Parents’ multilingual storytelling in the school setting: evaluating influence on family language practices

Abstract

The linguistic choices parents make while communicating with their bi- and multilingual children is fundamental to the development of their children’s linguistic repertoire and multilingual development. The involvement of parents in the implementation of multilingual pedagogies can play a fundamental role in fostering parents’ awareness on topics related to multilingualism. This paper illustrates school-based multilingual storytelling activities conducted by parents in a pre-school in northern Italy. The activity was designed as part of the project L’AltRoparlante (Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020), an Italian network of schools which adopted multilingual pedagogies at curricular level. The findings suggest that involving parents in multilingual pedagogies have a positive influence on family language use as they encourage children’s linguistic diversity awareness and parents’ biliteracy planning. Parents’ involvement in multilingual pedagogy can be a useful tool to build inclusive home-school collaborations and to guide parents in shaping multilingual storytelling activities at home.