An analysis of Spanish use in award-winning children's picturebooks

This study reports how authors use Spanish in award-winning Latinx children's picturebooks in the USA. Teachers, families, and librarians use these books to support heritage language and culture or to broaden children's understanding of cultures other than their own. Thus, how these books use Spanish matters because of the potential of these books to promote cultural and linguistic diversity to children. This study investigated how authors used Spanish, which characters spoke Spanish, and what language ideologies texts explicitly communicate. Across 9 books (award winners between 2010 and 2015), there were 78 instances of Spanish use, and 21 of these were complete sentences or exclamations. The books provided a high level of support for understanding Spanish. Supports include immediate translation, appositive explanations, contextual cues, and picture cues, with little use of fluid translanguaging, which more approximates the communicative practices of bilingual communities. The paper concludes with implications for teachers to develop critical language awareness among students in response to literature and suggestions for authors and publishers to represent Spanish-speaking communities in children's literature.