Storytelling at home and at the nursery school: A study of bilingual children’s literacy practices

Research findings show that high standards in oracy (as well as in literacy) help raise attainment across the curriculum. This paper examines two bilingual children’s practices of storytelling both at nursery school and at home in Luxembourg. The findings reveal some common themes both between the families and between the home and the school settings: storytelling was regular, multimodal and associated with language development. There were also major differences; first, children collaboratively constructed stories at school, where dialogue was valued, but not at home and, second, the adults had a different understanding of multilingualism, which, in turn, impacted on the value they attributed to the children’s opportunities to use languages at school. While the teacher encouraged the bilingual children to draw on their entire linguistic repertoire, one mother would have preferred a monolingual setting. It is hoped that these contextualised findings of cultural practices help practitioners develop linguistically responsive and accountable language teaching.