Our mission

To make multilingual magic happen for families and in classrooms.

In the classroom

We are not here to replace the teacher. We are here to give teachers tools to support the multilingual learners already sitting in their classrooms — a daily speaking lesson that runs itself, books pitched at the language a child actually has, and reporting that shows who is moving and who is stuck.

And there is one thing we cannot build. Language sticks when it is attached to feeling — words met in a moment of delight, pride or curiosity are the ones that stay, and positive emotion in particular makes them stay. Children learn when they feel safe, inspired, valued. Only a human teacher creates that room. Our job is to hand them the vocabulary and the daily practice, so they can spend their attention on the part only they can do.

At home

Multilingual families, and families of multilingual learners, should be able to find literacy resources in their home language and in English. Every book is a multilingual eBook: the languages sit behind a selector, so a family can switch whenever they like, and every child gets every language — not only their own.

We deliberately do not put two languages side by side on the same page. The brain locks on to what it recognises and skips the challenge, so a child reading a bilingual spread simply reads the familiar half. One language at a time, chosen on purpose.

And we want families reading together. Every book narrates itself, so a caregiver who does not read English can still share the story — but the point is to give you a way in, not to swap parent-time for screen-time. The books work best with somebody listening.

What the books actually do

They build vocabulary. Every title is fully scaffolded, content-focused and standards-aligned, for ages 5 to 12, across five early-acquisition language levels. A book at a child’s level is one whose words are already in their spoken repertoire, so reading feels like recognition rather than decoding.

What we are not

This is deliberately not a phonics programme. We do not publish decodable texts, and we do not teach phonemic or phonological awareness.

Structured phonics teaches children to decode, and it is essential — but it is somebody else’s job, and it is already done well. What phonics cannot do is build the breadth of vocabulary and background knowledge a child needs to understand what they have just decoded. That gap is the one we exist to close.

Who is behind it

Dr Kathryn Macfarlane — Founder & Director. A bilingual English/French speaker, mother of three bilingual young men, and thirty years in education working on language learning outcomes: as a language teacher, a curriculum advisor and an education consultant across Australia, France, the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Her degrees run the length of this problem: a Bachelor of Education (Primary and Secondary); a Master’s in English Lexicology, with a thesis on bilingual parenting strategies; a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in General Linguistics, with a thesis on bilingual education; and a PhD in Applied Linguistics evaluating a professional learning programme across 89 schools, focused on building oral language competency and confidence.

That thesis was awarded the Penny McKay Memorial Award in 2020 — jointly by ALAA, ALTAANZ and ACTA — for its innovative contribution to Languages education for school-aged children.

Where the design comes from

Five things shape this product, each with research behind it — and it is the combination, not any one of them, that makes it different.

• A classroom vocabulary corpus, not a booklist. Around 100 word families cover some 80% of the language children actually need in a classroom, and about 400 reach roughly 95%. Those bands are our five Language Levels — which is why they are counted in word families rather than titles.
• Intentional gesture-based language teaching. Every word in the sequence carries a deliberate physical gesture. Moving as you speak gives a word a second route into memory, and gives a child who cannot yet say it a way to show they know it. This is the piece most programmes leave out.
• Individualised pathways with spaced retrieval. Talk Time tracks what each child has mastered and schedules what comes back, and when. Secure vocabulary returns less often; shaky vocabulary returns sooner. No two children get the same lesson.
• Daily contact — and never on its own. Across the 89 schools in Dr Macfarlane’s PhD study, the classrooms that flourished were the ones where several strategies ran together: leadership, daily contact, a tight focus on high-frequency classroom vocabulary, gesture-based instruction, goal-setting and self-assessment. Meeting the language every day was the strongest single indicator of progress — but on its own it was not enough. Leadership came first, because without a leader willing to change the timetable, children keep getting one lesson a week. So Talk Time is ten to fifteen minutes, every day.
• A library built on the very same corpus. The read-along books are not a separate product bolted on. They are written from the same vocabulary sequence the speaking lessons teach, so the words a child practised aloud this morning are the words waiting on the page — in real curriculum content, in whichever language they choose.

Each of those exists on its own somewhere else. Plenty of apps teach speaking, and some now use AI chatbots to do it. Others publish levelled libraries and say that reading will take care of the talking. But they do not integrate language and literacy the way this does — and we have yet to find one that teaches through gesture, or that is built on a research-based classroom vocabulary corpus. It is the five running together that makes this stand out.