Building Bridges: Multilingual Resources for Children

"Building Bridges" extends the debate on resources in multilingual classrooms in new directions. It focuses on the languages other than English that are most commonly spoken by British school children - Bengali, Chinese, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu; and it looks at ways in which decisions about langauge, typography, production and design affect both readability and status. A number of themes run through the book: the value of diversity for all children in all schools; the importance of creating an atmosphere which supports the use of spoken and written resources in other languages; the need to recognize status issues associated with the design and production of resources; the fact that children are more perceptive users of materials than they are generally given credit for; and the potential of multilingual resources for building bridges between monolinguals and bilinguals, between home and school.