Mother Tongue & World Literature: How Singapore Libraries Serve Their Young Multilingual Patrons

Abstract

As the recipient of the 2017 SLAV Research Fellowship, I was fortunate enough to travel to Singapore in April this year to visit twelve school and public libraries. This gave me the opportunity to investigate how Singaporean library staff are creating dynamic resource hubs for their multilingual youth. As a country with four national languages, as well as an impressive reputation for international education, my library visits, observations and interviews provided a wide array of ideas on how we could improve our services to LOTE (Languages Other Than English) and EAL (English as an Additional Language) students in Australia.