page 354 Language Arts, Volume 93, Number 5, May 2016 Marta’s book that she was working on today was bilingual, translated line by line in parallel text. For example, on one page, she had: “I see irewercs. Yo mira cowethes” [“I see the ireworks. Yo miré cohetes”]. I asked her about it and she said that this book was for her family and, “They don’t talk like this” (pointing at English line), “they talk like this” (pointing at Spanish line). (Field notes, 1/27/14) I met Marta (all names are pseudonyms) in a irst- grade ESL classroom. Marta and her classmates are part of the growing population of bilingual children in US schools. Often, teachers see chil- dren’s bilingualism as a handicap to be overcome (Pettit, 2011). This perspective may be related to the substantial evidence indicating that bilingual Lati- na/o children are not well served by the most com- mon forms of literacy instruction (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2013). However, research from the sociocultural tradition has illustrated that these families and children have rich repertoires of language and literacy practices, albeit ones that often go unnoticed by schools and teachers (Orel- lana & Reynolds, 2008; Murillo, 2012; Reyes & Azuara, 2008). Rather than view bilingualism as a handicap and a deicit, we might view it instead as an asset and organize teaching to take advantage of the insights that bilingual children have into how language works. In particular, Marta’s ability to “talk like this” to some people and “talk like that” to others relects a sophisticated understanding of audience that overlaps with the skills and standards of the lan- guage arts curriculum. Inviting her and children like her to explore how writers shift voices for different readers holds great potential for literacy learning. Theories and Background This work was grounded in the premise that all chil- dren have funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992) based on their participation in family and community life. The central assumption of this position is that “people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge” (González & Moll, 2002, p. 625). Since literacy practices emerge from particular social contexts and are learned through participation in those contexts (Barton, 1995; Heath, 1983), children become literate through many different paths. Although many of the skills and resources of working class households and peo- ple of color are considered irrelevant to academic learning, teachers attuned to students’ funds of knowledge can use them to create powerful contexts for learning. One framework for organizing literacy instruc- tion around points of overlap between everyday and academic competencies was laid out in the cultural modeling tradition. As developed by Carol Lee (2007), cultural modeling fosters students’ learning by asking them “to play a game about which they already knew something” (p. 79). By analyzing stu- dents’ everyday language practices and the substan- tive ways in which those practices converge with school literacy tasks, cultural modeling repositions marginalized ways with words as useful resources for literacy learning. Lee’s research (1995, 2000, 2007) considered parallels between discourse features of African American Language and the literary analysis skills valued in the secondary English classroom. Giving examples from her own teaching, Lee described how she leveraged the culturally speciic practice Leah Durán Revisiting Family Message Journals: Audience and Biliteracy Development in a First-Grade ESL Classroom Copyright © 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.