Multilingual picture books in the EFL classroom: a linguistic pathway to intercultural citizenship

The many benefits of using picturebooks in the primary classroom include language development as well as an introduction to real world issues through storytelling and fictitious characters that children can relate to. According to Dolan (2004: 3), picturebooks can also ‘bridge the gap between geographically distant places and the lives of children in the classroom’, through the interplay of words and pictures, which allow the child to learn to read the world. Multicultural children’s literature aims to reflect the diversity of children in the world and democratise the curriculum by making it more pluralistic. However, the representation of diversity in children’s literature, both cultural and especially linguistic, has been inadequate. Even though there is a drive to increase culturally diverse characters in children’s literature, from a linguistic perspective there is still a dearth of multilingual literature in ELT classrooms: picturebooks tend to be mostly monolingual, and even though they offer a window to otherness in faraway places and a mirror of otherness closer to home through the characters and illustrations, they do not always acknowledge the linguistic aspect of the cultures they are highlighting. Yet, language reinforces the differences and similarities in cross-cultural spaces. Within a framework of culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, this paper investigates the place of the multilingual picturebook in ELT, by firstly conducting a literature review of how multilingual books are used and their contexts, and then identifying the benefits of a multilingual approach to developing intercultural citizenship. References Dolan, A. M. (2014). You, Me and Diversity: Picturebooks for teaching development and intercultural education. London: Institute of Education Pres