This week (January 29th-Febrary 2nd 2024) we are celebrating Languages Week in Scotland. What a great opportunity to bring into the spotlight the critical role that languages and multilingualism play in our day-to-day lives!

During this week, we don’t celebrate only the words we speak, gesture, sing and dance with others in our immediate communities. We take this opportunity to bring everyone’s attention to a paradigm shift: a change in how we see ourselves and our language resources where multilingualism IS the way to reach out, communicate effectively and live with others. This paradigm shift has become apparent in our multilingual groups in schools, with teachers and pupils immersed in multilingually rich learning environments. The need for new resources and pedagogical approaches to support learning in these contexts has become more pressing and we have responded to this call with our Multilingualism through Art (MtA) Activity Pack.

In 2023, Dr. Dobrochna Futro and Dr. Lavinia Hirsu from the School of Education in collaboration with colleagues at Scotland’s National Centre for Languages (SCILT) and Bilingualism Matters developed the MtA project funded by the Glasgow Knowledge Exchange Fund (GKEF). This CLPL (Career-Long Professional Learning) project involved teachers from 12 primary schools in 7 local authorities in Scotland. We worked together on developing multilingual approaches to language teaching, used art-based approaches to foster creativity and confidence in language learning, and we piloted a series of activities that we are now able to share with the wider community of language educators.

If you are interested in joining our journey or improving your teaching with new ideas to support your multilingual students (and by this we mean all learners!), please check our online exhibition and teacher testimonials available on the SCILT website.

The MtA Activity Pack includes activities for primary teachers who can use these as inspiration to teach languages multilingually.

This project builds on our wider research agenda with projects in Scotland, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. For the MtA project, we have benefited from the support, expertise and passionate engagement of colleagues at SCILT, Bilingualism Matters, teachers and pupils alike.  

First published: 29 January 2024

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