Translanguaging is a natural practice but uncommon in schools (Creese & Blackledge 2010). This paper focuses on translanguaging in early childhood education in trilingual Luxembourg. Because 65% of children do not speak Luxembourgish on school entry, practitioners in formal and non-formal early childhood institutions focus on Luxembourgish, sometimes at the expense of other languages. Kirsch’s studies show that translanguaging is a legitimate practice and depends on practitioners’ language ideologies (Gkaintartzi & Tsokalidou 2010). This paper draws its data from a questionnaire with 46 practitioners, interviews and classroom observations. The survey data show that the practitioners view multilingualism positively and perceive translanguaging as unproblematic (Kirsch, forthcoming b). The practitioners also indicated that they communicated with the youngsters in their home languages – if known – and that children translanguaged frequently. Further evidence of translanguaging comes from a qualitative study in 2 nursery schools (Kirsch forthcoming a). The video-recordings of 5 focal children reveal that they regularly translanguaged during collaborative storytelling on the app iTEO, using Luxembourgish, home languages and other languages picked up from peers. The teachers embraced language diversity and promoted translanguaging. The findings may contribute to a better understanding of translanguaging practices and the development of multilingual pedagogies.

Creese, Angela, and Adrian Blackledge. 2010. “Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?” The Modern Language Journal 94 (1): 103–115. Gkaintartzi, Anastasia, and Roula Tsokalidou. 2011. ‘‘She is a very good child but she doesn’t speak’’. The invisibility of children’s bilingualism and teacher ideology. Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 588–601. Kirsch, C. (forthcoming) “Translanguaging Practices during Storytelling with iTEO in Preschools”. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual contexts, Vol 3(2). Kirsch, C. (forthcoming) “Opbauen op méisproocheg Ressourcen beim Sproocheléieren”. Learn new, special issue university of Luxembourg.