English-Spanish Cognates and the Pura Belpré Children's Award Books: Reading the Word and the World

Abstract

English-Spanish cognates are an important subset of words in both the English and Spanish languages. Cognates are words that possess identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings in both languages as a result of being derived from Latin and Greek. Of major importance is the fact that many of the more than 20,000 cognates in English are academic vocabulary words, terms essential for comprehending school texts.

 The Pura Belpré Children's Book Award has been given since 1996 to outstanding children's and young adult literature that represents, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience. The books are judged for their literary and artistic quality.

 There are many English-Spanish cognates in each of the Pura Belpré picture books. The purpose of this article is to introduce the Pura Belpré Cognate Database, which lists all of the English-Spanish cognates for each of the children's picture books that have won the award or have been designated as honor books. Ideas for vocabulary, spelling, and morphology lessons or mini-lessons are also presented.

Notes

¹ http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/belpremedal

² http://www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/findacognate.html

³ http://www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/teacherschoices.html

⁴ http://www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/california_reader.html

⁵ http://www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/belpre.html