Fabula, an interdisciplinary project funded by the EU Multimedia Software programme, provides software to enable children learning European minority languages to create bilingual digital books.We share a set of assumptions and approaches to the key issues addressed by the project.First, bilingual books are a powerful teaching tool of great value in multilingual classrooms.Second, the graphic design of books has important effects in finding inventive solutions to problems.Third, multimedia can enrich bilingual books.Finally, self-made materials motivate children.These assumptions led to a general definition of the Fabula software: an easy-to-use software environment for making and viewing interactive multimedia bilingual books, concentrating on "languages of lesser diffusion."The language pairs we currently cater for are Welsh/English, Irish/English, Basque/French, Catalan/Spanish and Frisian/Dutch.We shall present a brief description of the Fabula software and discuss the ways in which it has been used in schools in Europe.We shall also set out our future plans for Fabula, including a Europe-wide competition for schools and the creation of a WWW-based "on-line library" for teachers and children who use the Fabula software.
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Edwards et al. (2002) studied this question.