WOW Dozen: Language Learning and Communication
Over half the world's population speaks more than one language. While many people naturally become multilingual by growing up in multilingual communities, others deliberately learn a second or third language later in life. People learn new languages for many reasons, including to maintain connections to heritage and family, in order to navigate a new country, and to communicate with new friends and communities. Sometimes people even invent their own ways to communicate! In this collection of picturebooks, we find a dozen different examples of people learning a new language or finding a way to communicate.
A recent immigrant from Italy uses her limited English and the linguistic support of a teacher to tell her class a funny story.
A small boy visits his grandmother in Mexico and uses the game of lotería to facilitate communication.
In this biography, Louis can’t find books he can read after losing his sight so he develops a writing system for the blind.
When a Cree girl discovers that her grandfather was forbidden to speak his language as a child, she finds a Cree language book so he can relearn it.
Based on a true story, in 1880s Jerusalem Ben-Zion and his father work to revitalize Hebrew as an everyday language.
As children gather around a storyteller one boy offers to translate her story about the Tower of Babel for a boy who can’t understand her words.
Based on a true story, Leyzer Zamenhof hopes the world will be more peaceful if everyone can understand each other by using a universal language he creates and calls Esperanto.
The friendship between a little girl and her new classmate from Morocco deepens as they learn each other’s language.
Recent immigrant Dat heads to his first day of school not understanding a word that anyone says until a kind classmate begins using art as a communication tool.
Set in a preschool, immigrant children from around the world find a surprising language connection & a cultural bond when Luli brings a pot of tea to class.
On her first day Mina doesn’t understand the noisy children at her new school but over time the strange sounds begin to make sense.
As Abuelita helps Manolo prepare for a Spanish spelling bee, her stories about how speaking Spanish was prohibited inspires pride in the strength and beauty of his language.
WOW Dozen features a list of 12 global books for children and adolescents around a theme, topic, issue or personal favorites. Each Dozen consists of ten newly-published titles with two older "must have" books. Please share or recommend additional books that fit the theme in the comments section or on social media using #WOWDozen. Use the printer icon in the upper left corner of this post to print or save this list as a PDF.
I just purchased a lovely new book that fits perfectly with this theme. It's called "My Dog Just Speaks Spanish" and is written/illustrated by Andrea Caceres. It's a gentle story about language diversity and communication, with Spanish words naturally incorporated throughout the text. Highly recommended!