Last week, La Bloga-Wednesday's Rene Colato Laínez shared Jorge Tetl Argueta and Felipe Ugalde Alcántara’s Viento, Vientito. Wind, Little Wind. Alcántara’s cover illustration, whose waves echo Japanese woodblocks, immediately let me judge the book by its portada.
I have a little friend who’s needful of this book, so she will have it. I have also from the publisher, El Niño de maíz. The Boy of Maize, by Mario Bencastro and Christina Rodriguez.
As I leaf through these two gems, I credit the publisher, Piñata Books an imprint of Arte Público Press, (link) for providing an extensive library—a series of books for sale—of similarly published works. Parents and grandparents of children coming to literacy will want to visit the publisher’s website weekly to help that kid keep up with a growing appetite for literacy in two languages.
Illustrations delightful to adults. Kids learn to find delight through their own eyes and fingers and crayolas across the page (later), and also learn visual literacy from that smiling adult pointing to features for discussion.
Engaging text in Spanish and English engages when the adult makes it so. Reading to kids offers the literate world’s greatest pleasures. Speech teachers tell their uptight adult public speakers to read to children. Reading to kids requires not just words but sounds, beeps and boinks and toot-toot! When no one’s watching, Mr. or Ms. Uptight will really make a good growling critter noise.
Now, just remember how your body felt in that moment of grinning kid, growling adult, picture book, and make your body feel like that when you begin that speech in front of that audience. It’s not the same, but you make it close enough to get past the moment and into the message.
Reading bilingually evokes a bit of controversy from second- and third-generation raza. They speak English at home and in business. One of the spouses may be married-into-raza raza and Spanish genuinely is a foreign tongue to that parent. “I’d love for Mocosx to speak X’s grandparents’ language but…”
The only barrier is your lips and ears. Listen to other books read aloud in Spanish. For many, listening is a route to remembering pronunciation and which syllable accents go. Those second and third generation raza possess what linguists call a “competence-performance dichotomy.” Having grown up with and around Spanish, the English-dominant parent understands Spanish but is uncomfortable or incompetent orally.
For the children of those families, competence-performance dichotomy is all they’ll have, until they study foreign language in middle school. And then, they’ll get “A” and possess a comfortable code-switching mind. That’s not a bad result, for people whose native language once was not English.
1 comment:
To add to your subject, iIn my limited educational and work experience, I learned to read bilingual books straight through in one language, not read a page at a time and switching back and forth between languages. – retired elementary bilingual and dual language teacher who still misses the kids.
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