six-year-olds learning to write in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish as well as English are compelling evidence that young children are entirely capable of learning more than one writing system at the same time. This account illustrates what an advantage biliteracy is - the children find out how each system works, and develop their visual and kinaesthetic skills by using different scripts.
We see children writing at home, in the community language school and in peer teaching sessions with primary schoolmates, and discover that:
children can create their own ideas about how writing works
families and community language teachers support children's learning in ways that complement the work of primary school teachers
biliterate children live in 'simultaneous worlds' linking their languages and literacies
The book describes the findings of a research project carried out by the author with colleagues Gunther Kress, Hayat Al-Khatib, Gwen Kwok, Roy Kam and Kuan-Chun Tsai. Each chapter gives suggestions for helping bilingual pupils and extending the early language learning curriculum for all children.
With primary school language learning set to expand, this book is a timely resource for early years teachers, EMAG teams, students of bilingualism and teacher educators.

Dr Charmian Kenner teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Home Pages, which looked at the language development and early writing of 3-4 year-old bilinguals, also published by Trentham.