LIDA Stories Canada
About us
Learning Inclusion in a Digital Age (LIDA) has developed LIDA Stories Canada, a website for immigrants and refugees learning English with the help of their mother tongue or another familiar language. The website provides 30 stories in the major immigrant and refugee languages in Canada, in addition to English and French. By reading the story in both languages, learners can benefit from better understanding and draw on prior knowledge in a familiar language. The website particularly targets recent immigrants and refugees and immigrants with little schooling who have previously relied on learning orally and informally, but we hope the stories will appeal to others as well.
For stories written for children, please visit Storybooks Canada, and for stories in Indigenous languages please see Indigenous Storybooks. More stories in a wider selection of languages and regions can be found on the Global Storybooks portal.
About the stories
Most of the stories have been written for this project. Five stories stem from former projects by the LIDA team, but have been edited slightly to fit this target group better. Two stories, Coming to Norway and An old man as a husband, were written anonymously by refugees/immigrants specifically for the LIDA Stories project. The majority of illustrations were made by students at Hamar Cathedral School, Norway, while the rest of the illustrations come from Aakanee.com. The story texts and images are openly licensed (either CC BY or CC BY-NC-SA — see the information provided on each story page), which allows them to be reused under the terms of the individual licences.
How are reading levels assigned within LIDA Stories Canada?
| Level | Description | Words per story |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | Very short sentences in present tense | Up to 50 words |
| Level 2 | Short sentences in present and future tense | 51 to 100 words |
| Level 3 | Short sentences in past, present, and future tense | 101 to 200 words |
| Level 4 | A couple of sentences per page | 201 to 300 words |
| Level 5 | Multiple sentences per page | 301 to 450 words |
Our Team
Espen Stranger-Johannessen
Dr Espen Stranger-Johannessen is the project leader for LIDA Stories Canada and associate professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He has a PhD in Literacy Education from the University of British Columbia, Canada. His PhD research deals with teacher identity and the African Storybook, a website with African children’s stories. Based on this work, together with colleagues he developed websites for several countries and regions with children's stories in 140+ languages, including the Canadian version Storybooks Canada, which LIDA Stories Canada is based on.
Liam Doherty
Dr Liam Doherty is a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies and a Research Associate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr Doherty is the technical advisor for LIDA Stories Canada.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge funding from Erasmus+ for "Learning Inclusion in a Digital Age — to belong and Find a Voice in a Changing Europe".
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the website design from Storybooks Canada, the illustrations from Aakanee.com, icons from FontAwesome (via Fontello) and Elegant Circles, and the work done by the translators, proofreaders, readers, and everyone else who have contributed to make these stories available.