Starting small: Engaging young learners with literacy through multilingual storytelling

Abstract

In Australian schools, approximately 20% of young children are emergent bilinguals, who are simultaneously developing their home languages while learning through English. While many teachers recognise the benefits of multilingual teaching approaches in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, there remains a significant level of uncertainty about how to enact them. These approaches depend heavily on teachers’ ability to leverage young learners’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge, as well as to apply pedagogies that engage the full range of their linguistic abilities. To effectively develop these strategies, many teachers require additional support. This paper presents a study in which researchers collaborated with a classroom teacher to initiate a multilingual storytelling project aimed at children aged six to seven. The objective was to explore the potential of multilingual storytelling to engage young emergent bilingual learners in early reading and writing activities. Our findings indicate that this pedagogical approach, rooted in the principles of translanguaging, significantly enhanced the students' engagement with literacy. By validating their home languages and cultural identities, the project provided strong support for their oral language development, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating multilingual practices in the foundational years of education.