Inquiry Proposal--Bilingual Literacy Programs in Early Education

I want to look at bilingual literacy programs in early education (preschool and kindergarten). I’ve seen a number of approaches to literacy in early classrooms, from majority play to majority structured work on letter sounds and reading, so I’m interested in looking at the differences in programs, and especially how the programs in bilingual schools relate to the students’ and their families home practices and experiences with language. I’m interested in looking at how and which languages are privileged (or not) in these classrooms, and how this may vary depending on the teacher, the students, and the larger community. I think I would like to interview my placement teacher, who teaches at a preschool literacy program for mostly Spanish speaking kids, as well as some of the preschool and kindergarten teachers at the bilingual school I was working at last semester in Costa Rica. While I will mostly want to look at educational research from classrooms, there is also a fair amount of psychological research about the process of bilingual language development, and I’m thinking about incorporating some of that as well.