March is Multilingual Month

What is Multilingual Month?

Multilingual Month was first proposed in 1998 as a national annual event to be celebrated in schools on a par with the already established Black History Month in October.  It aims to promote a range of activities across the curriculum in schools which explicitly value the cultural and linguistic heritage of their pupils and which promote language learning and anti-racist and anti discriminatory attitudes.

Children are more likely to take pride in their language skills if these are acknowledged and developed by their school. Although there are over 300 languages spoken by London school children, English is often the only language heard in many schools. The activities for multilingual month are designed to help teachers to demonstrate that the different languages spoken by children are valued and of interest to all pupils – whether monolingual or bilingual.

What can I do?
•    Pass on the enclosed leaflet to your children’s teacher.
•    Offer to come into your child’s class and to teach the children some words or a song in your language.
•    Participate in a multilingual story telling session.
•    Contribute resources in your language for displays about the languages in your child’s class.

One of our members reported how her suggestions about Multilingual Month last year resulted in a series of assemblies at her child’s school about languages and even the establishment of language clubs which are still running!

Although there are over 300 languages spoken by London schoolchildren, English is often the only language heard in school. Multilingual Month aims to promote a range of activities across the curriculum in schools which explicitly value the cultural and linguistic heritage of their pupils and enable them to share their knowledge with other children.

Ideas for Multilingual Month activities include:
•    Theme-based Assemblies
Where the theme is languages including BSL and Braille
•    Taster language lessons in a range of world languages, Bengali, Urdu, Yoruba, Swahili, Hindi, Bosnian, Albanian, Twi and Arabic, as well as European languages.
•    “Teach me your language” sessions where pupils teach simple phrases of their home language/mother tongue to other pupils. 
•    Greetings and salutations in different languages, so that on a chosen day, everyone in the school can greet each other in as many languages as possible
•    Bilingual storytelling/poetry workshops
•    Multilingual drama workshops
•    Displays of multilingual writing by pupils
•    Displays of newspapers in other languages, even as backing paper
•    Language surveys where the results are displayed
•    Displays in the borough and school libraries or classrooms of dual language books and books in languages other than English
•    Video cameras to interview grandparents/parents/kids – handing down stories, talking about conflict and tradition
•    Music, songs and dance from countries of origin depicting stories

Further information regarding any of the suggested activities can be obtained from Ms Fahro Malik at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and a copy of the Multilingual Month handbook, which includes lesson plans and basic vocab lists for a number of languages, can be downloaded from: www.naldic.org.uk/docs/resources/featured.cfm