Teaching ideas for biliteracy: Leveraging students’ languages and lives

Addressing refugee/immigrant education from an asset stance, this formative design qualitative study shares teaching ideas for biliteracy successfully employed by Polish teachers of Ukrainian students in 2023. Based on research from the fields of language and literacy, the authors share the key elements of a biliteracy approach through the acronym HEART, signifying that biliteracy is teaching from the heart: 1) Home language invitation; 2) Engaging multiple language domains; 3) Authentic content; 4) Reinforcement through sentence stems, and 5) Teacher-created mentor texts. Then, they share practical teaching ideas that draw from students’ languages and lives that all teachers can use to curate their own curriculum and implement a biliteracy curriculum for their refugee and immigrant students.