Multilingual Learning: Stories in Schools and Communities in Britain

With its stories of individual learners and teachers in a wide range of contexts, this book offers radical new thinking about mainstream and community education in Britain. It argues for theoretical frameworks and a model of pedagogy and terminology that properly reflect the ways in which children’s achievements in mainstream school are fed by all their learning experiences in different contexts, and in all the languages in their repertoire.

The editors, all experienced teachers and researchers in community settings, present an overview of the current situation and propose theoretical and pedagogical frameworks to move discussion forward. Individual case studies bring to life how it feels to be a teacher or learner in such contexts.

The contributors are Olga Barradas, Arvind Bhatt, Nirmala Bhojani, Christine Callender, Yangguang Chen, Angela Creese, and Raymonde Sneddon. The concluding chapter by Jill Bourne draws the themes together and opens out the possibilities for the future.

Multilingual Learning is for researchers, teachers, and teacher-educators, and indicates the possibilities for positive links between mainstream school and community learning contexts, and for future research, policy and practice.

Peter Martin was, until his death, Professor of Education and Linguistics at University of East London.