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Day 23: Checking, filling gaps, reworking

I have just come back from a weekend visiting my brother and his family living in London, and even managed to read a few picturebooks to my niece and nephew, including Hairy Mclary.

Last Friday’s work, and this week's so far has centred around going back to initial data from multilingual picturebooks, checking it, filling gaps and gathering arguments for the article I am writing. It is always interesting to go back and discover how much your thinking has developed since you started. You also start to see trends which weren’t visible in your initial analyses, for example it is now clear that for books with many languages (e.g., 12 or 13) are mostly concept or rhyme books with specifically didactic purposes, and books with fewer languages (3 or 4) are mostly full stories. It is also clear when I put my data into a big table that the languages which dominate are mostly international languages such as French, English and German, and that books either have an inward looking focus,  representing languages within a country, or an outward looking focus, trying to introduce readers to languages outside of the languages spoken in their own country.

I had a fruitful session with one of the language specialists here, Michelle Bourgeois, who is American working here for one year looking after the English language books. I was keen to make sure she had links to as many New Zealand publishers as possible, so gave her some lists given to me by my friends in NZ, and in return Michelle was able to point me in the direction of some very interesting bilingual picturebooks which have come across her desk. More on those in future posts.


I have also just received a few more treasures from the stacks featuring books which reflect attitudes towards languages, and am looking forward to getting to look at these, but I am still working and reworking the ideas in my multilingual picturebooks analysis for now.

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