Dr Sabine Little is a Senior Lecturer in Languages Education at the University of Sheffield, where she researches how multilingual children experience their world growing up, spanning home, school, the community, and online experiences. 

This is an area we’ve been looking to delve into for a while at LoveReading4Kids and we couldn’t have selected anybody better to support us in enhancing this area of the LoveReading4Kids offering. Via her "Lost Wor(l)ds" project, Sabine shares ideas for teachers working in multilingual settings, and she has been called upon to provide talks, workshops and/or consultancy for many organisations, as the National Education Union, the Primary Languages Network, the Youth Libraries Group, and the International Baccalaureate Organisation, and now she will be supporting LoveReading4Kids too. She also co-convenes the Literacy and Multilingualism Special Interest Group for the UK Literacy Association.

Watch here a chat between Sabine and LoveReading4Kids MD Deborah Maclaren where they discuss all areas of multilingualism.

Sabine has worked with the National Literacy Trust to include questions related to multilingual reading in the National Literacy Survey, greatly improving our understanding of how children from multilingual backgrounds live their reading lives. 

Sabine’s paper on "Rivers of Multilingual Reading" has led to many schools using the methodology to make multilingual reading visible in classrooms. 

As part of Sabine’s research, she worked with Sheffield Libraries to establish a multilingual children's library, which won the international Brenda Eastwood Award for Diversity and Inclusion. And there’s a great discussion in this chat about the top things Sabine would advise for those looking for advice on how to establish (or maybe even improve) a multilingual library. 

In addition Sabine will be joining the LoveReading4Kids team with a focus on ensuring we enhance this element of our offering. She shares here her recommended multilingual reads right across the age ranges, and this can also be found as a reading list in the LoveReading4Schools dashboard too, downloadable here.

The following books are all books that embrace linguistic diversity in some way, shape or form. NB: these are not “bilingual picture books” that tell the same story twice in different languages, instead, one or more languages or scripts form an integral part of the story. We will be adding full reviews to some of these books in due course, and also add to the list continuously.

If you know of a book that would fit this list, please get in touch with Dr Sabine Little at s.little@sheffield.ac.uk

These books are a great first step to introduce children to different languages and script. If you want to go one step further and create a multilingual children’s library, you can find some information here.

Thanks Sabine, and welcome to the team.