This paper forms the second part of a case study introduced at ECER 2011 that reported on research into literacy practices in informal playgroups in Sydney, Australia. In that paper, the nature and significance of the informal sector in Australia and its importance for children who will enter school with no other prior to school experience was highlighted.  Since then, one year of addtional fieldwork has been conducted and extensive analysis of available data has been undertaken. This paper will present the most recent data from this work and highlight the issues around the use of participatory ethnography by focusing in detail on two of the playgroup sites. One of these sites involved a group of young Aboriginal mothers and children and the other involved a multilingual group, most of whom spoke Arabic. Participant researchers worked with the staff at each site to introduce age appropriate early literacy activities that reflected the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the children. The effects of these activities on the engagement of children and mothers were monitored.

The Aboriginal group was a particularly sensitive site and the researcher here was an Aboriginal woman herself who was accepted into the group and who was able to gather very rich data around home literacy practices and the value attributed to those literacy activities that reflected Aboriginal language and culture. The mothers in the multi-lingual group have been in Australia for varying lengths of time and included first second and third generation speakers of Arabic, Tagalog and Chinese. The researcher in this group was a woman of Hungarian language background who similarly integrated into the group in a short time. Both researchers produced quality field-notes, reflections and they were able to video activities in the latter stages of the project.

By taking a socio-cultural approach (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Gregory, Long & Volk, 2004) early literacies were seen in this project as more than just a number of discrete skills, but rather as a set of practices located within particular social, economic and cultural settings, which include various cultural and linguistic contexts. Researchers focused on the capacities of children and their families to be involved with a range of literacy practices, including textual, oral, aural, graphic, or digital forms, both in English and the home language. In Australia, some 40% of children reach school age without attending formal pre-schools and Aboriginal and immigrant groups are greatly overrepresented in this statistic. For these children, informal playgroups, funded from a range of government and non-government sources are important sites for learning. For children who speak a language other than English in the home, the playgroups also offer an opportunity to strengthen and support the use of the home language and connection to heritage cultures.

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