Pedagogies that foster multilingualism are promising in our globalised and heterogeneous world as they are inclusive, empowering and supportive of social justice and political participation (Creese & Blackledge, 2010). García & Wei (2014) call for multilingual pedagogies and argue that educators should provide children with opportunities to translanguage, meaning, draw on their entire semiotic repertoire for communication, meaning-making and knowledge construction. At present, the latter are underdeveloped, particularly in early years, and research on them is scarce (Lewis et al. 2012).
Some countries have implemented educational policies focussing on multilingualism (Viernickel et al., 2013) but the emphasis continues to remain on majority languages rather than family ones (Neumann, 2015; Panagiotopoulou & Rosen, 2015). While multilingual programmes are commercially available, too little is known about their efficiency (Lengyel, 2011). Many are based on communicative and pragmatic approaches and target the development of vocabulary, for example, through daily routine activities such as songs, rhymes and storytelling. Studies have shown that rhymes can further language development (Sayakhan & Bradley, 2014). Similarly, storytelling familiarises children with a wider range of vocabulary, complex grammatical structures and decontextualized language use, and promotes the development of narrative and general language skills (Gogolin et al., 2011; List, 2010; Kirsch, 2014; Sénéchal et al., 2002).
Although Luxembourg is a trilingual country, children do not automatically develop multilingualism in early childhood education. Currently, 65% of children do not speak Luxembourgish as one of their home languages (MENJE, 2016). Formal and non-formal educational institutions focus on the teaching of Luxembourgish, sometimes at the expense of the children’s home languages and the country’s other official languages (Kirsch, 2015; Neumann, 2015). By contrast, the flexible use of languages and translanguaging are the lived reality outside the classroom (Gilles & Moulin, 2009). The project ‘Developing Multilingual Pedagogies in Early Childhood’ (MuLiPEC, 2016-2019) by Kirsch, aims at developing both young children’s multilingualism and innovative language pedagogies that capitalize on the children’s linguistic diversity in Luxembourg. One of the means is a professional development course on multilingual pedagogies where teachers and para-professionals research their own practice. In 2016, 50 practitioners attended the course. Of these, seven, who work in four different settings, had been selected to participate in a-year-long study, which analyses the language pedagogies and the ways in which the on-going professional development contributes to changing practices. The seven practitioners implement multilingual activities using pictures, rhymes and stories and discuss these in the group meetings. A focus of the meetings in the first academic term was the practitioners’ language use and effective strategies (De Houwer, 2009; List, 2010). We discussed, for example, their use of strategies such as repeating key words, commenting on one’s own actions while talking, and translanguaging.
The present paper focuses on the interactions in one of the settings, the ‘précoce’ during the first term of the school year. The ‘précoce’ is a non-compulsory nursery year for 3-year-olds, preceding the compulsory two-year-long nursery school. The paper investigates the language practices of the teacher and her para-professional colleague as well as the influence on the interactions of two focus children speaking Portuguese and Cap-Verdean Creole. None of the children in class speaks Luxembourgish, they speak Portuguese, Cap-Verdean Creole or French. One of the teachers understands some Portuguese. We examine the following questions:
- How do the two adults interact with children in routine language learning activities such as storytelling, memory games and songs? What activities take place and what languages are used?
- How do the two focus children interact with peers and the adults?
The findings of the project MuLiPEC should deepen our understanding of language pedagogies in early childhood.
