Description

What can educators in Britain learn from colleagues across Europe about successful multilingual initiatives? This edition of NALDIC Quarterly brings together some of the ideas and inspirations generated by a network of researchers, practitioners and policy makers from different European countries who met regularly for a series of seminars based at Goldsmiths, University of London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The four articles in this edition are a small selection of the 33 contributions from seven countries that make up the forthcoming book Multilingual Europe: Diversity and Learning edited by Charmian Kenner and Tina Hickey, about to be published by Trentham. All the contributions to both this edition and the book show colleagues concerned to build learning communities in which children and young people can develop the skills
needed to thrive in a multilingual society. The writers believe strongly that all children have the right to become capable users of more than one language, by maintaining their existing languages and adding new ones.

Contents

Editorial (page 2)
Charmian Kenner and Eve Gregory

Multilingual Europe: hopes and challenges

Multilingual pre-schools in Sweden: finding out what parents really want (page 4)
Monica Axelsson

Parent-teacher partnerships: co-constructing knowledge about languages and cultures in a French primary school (page 7)
Andrea Young and Christine Hélot

Turkish community action in the Netherlands: Campaigning to Retain mother-tongue education (page 10)
Kutlay Yagmur

Bilingualism and biliteracy as the norm: Arabic/Hebrew bilingual schools in Israel from a socio-political perspective (page 13)
Aura Mor-Sommerfeld

NALDIC News (page 16)

Reviews (page 19)

Conference Report (page 21)

NALDIC Annual Conference Preview (page 23)