The pinnacle of young children's educational development is the acquisition of literacy. Literacy is the ticket of entry into our society, it is the currency by which social and economic positions are waged, and it is the central purpose of early schooling. In some sense, we send children to school at about the age of five so that they will learn to read. Future academic success depends on how well they master that skill, and academic success in our part of the world determines much about children's futures. So we would not want to do anything to jeopardize the success our children will experience in learning to read. In Western middle-class families, we deliberately attempt to bring our children into the world of literacy almost from the time they are born. If we found out that having two languages made learning to read problematic, we would endeavor to keep our children monolingual. Parents are like that.

The extensive research on the acquisition of literacy by monolingual children has provided an important framework from which the special circumstances of bilingual children can be examined. Despite the ubiquity of bilingual children in the school system, however, surprisingly little research has been expressly dedicated to this population. Much of what follows attempts to extend the existing literature on literacy development with monolinguals to the experience encountered by bilingual children.

As usual, “bilingualism” is in need of some deconstruction. As we saw in Chapter 1, there are myriad ways in which a child can be bilingual, and these seem to be particularly important in the way each one influences the child's acquisition of literacy.