TALES@home (Talking About Language and EmotionS at home)

• Members of multilingual families sometimes struggle with the multilingual context they live in. They have negative connotations towards one or some of the languages spoken at home or in society.
• Professionals (educators, social/medical workers, teachers etc.) who face these multilingual families struggle to help them expressing these attitudes, they struggle to bend the negative connotations into positive ones.

We want to:

• address non-formal language learning in the multilingual home. More specifically the motivations and beliefs in the family about language use and learning.
• empower parents and by extension the whole family to manage language use at home and to create a positive and stimulating environment.

How do we support multilingual families?

• By creating an open atmosphere in which decisions on language maintenance/shift are considered and are debatable.
• By reinforcing the mutual understanding between different generations so they are able to handle negative attitudes and reinforce the positive ones.

What will we produce?

• A digital app used by multilingual families with support of professionals.
• A user’s guide and film to sustain professionals with practical instructions for using the app
• Training for professionals
• May 2018: International Conference: ‘Languages@home: empowering multilingual families’ in Brussels

We develop these tools by ‘User centered Design’: involving multilingual families and professionals throughout the whole project.