An investigation into the linguistic landscape of translingual storybooks for Arabic-English bilingual children

Kay Gallagher, Zayed University
Afaf Bataineh, Zayed University

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

Publication Date

4-20-2020

Abstract

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This study investigates the linguistic landscape of eight culturally-responsive, translingual picture storybooks written by bilingual Arabic-English teacher candidates for young emergent bilingual children. Drawing on linguistic content analysis methodology, the study analyses the cross-linguistic challenges teacher candidates faced in creating translingual children’s story books for young Emirati children wherein Arabic and English are meshed, and examines the strategies they used to integrate the two linguistic systems. The study also examines what the storybooks convey, explicitly or implicitly, about culture and language in the UAE where the storybooks were created. The findings of the paper indicate that meshing Arabic and English is not a simple undertaking and that directionality, linguistic balance, page layout, name selections, environmental print and cultural content are impacted by this process of meshing. As prototypes, however, these storybooks have yielded valuable educational lessons.

ISSN

0143-4632

Publisher

Routledge

Volume

41

Issue

4

First Page

348

Last Page

367

Disciplines

Education

Keywords

bilingualism, linguistic landscape, multimodality, Picture storybooks, translanguaging

Scopus ID

85084492707

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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