This project led by Eneida Garcia Villanueva (Heriot-Watt University) reflected on the multilingual, multicultural and superdiverse society represented in Glasgow today through the medium of a multilingual performance. Eneida worked with pupils from the Whinhill Primary on creating a multilingual play, which they subsequently performed in a local theatre to main language stakeholders in Scotland, families, MPs, policy makers and pupils and teachers from other schools.
It took the young actors no longer than four weeks to put on a stage an adaptation of the fable ‘The three little pigs’, in which five different languages were used: English, Gaelic, German, Polish and French. Big Bad French-speaking Wolf was hilarious and multilingual negotiations conducted by the Little Pigs when buying building materials breath-taking. Eneida emphasised that the children had to learn languages from each other and did it very well and highlighted the importance of creating contexts where the languages spoken at home enjoy the same status as those taught at school.
For more details, visit: https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/blog/exploring-multilingualism/creative-multilingualism-owri-funded-projects
