We are pleased to announce the availability of a new TIRF “FreeBook.” In partnership with Routledge, the Foundation is offering a collection of five research reports previously published in the TIRF-Routledge series, “Global Research on Teaching and Learning English.”

As the title shows, this collection focuses on teaching English to multilingual children in a range of countries: China, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Uganda, the United States, and Uruguay. Five chapters were chosen for this FreeBook.

1. “Learning English through Educational Media: Drawing from Children’s Linguistic Repertoires,” was written by Kevin Wong. It is based on research with four five-year-old children of Chinese immigrant families in an after-school program in the United States.
2. “Creating Multimodal Design Spaces for Language Learners through Global Digital Storytelling,” by Rui Li, reports on English learners in northwestern China who were part of a large project involving children in Mexico, Uganda, and the United States.
3. Leticia Cinganotto’s chapter is entitled “Digital Technologies and Storytelling for CLIL in a Primary School in Italy.” It describes the experiences of a fifth-grade teacher and her 20 students in a bilingual school.
4. “Remote Teaching: A Case Study in Teaching English to Primary School Children in Uruguay via Videoconferencing” is by Graham Stanley. It discusses an innovative program addressing the shortage of primary school English teachers through digital conferencing.
5. “Metalinguistic Awareness and Multilingualism: A Case Study of Young English Learners” was co-authored by Diana Walla and Eliane Lorenz. They investigated the relationship between children’s metalinguistic awareness and whether or not they come from multilingual backgrounds. The report is based on data from twelve 11-to-12-year-old students in Norway.

We hope you find these research reports useful in your own context and that you will share this link with teacher educators and teachers working in primary schools. We find the reports to be insightful and well written, and we expect readers – particularly teachers of young children – will recognize important issues that they themselves have contemplated.

Finally, we would like to thank our colleague Megha Patel, Education Editor at Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, for her encouragement and practical support in bringing this project to fruition. Her guidance and encouragement mean a great deal to TIRF colleagues who undertake TIRF-Routledge publications.

The FreeBook is available on TIRF’s website to download for free. Click here to learn more.