Children's Literature in Multilingual Classrooms: From Multiliteracy to Multimodality

In the true multilingual classroom, children use a variety of languages to learn: their home languages, the school language, foreign and second languages offered in the curriculum, minority languages, endangered languages. Transforming our monolingual classrooms into spaces where a multiplicity of languages can thrive remains a pedagogical challenge for most teachers, but greatly enhances the children's learning.

The authors in this collection describe inspirational initiatives in the teaching of literacy and the role of children's literature in multilingual primary classrooms. Accounts by teachers and researchers from the UK, Canada, France, New Zealand, Finland, Spain and Austria of recent innovative classroom-based research projects illustrate new conceptualizations of multilingual literacies and their pedagogical impact in the various teaching contexts.

The book explores new forms of pedagogy and presents inspiring examples, such as the 'Little Books', that teachers can adapt to the circumstances and interests of all the children in their classrooms. Every teacher educator, and any school with children who speak languages other than the official one, needs this book.

Christine Hélot is Professor of English in the Teacher Education Department of the University of Strasbourg in France.

Raymonde Sneddon is a French/English bilingual who loves playing with languages. She was a primary teacher in east London who specialized in working with bilingual children, their families and communities and is now Research Fellow at the University of East London.

Nicola Daly is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand.