Using and Researching Dual Language Books for Children

The Dual Language Action Research Project (2002-2004)

Commercially available multilingual welcome book

Schools produce information booklets for parents and in some schools these have been translated into the languages that most newly arrived children are likely to speak. In collaboration with the Refugee team of Bill Bolloten and Tim Spafford in Newham, Mantra have produced a CD version that can be readily customised for each school and made available in a total of 15 languages.

Welcoming new children at a Primary School in Waltham Forest

In June 2002 Alison Jenkins reported on her work to the Dual Language Books Action Research Project at UEL.

The context:

The project was carried out in a primary school in which the following languages were spoken: Urdu - Punjabi - Turkish - Somali - French - Portuguese - Spanish - Albanian - Bengali - Gujerati - Yoruba - Twi - Edo - Vietnamese - Tamil - Pushtu - Dari - Arabic. Few children in the school were literate in the language of the home, although older children who were newly arrived in this country often were.

The school has a substantial supply of dual language books, many of them now quite old and mainly in Asian languages. These are generally kept in the library rather than in classrooms to ensure wider access. Over the years a very large number of recordings have been made for story tapes and books have been made in a range of languages. There is an Urdu class which takes place on the school site. As in many schools there are issues around these activities and resources:

• Poor recording conditions affect tape quality;
• school wide and classroom management of resources means that there are few multilingual lingual materials to hand in any given classroom
• materials are little used in the literacy hour, possibly due to time management issues;
• the high cost of providing materials in all languages spoken

Working with new arrivals

Where available, children from Y1 to Y6 who speak the same language as the new expected arrival make a Welcome Tape in that language. The children negotiate all aspects of school life that a new arrival needs to know about, discuss and plan and then record the tape. These have proved valuable to the new arrivals who get their own copy to keep and refer to; the tape can also be played at the initial interview for parents and children to hear.

There are great advantages in a project of this nature:

• the process is a valuable speaking and listening lesson for the children who make the tape
• children learn to negotiate their knowledge of the school environment and match it to the needs of new arrivals.
• children can use their special cultural and linguistic knowledge to anticipate the difficulties that children from their own family’s country of origin may experience 
• they work collaboratively and bilingually, building on linguistic strengths, learning new words and forms of expression appropriate to a recording.
• the tape is particular to the school and to the interests of the children who make it
• the children who make the tape learn to empathise with new arrivals and are prepared to befriend them and ease their passage into the school
• the new arrivals feel genuinely welcome and have a peer group they can immediately relate to
• it is not necessary for either the children producing the tape or those using it to be literate in their first language.

At the time of reporting Welcome Tapes hade been made in 12 languages. However the technology presented difficulties: it is difficult to modify a tape when, for example, dinner times change and tape recorders are not readily available around the school. By 2007 the range of welcome tapes produced has widened to include eastern European languages spoken by new arrivals. The children’s copy follows them into class where they can listen to it whenever they wish. The school has greatly increased its provision of dual language books for use in classrooms and in the library.

Update: readily available technology makes this approach to welcoming newcomers much easier. Digital recorders are easy to use, recordings can be easily edited and burned onto CDs and/or downloaded on to the school’s IT network, so they can be referred to at any times.

---

© 2007