Bonnie Norton – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Global Storybooks: freely available digital tales in 50+ languages.

Global Storybooks is a free multilingual literacy resource for children and youth worldwide. Read, download, toggle, and listen to a wide variety of illustrated stories from the African Storybook and other open sites. Development continues at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

One of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is to achieve quality education globally by the year 2030. High illiteracy rates among children are partly due to a lack of appropriate reading materials in languages familiar to children. Research has shown that children learn to read best in their family’s home language, which also establishes a strong foundation for learning any additional languages. The Global Storybooks portal hosts custom sites with multilingual open-licensed books for over 40 countries and regions on five continents. The vision is to help democratize global flows of information and resources, to facilitate language learning — including Indigenous languages — and to promote literacy.

For further information:

Norton, B., & Stranger-Johannessen, E. (2020, January 19). Global Storybooks: From Arabic to Zulu, freely available digital tales in 50+ languages. The Conversation.

Identity, Digital Storytelling and Linguistic Citizenship, Hub for Education & Language Diversity, King’s College, London, UK, 22 July 2021, 15:00 BST.

This event is part of the Hub for Education & Language Diversity (HELD) summer school, July 21-23, 2021, but is open to everyone.

What is the relationship between identity, digital storytelling and linguistic citizenship? Due to advances in digital technology, there are new relations of power at micro and macro levels, and digital literacy has become essential in “claiming the right to speak.” As language learners navigate these changing times, they need to negotiate new identities, investments, and imagined futures.

In this presentation, Dr Bonny Norton demonstrates that while there are social structures that may constrain a language learner’s linguistic citizenship, digital stories in multiple languages can help these learners claim the right to be heard. Drawing on her recent research on digital storytelling in both wealthy and poorly resourced communities worldwide, she discusses how freely available digital stories in multiple languages can harness the linguistic capital of language learners in homes and schools, with exciting implications for the promotion of linguistic citizenship in communities worldwide.