Nabeela Ahmed: NLT Multi-Lingual Poetry Project

Following on from Fay Lant’s blog post in January, we are sharing an update on the multi-lingual poetry project in Bradford from poet and teacher Nabeela Ahmed:

This project has been a dream of mine for many years now and I have been excited about the chance to work with the National Literacy Trust on making it a reality. Being aware of research which taught us that incorporating mother tongues enhances the children’s ability to learn other languages and learn in general, we were keen to offer an opportunity where they didn’t leave parts of them outside the classroom door.

The multilingual strand follows the same pattern as the rest of the Young Poets project of the children visiting an inspiring venue, in this case it was the wonderful Brontë Parsonage and the moors. This was to be followed up by teachers supported with lesson plans and resources to help children write a poem incorporating their mother tongue and dialects.

As a team we had dared to see a dream in broad daylight and it was magical to see it transpire in front of my eyes:  the final poems included words from Urdu, Romanian, Gujrati, Slovak, Arabic, Latvian, Punjabi, Italian, Bengali, Spanish and Dutch; then words from Yorkshire and Mancunian dialects. The children wrote verses about food, places and things that mattered to them, emotions and people. The girl who had moved from Pakistan to Holland then to England, adding words from each of her three languages. The boy who wrote about his sister’s house as the place he felt loved and “hush” (happy). The Bengali girl who added “Naano”, her grandmother, and the girl who wrote about Moldova – “moldova mea ie jrumosa”. Arabic and Latvian phrases rolling off their tongues, leaving their classmates mesmerised and asking for what it meant and the oh! moments with full facial expressions and noises. One girl managed to capture the essence of the differences in attitudes to food from her parents to her generation in one sentence: “from roti and salan to enchalades and banoffee pie”.

Then there was the teacher taking notes, the one who said, “this project has made me think about speaking Punjabi and then throwing in words of English when speaking to my granddad”, and the one who shared her own poem with lots of Welsh in it.

One of my favourite moments was observing each class as I shared my Kashmir to Yorkshire poem and learning which children spoke Pahari from the reactions on their faces – the involuntary smiles and giggles, the wide eyes locked on me, as though saying, “you are saying that here, in school, in the classroom?”.

I am thankful to the National Literacy Trust’s Young Poets and Bradford Hub teams for their openness to new ideas and the support they provided me throughout. The project would not have been possible without the amazing teachers and fabulous librarians who joined the trips to the Brontë Parsonage and encouraged each child to perform. They told me how the project gave them the confidence to use their own and the children’s languages and dialects in their teaching.

We are all looking forward building on this in the years ahead.

Nabeela Ahmed

The National Literacy Trust is dedicated to transforming the lives of children from the UK’s most disadvantaged communities through literacy by improving their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The Trust’s research underpins several programmes, campaigns and policy work which have supported the literacy skills of 268,490 children during the last year alone.