Claudine Kirsch presented findings of the research project iTEO at the international conference “Rethinking Language, Diversity and Education” held in Rhodos on 28th May 2015 (http://rlde.aegean.gr/rhodes2015/index.html). She discussed how collaborative storytelling with iTEO helped nursery children develop their multilingual repertoire. The research findings indicate, firstly, that all children make use of translanguaging including gestures and other body language in the majority of the storytelling events and, second, that they are able to draw on up to five languages. Translanguaging happens most frequently when children with the same language background collaborate. They discuss the genre of the text and its content in one language and record in a different one. Over the period of the study all children began to deliberately add words, sentences or whole stories in their home languages, which their peers listened to attentively. We argue that iTEO creates a safe space where children develop a multilingual repertoire and voice their identity through their texts.
