Notes from European experience on multilingual talking books for young school children learning creativity - Статья

Плахотник), V. Red’ko (В. Редько), N. Samujlov (Н. Their writings are however mostly dedicated to monolingual textbooks creation. The Professor Christine Helot of Strasbourg University mentions developments in the production of bilingual and trilingual books for little children in France [7, 42-65]. However, in general the problem of producing multilingual textbooks and manuals is not widely investigated in Europe nor in the wider world. In this context the practice in an international group of investigators is interesting for Ukrainian researchers and the authors of text books. The project named Multilingual Virtual Talking Books (MuViT) aims to implement the concept of pedagogy of multiliteracies. This concept was developed by an international group of scientists which consisted of ten academics from the USA and Australia and called ‘New London Group’ in 1996. They produced a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing schoolchildren and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call ‘multiliteracies’[9]. The authors of the approach argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than that portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable schoolchildren to achieve the twin goals of literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success [3]. The members of the New London Group underlined that education in the 21st century must consider and develop the intercultural, multilingual and technological experience which schoolchildren already have [9]. Before the start of the MuViT project, 8 researchers in the field of first, second and foreign language acquisition, teachers and teacher educators, IT-specialists from Germany, Spain, Turkey, Latvia and Russia searched for a simple-to-use tool which could enhance multilingual learning through the use of new media. The questions to be answered were: How could different languages enter classrooms all over the world and motivate children to learn their own and other languages, including minority languages, school languages and foreign languages, without requesting teachers to be able to speak all these different languages? How could, at the same time, children’s technological understanding and media literacy be developed? [3; 8] The work of the project under the leadership of professor D. Elsner began from the analyses of the textbook market in different European countries. They came to the following conclusions: 1) the products available for multilingual learning are basically paper books in two languages; 2) sometimes accompanied by CD which are often restricted to two languages (English/Spanish); 3) do not come with appropriate methodological guidelines for their integration into the language classroom; and 4) are aimed at the development of traditional functional literacy, namely reading [8].