In my work with multilingual families, reading in the home language raises its head on so many levels. It is viewed as a shared family activity in a way that playing games, apps, or watching television are not. For example, parents look forward to passing on the books of their childhood to their own children.
Reading is emotive, linked to storytelling and interaction, to intergenerational communication, and identity development. While not all reading is related to books, books do indeed feature in a significant number of stories families tell me about their reading.
But how do you get hold of the books you know and cherish when you live in a country where your language is not widely spoken? How do you maintain some sort of equilibrium in the availability of reading resources, and how do you take the step from “reading together” to “child learning to read (and enjoying to do so!) in the home language”, when formal schooling is stacked against that goal?
The answers are, of course, different for different families, depending on many factors, such as availability of heritage language schools, script and syntax of the home language, etc. But there is one thing that helps all families – the availability of reading material. And while reading material goes beyond books, they remain the one resource parents are most likely to turn to, with 64% of families using them on a daily or near-daily basis.
How can we access books for our children, books which are interesting, motivating, and relevant? Not all languages have equally vibrant publishing industries, of course: in some languages, there is virtually no track record of children’s publishing, for reasons of financial viability, a lack of children’s authors, or lack of infrastructure.
If families are locally connected, books may be swapped and borrowed, increasing access, but let’s face it – keeping your multilingual child in books corresponding to all their languages is a complicated, and potentially expensive, business.
When, as part of a recent research project funded by the UK Literacy Association, I began working with families to explore how children engaged in multilingual reading over extended periods of time, the status of the language became a topic of discussion. English books are written into the school’s “read at home” diary, English books can be found in the library, English books can be discussed with friends, teachers, etc., and English literature and story-telling events are accessible to the public. The tide, as is so often the case, is relentlessly anglophone.
The families’ experiences sparked a series of public engagement events around multilingual storytelling – the first with PhD students from the University of Sheffield, the follow-ups with participation from Sheffield’s heritage language schools, and, increasingly, volunteering parents. A loose schedule would allow for a new language every half hour or so, with impromptu readings taking place in-between. The last event, held in March in Sheffield Children’s Library, was so well-attended that the library was at full capacity.
Families of different language backgrounds stayed well beyond “their own language time”, listening to stories in Lithuanian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and many more. A monolingual English-speaking father stated: “I’d never heard Punjabi before – it’s a beautiful language”, while one mother exclaimed “this is the first time my daughter has heard her language in a public context, outside the immediate family”.
After the event, the library’s bilingual picture book shelf was decimated. There was clearly a need for more books, more stories, in more languages – what to do?
When I asked whether the library would be willing to open a multilingual section in the children’s library, the answer was an immediate yes. Funding, however, was a problem: in the UK, libraries have been under immense financial pressure, many have closed.
What the library could do was to host a pilot of 500 multilingual books, providing space, staffing, cataloguing, etc. The books themselves had to be provided. We put out calls to the community, asking for book donations. Through Twitter and email, I approached authors and publishers, asking them for “spare” translated copies – when a publisher sells translation rights, they (and the author) typically receive a number of translated copies. We offered to give these copies a new home, and a number of wonderful publishers and authors agreed, giving the library boxes and boxes of brand-new editions. Heritage language schools organised book collections among parents. Over the summer holidays, a #bringabookhome hashtag on Twitter encouraged people to buy a children’s book from the country they were on holiday in and then to donate it to the library after their return.
The result, as one can imagine, is not a perfectly balanced library. Certain books are more easily to get hold of than others, picture books have a higher representation than chapter books, and certain languages are disproportionately represented. Nevertheless, the side effect of a “community-built” library is that it gathers momentum along the way – if you have worked to help make something happen, you have a vested interest in its survival. And so, Sheffield’s multilingual library is very much a community effort, a fitting tribute to the “City of Sanctuary”.
The multilingual library has received further support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council: as part of the Open Worlds Research Initiative’s Cross-Language Dynamics strand. The funding enables a research strand alongside the pilot, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative data collection on how families engage with the library, and an accompanying reward scheme. One of the project outcomes will be a clear set of guidelines, hints and tips for other libraries seeking to run similar projects – these should be available in the first half of 2019.
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References
Little, S. (2018, Online First) ‘”Is there an app for that?” Exploring games and apps among heritage language families’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2018.1502776 (Gold Open Access)
Little, S. (2017, Online First) ‘Whose heritage? What inheritance?: Conceptualising Family Language Identities’. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463 (Gold Open Access)
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It was very heart-warming to know a child heard their mother tongue in public for the first time in their lives.
There is an Armenian publishing house called Cilicia in Syria and Lebanon which published many Armenian books for all ages including children as young as 1. Parents and relatives living abroad would come all the way to Aleppo or Antilias to buy these books and give them to the younger generation.
https://www.ciliciabookstore.com/
here is a link of the bookstore in case there was a need for Armenian children books.
This is amazing! I wish more places would do this.