Beyond Bilingual: Making Storytime Friendly to Families who are English Language Learners

One of the last sessions I attended at ALA was a session on making your storytimes more friendly for English Language Learners. We have a very diverse community here, and many people learning English come to our storytimes in hopes of learning some English with their kids. I've particularly seen a huge number of immigrant parents at our Infant and Toddler storytimes. So I was interested to see what other libraries do to make storytime more fun and more comfortable for their English learner parents.

The workshop was presented by Rachel Payne, Eva Raison and Jessica Ralli of Brooklyn Public Library. They set up a website with wonderful resources--you can view their slides from the presentation, PDF versions of the cards they created, storytime guides for parents written in 9 different languages, and great booklists! All this and more is at:

bklynlib.org/beyondbilingual

So now their presentation: They talked about the tension immigrant parents feel, when early literacy research says use your own language, but parents want to practice English and want kids to learn English - they have anxiety about their kids not learning English quickly enough and themselves, too.

In response to this, Brooklyn PL made a multilingual storytime advisory committee. They have now provided over 300 storytimes in 9 languages! They had to go outside of their staff because they don't have staff who speak Urdu. They hired community members to offer storytimes. There were no specific age ranges for storytime, although it was part of their "Ready, Set, Kindergarten!" initiative. The Multilingual Storytime is a "bring the whole family" kind of program.

They paired Bengali storytime with their English language discussion group, so while kids were playing or doing crafts after storytime, parents were practicing their English.

They created storytime cards very similar to what we use in Sensory Storytime, to give ELL parents a visual reference for the elements of the storytime. They show parents all their lyrics and rhymes with one giant illustrated book. They used to give handouts, but handouts get lost or trashed, and parents can just as easily take a picture of the giant book.

Their storytime guides orient families to storytime and translate important early literacy research and tips. Something for us to think about if we ever start translating information into Chinese on a regular basis: they recommend using both Chinese traditional and Chinese simplified.

Making Your Storytime ELL Friendly:

• Model wordless books.
• Every now and then, model reading a book in another language than what it's written in. Expose people to global books they would never otherwise read, written in languages they don't speak.
• Use props, like puppets.
• Sing a book. The presenters explained: "It slows you down." You can also sing a book in "call-and-response" style and let people practice saying English words at a slow, easy pace. Example: When reading My House by Byron Barton, you can sing to the tune of "Frere Jacques": "I am Jim, I am Jim, This is my house, This is my house..."
• Read Big books.
• Use expression and choose books with expressive characters and lots of dialogue.
• Provide song and rhyme lyrics on a large notebook.
• Use visual schedules and prompts.

Adding Multilingual Content to Your Storytime:

• Change a few action words of a rhyme to another language. They did an example of this with the whole group. We all sang "Wheels on the Bus" in English and Urdu--we used Urdu words for the sounds that the wheels, door, wipers, etc. make!
• Share a different language's counting book or ABC book every week
• Sing the ABC song in other languages
• Read a book about colors and translate the colors into other languages

Adding Multilingual Content to Your Play Areas:

• Uncle Goose makes blocks in other languages!
• Multicultural foodsets -- at BPL, they made their play area into a "food truck" and switched it up with a different culture each week, displaying books in that language nearby!

No-nos:

• Don't claim to be bilingual if you're not really
• Check with community experts so you don't get it wrong!

Someone mentioned that, at Skokie IL, they have "Storytime ambassadors" - volunteers who speak the language and come to storytime. They recommend partnering with a university's bilingual students, like maybe education majors, to be an "ambassador" for your multilingual storytime.

One of the presenters then talked about some of the concepts of Universal Design for Learning, and how they apply here. 

Universal Design for Learning: 

• Show things in different ways
• Allow people to show what they already know, in different ways
• Give them different ways to participate

I agree--it's important to immigrant and English learner families that they have options for engagement and participation, so that they begin to take ownership of the program and also feel like they are growing.