Skip to main content

Day 5: Russian books and Searching

I began this morning attending a presentation at a day seminar at the IJB about Russian and German children’s books. Vitalij Berogov discussed some of the ABC books published in Berlin to provide reminders of Russian culture to the children of the Russian community in Berlin who hoped one day to return.

After that, I returned to the study library, to my little desk number 8 where I began looking through a range of multilingual book websites searching for possible titles which I then ordered from the IJB library. Once that was finished, I then went on to begin a methodical search of the library catalogue to find more multilingual picturebooks. I am first searching by the tag plurilingual and country of origin. Many of the books that turn up are bilingual but every now and then I find another multilingual book. I spent the rest of the day searching and ordering new finds. I estimate this will be my job for the next few days. Then I can get back into some more analysis (my favourite bit). 

We had a lovely meal of fish and potatoes for lunch in beautiful sunshine. We (the ‘stippis’ as we are known- this is a shortening of stipend which we receive as part of our fellowship) were discussing Jose’s search for picturebooks featuring scientists. Like my own search, identifying these books in a catalogue is not easy, so if you know any, do send me an email so I can pass the title on.


So my first weekend is coming up, and I am hoping to visit some art museums and bike out to the concentration camp Dachau which is 12 km away. I hear the weather will turn for the worse soon, so I must make the most of the good weather.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 1 at Schloss Blutenberg

After the long (but comfortable- I can recommend Qatar Airways) flight here, today has seemed rather surreal. I arrived at my accommodation by about 3pm yesterday (Sunday) after a very straightforward train ride and then short taxi drive from Munich Airport. It was a stunning and warm autumn day, and the place I am staying at is right beside a very fast flowing little river called the Wurm (with an umlaut over the ‘u’). There are lots of established autumn coloured trees and many people from the very young to the very old out on the bike path beside the river. My landlady is currently out of the country, but another of her tenants met me and gave me some lunch and dinner as no shops are open on a Sunday in this part of town. I stayed awake as long as I could before falling into a heavy sleep around 8pm, and then woke at a not too indecent hour today. I got up quite early and popped into a local bakery and vege shop to stock up on some food, and then headed into Schloss Blutenberg
1 comment
Read more

Day 2: The Research begins

Today was another warm autumn day, a pleasure to walk to work in. I arrived at 9.30 and started looking through the box of books I ordered through the IJB catalogue before I arrived. It is very difficult searching for books which are multilingual as this is not a tag in the search criteria. The books found were a mixture of quite a few bilingual Japanese/English books, and a selection of books featuring English and a minority language such as Cree, Spanish, Inuktituk and Greenlandic. There were also three picturebooks featuring characters discussing issues relating to being bilingual, for example in Yoko Writes her Name  (Rosemary Wells, 2008),   Yoko can write her name in Japanese and English. Her classmates respond with jealousy and in the process draw on several common prejudices around bilingualism. The search also did   manage to identify 5 picturebooks with between 3 and 5 languages in them, and I spent most of the day really enjoying analysing the linguistic landscape of t
1 comment
Read more

Day 17: Attitudes to language

A few more books have come up from the stacks, and I have enjoyed a day back analysing some picturebooks, this time relating to attitudes to language. One I’d like to share with you is Yoko Writes her Name (Wells, 2008), an anthropomorphic tale of a kitten at kindergarten called Yoko who can write her name and numbers in Japanese. Some of the children in the class make fun of here and tell her she will not graduate from kindergarten, but the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, decides that the class will have Japanese as a second language, and Yoko helps her classmates learn to write their names in Japanese Katakana script. This story reflects many different attitudes towards bilingualism, and presents many opportunities for children to start to learn to think about what characters in the story may be feeling. At the start of the story Yoko’s mum says she is proud of Yoko for writing her name. The text states “Yoko could write her name perfectly”, and the illustrations show she is writing
Post a Comment
Read more