Run by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), the initiative is running until International Mother Language Day on February 21 and aims to promote community literacies – with an equal focus on speaking and reading.
It comes after NLT research found that two in five children who speak multiple languages said they want their multilingual skills to be more recognised in school (Teravainen-Goff et al, 2021).
Part of the NLT’s Connecting Stories campaign, Storytelling Month will promote a love of reading and dialects through online scrapbook resources and booklists, which will be available online from early February.
There will also be activities via the NLT’s 14 hubs, which are area-based initiatives that bring together local partners to tackle issues in communities where there are concerns about low levels of literacy.
There will be three online scrapbook resources available. Tailored to children aged three to five, five to seven, and seven to 11, they will help them to explore their heritage, family or life history and experiences.
Other resources include a storytelling competition with master-storyteller Richard O’Neill, a dual language and folktales and fables booklists for teachers and parents, and story-reading videos on the NLT Hubs Facebook pages.
The aim is to celebrate “the value and skill of speaking multiple languages and the ways that these voices and stories shape our community”.
Free videos range from a reading of Enormous Turnip in Czech, the Little Turtle and Little Rabbit Have a Race in Mandarin Chinese and Romanian fairy stories.
The initiative also gives those who only speak one language the chance to be introduced to new languages they may not have come across before.
- For more details on Storytelling Month, visit https://literacytrust.org.uk/communities/connecting-stories/storytelling-month/
- Teravainen-Goff et al: Multilingual young people’s reading in 2021, NLT, September 2021: https://bit.ly/3uibFQy
- National Literacy Trust Hubs: https://literacytrust.org.uk/communities/