Language, Literacy & E-books, LWF Talk, London 2011

English as an additional language (EAL)

How a partnership between a digital publisher and educators approached the challenge presented by young learners in the London Borough of Lewisham for whom English is an additional language.

Featured speakers are Neal Hoskins, WingedChariot, with Tom Cooper and Jo Barclay from Lewisham Local Authority.

WingedChariot a pioneer in digital story publishing and Lewisham LA last year began a unique partnership on a project to fill a great gap in providing story based learning materials in a multilingual format for EAL and MFL classrooms.

With over 50 languages being spoken in many urban school programming a multilingual application in the top 10 community languages for students to use was an outstanding success.

The fantastic results and feedback from the initial pilot means that WingedChariot is pleased to announce today at LWF an expansion of this project into 6 schools across 3 London boroughs that will see more multilingual stories produced as well as a creative writing application for young people to tell and write their own stories through handheld devices.

Part funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Arts foundation in 2011 this simple but innovative project will also form part of the Cultural Olympiad celebration of 2012 with an eye to going national in schools for 2013.