What is Co-Lingual-S?

Co-Lingual-S is an abbreviation for the research project “Stories of multilingualism: Connecting families and schools through visual narratives“. It took place in Belgium between 2022 – 2024 and had three main aims:

• Understanding multilingualism at home: how family members create and sustain multilingualism at home
• Developing a multilingual storybook that portrays everyday multilingual family life
• Supporting teachers in implementing activities with the Co-Lingual-S multilingual storybook in primary schools

Why Co-Lingual-S?

Today, many children grow up with two or more languages. While multilingualism at home is an everyday reality for many families, schools may be less aware or find it ‘surprising’ and somewhat ‘unusual’. The EU-funded Co-lingual-S project addresses this disconnect between family and school regarding multilingualism. By closely collaborating with multilingual families and teachers in the creation and implementation of a multilingual storybook, we aimed to bring schools and families closer. In a metaphorical sense, we hoped the two worlds would start ‘learning about each others’  languages’  and become ‘colinguals’.

What did Co-Lingual-S do?

Co-Lingual-S had mainly four types of activities:

• It conducted participatory visual-narrative research with multilingual families and teachers working in multilingual schools.
• It developed a multilingual storybook that portrays everyday multilingual family life.
• It organised events on the topic of multilingualism for families, teachers and anyone interested in multilingualism.
• It formulated recommendations based on the findings of the project, in order to inform families, teachers, schools and policy-makers.
• It wrote blogposts based on scientific literature and outcomes of scientific projects related to multilingualism at home and school, and the links between the two.
  

Team