Sharing Power in Read-Alouds with Emergent Bilingual Students

This article addresses a growing call for the use of more culturally relevant texts and pedagogy in classrooms. We present how a teacher sharing power with emergent bilingual (EB) students during read-aloud discussions with culturally relevant texts supports EB students' literacy opportunities. These opportunities include (1) initiating new topics in the discussions, (2) providing cognitive or linguistic supports for one another, (3) using multilingual abilities to identify vocabulary, and (4) using cultural knowledge to make spontaneous inferences. For each of these four opportunities, we discuss (a) how power is shared by the teacher with her EB students, (b) how sharing power opens learning opportunities for others, (c) how the culturally relevant text supports the learning opportunities, and (d) how students are positioned in the discussion. Finally, we present how teachers can share power, and choose culturally relevant texts that will facilitate these learning opportunities, in their own classrooms.