Chapter 4. Language alternation in peer interaction in content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

Young children as actors of institutional language policies and practices in day care centres

“…One of our findings highlights children's agency in peer interactions as resources for their language development (see also Chaparro-Moreno et al 2019); they contribute to the institution´s language practices by taking on a teaching role, drawing on a shared or even distinct L1 language. This mechanism seems to be well-explained in research, noting that children usually alternate to L1 within peer interactions as a preferred language for socialisation, whereas L2 (as a colloquial or instructional language) is mostly used for institutional means (Morton and Evnitskaya 2018). Furthermore, although research on children's agency mostly focuses on free play situations, our findings provide in-sights that this turn-taking role of "young peer teachers" may not be exclusive to child-initiated, play-based activities, but is also present in educator-led activities.…”

“…Focusing on children's agency in terms of language use in day care, similar to the research of Bergroth and Palviainen (2017) on agency of bilingual children which however analyses children´s linguistic practices in regard to an official language and educational policy in ECEC settings, our findings demonstrate that agency manifests itself in both reproducing and undermining the institutional language policy of the centres. Within a structure-agency perspective, we understand children's agency in translanguaging thus as the engagement in practices of meaning and sense-making that are characterised by the flexible use of different languages (Morton and Evnitskaya 2018), and derive from their linguistic repertoires (Wei 2018) in relation to the structural settings/activities. From a practical perspective, this means that practitioners' language use is being shaped by the children's agency on the one hand, whiledespite of the children not being explicitly informed about the monolingual norm in Luxembourgishchildren's language practices are being framed by the practitioners' monolingual language use on the other, which in turn is influenced by the structured language policy.…”

“…Regarding the current educational ambitions of establishing a plurilingual policy in day care facilities for preschool-age children in Luxembourg, translanguaging should be seen as one of the key strategies both to create a plurilingual language environment in and through everyday practice in the day care centres as well as to recognise children's agency. Such a strategy of flexible language use has recently come to attention within discussions about translanguaging as a pedagogical concept (Vogel and García 2017), which is currently being debated in distinct bi-and multilingual contexts (Morton and Evnitskaya 2018). In line with this, the chance of achieving such a goal very much depends on the freedom and possibilities of the children to bring in their own linguistic repertoires by themselves.…”

Word search sequences in teacher-student interaction in an English as medium of instruction context

“…Even if a lexical problem has emerged, the students display an orientation to use English rather than Turkish, and thus orient to L2 being the normative language choice in whole-class interaction. The student makes an effort (i.e., speech perturbations, explicit search marker, silences, embodied practices), which projects the imminent code-switching (Morton and Evnitskaya 2018) to find the missing word in English in the ongoing talk. To illustrate, the formulaic expression 'how can I say?'…”

“…Code-switching has been shown to be an integral interactional practice in bilingual educational settings. The argument that the use of first and additional languages can be detrimental to language and content learning has been reconsidered under the lens of prior language alternation research (Lee and Macaro 2013;Morton 2015;Morton and Evnitskaya 2011; and the belief that L1s should be employed in cases where it would facilitate learning has been strengthened in recent studies (Lin and Wu 2015;Morton and Evnitskaya 2018), thus revealing the importance of embracing students' linguistic repertoires as an asset in the learning processes (Wei and Lin 2019). Lin (2005) describes student and teacher code-switching practices as "local, pragmatic, coping tactics and responses to the socioeconomic dominance of English in Hong Kong, where many students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds with limited access to English resources struggled to acquire an English-medium education for its socioeconomic value" (p. 46; see also Lin 1996).…”