'Tonga School' - Bridging the Communication between Plurilingual Families and Schools

Developing harmonious relationships between schools and plurilingual families is at the heart of a successful education of children growing up with multiple languages. We are aiming at getting sch...

Developing harmonious relationships between schools and plurilingual families is at the heart of a successful education of children growing up with multiple languages. We are aiming at getting schools to be aware of the multifaceted aspects of multilingualism and to accept the whole of the children. We also aim at giving the families to right tools to be able to communicate with the local formal school. So that children are not anymore 'translating actors” between the school and their parents.

We are going to create a framework with toolkit for school staff, so that they get the proper tools to communicate with plurilingual families. This framework will be completed by a series of modules to learn more about the family language planning and the impact of attitudes towards languages. Another activity will be the development of a booklet for the plurilingual families. All of those will be found on a platform. We will start also a network of Tonga School and Parents’ Cafés in schools.

In developing a better awareness on the development of family plurilingualism and in modifying the attitude of school staff regarding the home languages, we want to bridge the communication between the plurilingual families and the schools, to develop a better interaction between the plurilingual families and the schools. We are hoping to create a network of schools using the framework, they may have one person in the school who would be dedicated to work specifically on bridging with families.