The bilingual education program in a given community should be based on a sociolinguistic assessment of that community, and community members should be involved in assessing the surrounding bilingual reality and in deciding whether they wish to mirror that reality in the biliteracy program. This paper presents alternatives for bilingual programs based on the nature and objectives of the community. The program models presented illustrate the relative use of the native language or dialect and the second language or dialect in areas of concept development, prereading skills, written and oral language development, and reading instruction. (VM)