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

Abstract

As children’s agency in influencing institutional language practices is often not carefully reflected in early childhood education curricula, the objective of this paper is to offer meaningful insights about how institutional language policies are both reproduced and transformed by children’s everyday use of language. For this purpose, we will combine conceptual resources from social theory, sociolinguistics and childhood studies in order to analyse children’s linguistic behaviour by applying a structure-agency perspective as a relational approach. Drawing on data from ethnographic field research within institutional day care centres in Luxembourg, our findings demonstrate that the status of children as actors in institutional language practices is strongly connected to institutional policies as a structural condition. However, this does not mean that children just enact these language policies, because they are actors of both maintaining, undermining and alternating them. In this respect, especially the translanguaging of children and caregivers plays a crucial role in the Luxembourgish context as it allows to build a bridge between the official institutional language policy and the individual linguistic repertoires. Considering the goal of establishing a plurilingual environment in early childhood education which now is paramount to the educational language policy of the Luxembourgish government, this article suggests that translanguaging practices should be considered as one of the key starting points to create a plurilingual ecology in and through everyday practice in the day care centres.

Shaping participation

“…Children actively participate in these language policies (Bergroth & Palviainen, 2017). They do so in resonance with the institutional policies, yet, in contrast to simply enacting them, they are also engaged in maintaining, undermining and alternating them (Simoes Lourêiro & Neumann, 2020). These results link to the findings in bilingual communities outside of ECEC that I reported on above.…”

“…Cekaite and Björk-Willén (2013) describe how the use of the societal language Swedish tied in with the establishment of social order among peers as it came to index local norms of language use. Also in the multilingual Luxemburgish context, children were found to contribute to the maintenance of a monolingual norm by alternating their language to Luxemburgish in communication with the teachers (Simoes Lourêiro & Neumann, 2020). Lourêiro and Neumann's study, however, also shows how multilingual children manage to carve out spaces to exercise their multilingual agency and, in so doing, undermine the language norms in predominantly monolingual ECEC settings.…”

Translanguaging stance of preschool teachers working with multilingual children in Luxembourg

“…The increasing, ongoing awareness of the need for multilingual pedagogy is mostly reflected in the implementation of the mandatory multilingual education for preschoolers following the enactment of the new law in 2017 (Kirsch & Seele, 2020). With this legislation, the Children and Youth Act of 2017, the government aimed to facilitate the integration of children with migrant backgrounds into the Luxembourgish trilingual education and society and thus promote social justice for these youngest members of society (Simoes Lourêiro & Neumann, 2020). The law validates the pedagogical focus on the development of Luxembourgish while introducing the necessity of children's familiarisation with French and the valorisation of their home languages (Kirsch & Seele, 2020).…”