Developing a Bilingual Thematic Vocabulary Workbook

In Madagascar, secondary and adult English as a foreign language (EFL) classes commonly have limited resources and inadequate teacher preparation. Schools often have few or no textbooks and dictionaries. Computers with Internet access are a rare luxury. Teachers themselves may be underprepared, with no English teaching credential, minimal training, and limited English proficiency. Compounding these challenges, both teachers and students might not have any opportunities to engage with English outside the classroom and may have multiple primary and instructional languages--Malagasy and French, in the case of Madagascar. This was the situation for one of the authors, Sahondranirina, as a high school English teacher in Madagascar. Her students could not afford to buy a dictionary. Even if Sahondranirina had managed to convince the school principal to buy some French-English dictionaries, they would not have been much help because her students were not fluent in French--their first language is Malagasy. She therefore decided to help herself, her fellow English teachers, and her students by developing a bilingual Malagasy-English vocabulary workbook based on themes from the Madagascar national English secondary-school curricula. To help teachers facing similar challenges, this article explains the rationale and strategies to create useful vocabulary workbooks for multilingual students.