Unlocking Biliteracy: A Framework for Biliteracy Foundational Skills

Biliteracy isn’t built by teaching two languages the same way.
It’s built through intentional design—rooted in the structure of each language, responsive to how children develop literacy across both, and aligned to the purpose of dual language bilingual education.

The Framework for Biliteracy Foundational Skills offers guidance for a critical yet often overlooked component of that vision: the systematic and strategic instruction of foundational skills. It is a K–5 framework designed to support biliteracy foundational skills within a comprehensive dual language bilingual education program—regardless of the program’s language allocation plan.

Grounded in equity, efficacy, and efficiency, the framework helps schools sequence Spanish and English foundational skills across grades and phases, with clear instructional priorities—from early decoding and encoding in Spanish to advanced word analysis and bilingual morphosyntactic fluency.

This is not a curriculum. It is a blueprint for implementing foundational skills instruction that aligns to the structure and intent of biliteracy