Great Idea: Dual language books

What are dual language books?

Dual language books, also called bilingual books, are storybooks or non-fiction books with matching text in two languages: English and another language that is spoken in the UK.

Quality dual language storybooks have some or all of these features:

• Parity of text between the two languages. This is an important signal of the value given to the languages that multilingual children use.
• The representation of a diverse range of characters, including main characters, in contexts that children recognise.
• Storylines that offer authentic accounts of the lived worlds of the children who read them.
• A clear relationship between text and illustrations, so that children can use the illustrations to support their meaning making.
• Books that are favourites among all the children, so that those children who are new to the UK can build shared cultural capital.
• Books that present a view of the wider world, for all children to extend their knowledge and understanding of cultures and ways of life beyond their own.

Examples of activities

Teachers can use dual language storybooks in multiple ways, depending on the opportunities and constraints in their context. For example:

1. Where a child has learnt some reading and writing in their home language, teachers can encourage them to read the text in their home language and engage in a range of reading and writing activities in response to the text, with a teacher or TA who shares their language. The child can also read the book with another learner who shares their home language.
2. Where a teacher or TA doesn’t share the child’s home language, the focus can be on the English text, with engagement with the illustrations to build an understanding of the story. For additional support, teachers can invite a family member to conduct the reading in the child’s home language, and the teacher can then focus on the English text to build the child’s proficiency in English, while making sure they use comprehensible English.
3. Alongside the book reading, teachers can use objects, like toys, food items, and other realistic objects from the story, to embed understanding.
4. For support with phonics learning, teachers can choose books that contain language with the sounds, including phonemes and digraphs, that are the focus of the learning in the class. Hearing and using the new sounds in English in the context of a meaningful and enjoyable story can help learners who are new to English to learn about the sound/text relationship in English. This work can also support learners who are learning a new script, where their previous literacy learning has been in a different script, for example in Urdu or Mandarin.
5. For learners who can access the text in both languages, teachers can encourage them to make comparisons between spelling and grammar in English and their home language, as they deepen their understanding of how English works. For example, teachers can identify key words and focus on English spelling patterns, as children think about how those words are spelled in their home language. Teachers can identify a key language feature of the story in English, for example the use of the past tense in the verbs, and focus on the verbs, including by conveying meaning through mime, actions, and gesture.
6. Writing activities based on the story can extend literacy knowledge and practice, for example by providing scaffolding such as a story frame, to teach the format of a particular story type, like a fairy story or folk tale. This guidance on scaffolding expands on these ideas. Sentence starters can help children use and practise the language structures in a particular story type, or help to structure a response, like an opinion, to a story.
7. Teachers can design writing activities such as getting children to write their own stories, or fragments of a story like a different ending, either in English or their preferred language, which an adult translates. Where children are still learning to write, or to write using the English alphabet, they can co-construct stories in group activities or alongside an adult. Children can then illustrate and design their stories to produce books for the class library or to take home.
8. For learners in secondary schools, where dual language books are more difficult to access, teachers can suggest they bring novels and other texts in their home languages from home, or from their community language school, and could work in small groups to jointly construct versions in English.

How dual language books work to develop literacy

“Bilingual books ignite the feelings and thoughts belonging to language – in one world, two languages.” Where children encounter their home language at school, in ways that elevate and value their language, spaces are made where they feel seen, and where a crucial part of their identity – the language they speak, is affirmed. This work lays the foundation for their learning of and in English.

With dual language books, teachers can create relatable, fun, meaningful encounters with text, which provide contexts in which multilingual children who use EAL can develop their English proficiency, including their knowledge of the sounds, spelling, and grammar structures of English.

Dual language books create opportunities for multilingual children to develop their reading and writing in English, because they can use the scaffolding of the language they already know. By involving children in literacy work in their home language, teachers can create classroom environments in which children, especially those who are new to English, and new to schooling in the UK, can feel safe and feel they belong.

Dual language books create opportunities for shared meaning making, in classrooms where the teacher, TA and other learners don’t know the language of a new learner, providing shared enjoyment of a meaningful, fun, and language-rich text.

For dual language books to work best, make sure they are in the variety of the language that the learner knows: people in Tunisia speak a different variety of Arabic to those in Lebanon, for example, and within countries there are different varieties of the dominant language.

Top tip: In addition to collecting and using a good range of dual language storybooks, aim to a set of storybooks and non-fiction texts that are only in the language your learners know and use, so that English is not always the default and privileged language.

Why are dual language books a Great Idea for EAL learners?

Research shows there is a range of cognitive advantages associated with  learning and using the languages children speak at home. This can develop children’s metalinguistic awareness, as they compare the ways different languages work, and can see ‘literacies as systems’ (Edwards, 2009). As Jim Cummins’ work (1982, 1991) has shown, where children continue to develop literacy learning in their home language, they can transfer their knowledge of reading and writing to English, even where they may be learning languages in different scripts. Where dual language texts are in languages with different scripts, this enhances children’s exposure to the variety of ways of coding meaning.

When teachers use dual language books in literacy work, they welcome all children, helping to build a sense of belonging. The Lit in Colour report, commissioned by Penguin publishers and The Runnymede Trust (2021), presents evidence of the need for inclusive reading for creating inclusive, equal classrooms.

“ … [R]eading books and stories aloud and being encouraged to have conversations about them with their teacher and peers … improves reading comprehension.” Education Endowment Foundation (2020). This underlines how these important conversations about books can build the foundations of communicative ability that children need to develop as they move up the school years. In these conversations, children learn important communication skills, such as turn taking, listening to the views and ideas of others, and formulating their own ideas and opinions.

As a way of ensuring equality, teachers can build parity between all the languages their learners speak, by creating classroom and library collections that are representative of the diverse multilingual worlds that so many learners inhabit, and by embedding multilingual practices that recognise, value, and draw on each child’s full linguistic repertoire as they learn English.

References

Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (2020) Reflecting Realities. London: CLPE.

Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Cummins, J. (1991) Interdependence of First and Second Language Proficiency in Bilingual Children. In Bialystok, E. (ed) Language Processing in in Bilingual Children. Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press.

Edwards, V. (2009) Learning to be Literate, Multilingual Perspectives. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Education Endowment Foundation (2020) Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1. Available at: Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1 | EEF   (Accessed 02/01/2025).

Penguin & The Runnymede Trust (2021) Lit in colour. Available at: Lit in Colour | The Runnymede Trust (Accessed 02/01/2025).

Sneddon, R. (2009) Bilingual Books Biliterate children. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

Wyse, D. & Hacking, C. (2024) The Balancing Act. An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing. Oxon: Routledge.