In this chapter we look at:

• The shortage of teaching and learning materials suitable for use in multilingual settings.

• The main kinds of learning materials currently available – textbooks, written with a specific pedagogical purpose and ‘real books’, designed for enjoyment.

• Innovative developments which make multilingual materials available in classrooms, including dual language texts, the multivariety approach, multimedia resources and self-made materials.

• The economics of minority language publishing: how centralized support and co-publishing initiatives can increase the flow of materials in other languages.

The shortage of materials

The shortage of suitable teaching materials is a problem for literacy teaching in multilingual settings of all kinds (Michael, 1989). The particular challenges however, vary from one situation to the next.

In the case of Indigenous and established languages, such as Irish and Frisian, the small numbers of speakers mean that print runs are uneconomical. This, in turn, limits the range and quality of materials (Edwards, 2008a).

Speakers of new minority languages potentially have access to books from the home country. Very often, however, imported materials fail to speak to the experience of locally born children and the linguistic level for any given age range is too advanced (MRC, 1995). As a result teachers have to spend a great deal of time in lesson preparation and the production of resources. In some cases, differences in the quality of color reproduction or paper, may make materials produced abroad less attractive to students than materials for the home market.