| The number of students speaking a language other than English at home has grown significantly over the past several decades in U.S. schools. Educators' concerns about the language and literacy development of language minority students have increased accordingly. However, little is known about the linguistic and sociocultural resources that these students bring with them to their second language literacy and academic learning.;This study has three major purposes: first, to identify certain sociocultural aspects contributing to the biliteracy development of Korean bilingual adolescents; second, to investigate the literacy strategies and skills that they employ when reading and writing in Korean and English; and third, to examine whether or not and to what extent they transfer their literacy strategies and skills across languages. This study relied on a multiple-case study approach with four Korean bilingual adolescents participating over one academic year. Data were collected from participatory observation, interviews, think-aloud tasks and recall protocols, and document analysis.;This study demonstrated that certain social and cultural characteristics represented by several contextual variables contributed to the adolescents' biliteracy development. These variables were patterns of daily language use, the role of heritage language, home literacy environments, and attitudes toward both languages and literacy embedded in views of bilingualism and perceptions of literacy, and literacy activities at home. This study also revealed that the participants transferred their literacy strategies and skills across languages, in particular schematic resources and generalizable literacy strategies and skills, rather than linguistic resources focusing on using language structures. The degree of the transfer varied depending on the participants' language proficiency level in the two languages and their language use in actual reading and writing. This study supports the theoretical principle that effective development of the first language provides a significant foundation for the second language literacy development of language minority students. It further suggests that the understanding of language minority students' literacy development needs to begin with the understanding of the contexts in which they are utilizing two languages. |
