- Contributor
- Editors
- Publisher
- Year
- ISBN
- Language
- Nayr Ibrahim
- E.C. Hartmann & Á. McGillicuddy
- Routledge
- 2025
- 9781032639017
- English
This edited volume offers fresh perspectives on linguistic and cultural diversity in multilingual picturebooks, examining their potential to support multilingual learning in different educational contexts. Drawing on international, transdisciplinary perspectives from over fifteen countries, the book provides a comprehensive view of this unique literary genre.
The collection showcases a wide range of languages featured in multilingual picturebooks, including Chinese, Farsi, Georgian, Irish, Korean, Malagasy, Mexican Indigenous languages, Mirandese, Northern Sámi, Portuguese, Spanish, Te Reo Māori, Ukrainian, and Welsh. Various chapters examine how multilingual picturebooks foster language and literacy development for emergent bilinguals in multilingual and multicultural environments, highlighting benefits such as linguistic and semiotic code-switching, as well as their ability to stimulate intercultural awareness in readers. The book also considers the creation, translation, and complex publishing processes of multilingual picturebooks, while exploring modern technologies such as eye tracking to analyse the reading processes of these books.
Reflecting current insights and innovations in picturebook research, this volume will appeal to scholars, academics, and researchers in language and literacy education, multilingual education, and early childhood education. Those involved in children’s literature studies, multimodality, and bilingualism more broadly will also find this collection valuable.
This chapter explores the pedagogical affordances of a dual-language Northern Sámi–Norwegian picturebook in addressing multilingualism, interdisciplinarity, and indigeneity in English language teacher education. The scheme of work described in this study was developed in a pre-service teacher education programme for Grades 1–7 in Northern Norway. Primarily, it constituted a response to a call for more inclusive practices across subject areas, with a specific requirement to address Indigenous education. Ultimately, it integrated translingual practices into English language teaching (ELT) and addressed global-local diversities through an Indigenous and environmental perspective.
The picturebook Ábiid plástihkat – Plasten i havet (2020) by Rita Sørly (author) and Malgorzata Piotrowska (illustrator) is written in languages other than the target language of the educational programme and embodies a plurisemiotic object that contributes to decentring the monolingual-monocultural premise of the English language classroom. This chapter focuses on the translingual-transcultural pedagogical interactions facilitated by this picturebook and the reflections of the student teachers. Their responses to the scheme of work and critical interactions with the picturebook urge us to reconsider the monolingual bias and embrace interdisciplinarity and indigeneity in ELT.