Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
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

Day 30: Last day

This will be my last entry for my time at the International Jugenbibliothek. I feel very sad to be leaving. It has been such a wonderful experience in so many ways: the books, the people, and experiencing living in Munich. I have cleared my piles of books off my desk and found a few beautiful almost coffee table books entitled ‘The Best Children’s Books in the World’ and 100 Great Children’s Picturebooks’ to look at for my last day. I have also just had the pleasure of meeting Junko from USBBY who has just arrived from the US to work here for a month. I last met Junko at the IBBY conference in NZ, and we have a lot to discuss, so I am going to have lunch with her today, and dinner with her when I return next Friday. A final treasure! Working at IJB has provided focus and resources for my research concerning multilingual picturebooks, and given me time to really think and develop a book proposal. It is such a privilege, and a time I will always treasure. ...
Post a Comment
Read more