Vietnamese Bilingual Program for Braybrook Kinder

ViệtSpeak is very proud to announce and celebrate our involvement with a successful Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant: Nurturing Australia’s Little Multilingual Minds.

The partnership involves Amigoss Spanish Bilingual Childcare (Glebe, Sydney), Cherry Crescent Preschool (Braybrook, Melbourne) and ViệtSpeak. The academic team led by Professor Paola Escudero (Western Sydney University), with collaborators Dr Chloé Diskin-Holdaway and Professor John Hajek (University of Melbourne).

The project was also supported by Maribyrnong City Council with a financial allocation from this year’s budget and a community grant from the Victorian Multicultural Commission.

As the project description outlines, “despite its substantial multilingual capacity of more than 300 languages, Australia has been described as a graveyard for languages”.

Working with several community organisations, and beginning with Vietnamese and Spanish language, the project aims to develop:

• a deep understanding of multilingual families’ experiences
• a model to support lifespan multilingual education
• an openly-accessible database of child language in heritage languages

The project has the potential to provide a significant contribution to the development of multilingual learning in the Australian education system, helping enhance “children’s academic achievement, familial social and mental wellbeing, and cultural and economic opportunities”.