Handbook of Early Language Education (Springer International Handbooks of Education) 3030916618, 9783030916619

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Springer International Handbooks of Education

Mila Schwartz Editor

Handbook of Early Language Education

Springer International Handbooks of Education

The Springer International Handbooks of Education series aims to provide easily accessible, practical, yet scholarly, sources of information about a broad range of topics and issues in education. Each Handbook follows the same pattern of examining in depth a field of educational theory, practice and applied scholarship, its scale and scope for its substantive contribution to our understanding of education and, in so doing, indicating the direction of future developments. The volumes in this series form a coherent whole due to an insistence on the synthesis of theory and good practice. The accessible style and the consistent illumination of theory by practice make the series very valuable to a broad spectrum of users. The volume editors represent the world’s leading educationalists. Their task has been to identify the key areas in their field that are internationally generalizable and, in times of rapid change, of permanent interest to the scholar and practitioner. More information about this series at https://www.springer.com/series/6189

Mila Schwartz Editor

Handbook of Early Language Education With 14 Figures and 7 Tables

Editor Mila Schwartz Department of Research Authority Oranim Academic College of Education Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel

ISSN 2197-1951 ISSN 2197-196X (electronic) ISBN 978-3-030-91661-9 ISBN 978-3-030-91662-6 (eBook) ISBN 978-3-030-91663-3 (print and electronic bundle) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my husband, Viktor Kuschits, who has supported me since the beginning of my research enquiry at the University of Haifa in 2000, and to our two sons, Daniel and Michael, whose early bilingual development in Russian and Hebrew was a constant source of my curiosity and delight.

Preface

At an early age, a child perceives language not because it is necessary, but because there is an emotional response. The person who communicates with him/her in this language is of great importance. (Ira, a Russian as a heritage language teacher in the Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool, Israel)

The source of my curiosity in early language education is the delight and challenges that my husband, Viktor, and I have experienced bringing up two bilingual boys, Daniel and Michael. We have been doing our best, struggling to transmit Russian as a heritage language, as well as supporting their development in Hebrew as a symbolic Jewish language and the societally dominant one in Israel. As it frequently appears among linguists, my personal experience and concern in our sons’ language development and socialization stimulated wonder and endless number of questions about the ecology of early language education, that triggered my research enquiry. This enquiry gradually resulted in an idea to invite leading scholars from all over the world to provide a first comprehensive analysis of theory and practice in this field. Early childhood is a critical period in a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive development; preschool serves as the first transitional step from home to the wider social environment and stimulates the child’s socialization. The role of early language education in childhood in promoting a child’s life-long love of language and language proficiency seems to be unquestionable. A growing diversity of various preschool educational programs in the past two decades has induced major increase in research activism throughout the world, focusing on early language education. Analysis of this activism indicates a need to conceptualize early language education as a distinct research domain. This need gave start to this handbook’s birth, by fruitful cooperation with Danijela Prošić-Santovac who contributed tremendously to the rationale of this project and to its elaboration. The handbook is aimed to offer easily accessible, practical, yet scholarly sources of information about early language education and its history, major contributions, current issues, and future developments in various parts of the world and with different populations. The languages under the scope of this handbook are identified by the contributors as immigrant, indigenous, endangered, heritage, regional, minority or majority languages, as well as marginalized, foreign and second languages, all of which are discussed in relation to early language education. vii

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Preface

The accessible style and the consistent illumination of theory by practice make the handbook very valuable to a broad spectrum of audience. Thus, the handbook is relevant to scholars and all levels of students studying second/foreign language teaching, bilingual/multilingual education, early childhood education and care, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics, and psychology, with special interest in early childhood development and education in multilingual and multicultural societies. They may use it for study, research, and teaching. In addition, this volume is of special interest to a wide range of professionals such as preschool teachers, educational psychologist, and speech therapists, due to rich up-to-date empirical data and field implications it provides. Finally, the handbook has practical value for policy makers, parents, and ethno-linguistic community leaders. We hope that this pioneering anthology will be a source of inspiration for researchers of early language education as well as for educators, and that way, it will encourage the formation of a strong professional community of practice. Haifa, Israel March 2022

Mila Schwartz

Acknowledgments

This handbook has been a 4-year long journey. I was delighted to initiate its emerging, observe its development, and now witness its successful birth. I am tremendously grateful to Danijela Prošić-Santovac, with whom I started this journey and without whose invaluable advice and input this project would have never flourished. I would sincerely like to thank the people who have assisted in the preparation of this volume: Natalie Rieborn, Publishing Editor of Social Sciences Books; Akshara P P, Production Editor, Book Production; and Mokshika Gaur, Senior Editor, Major Reference Works. I would like to thank the contributors, who responded so enthusiastically to my invitation to participate in this project. It has been a fascinating experience to work with a group of people as a professional community, with scholars who are leading experts in the field of early bilingual education and whose research inspires my work. I have greatly appreciated the energy and thoughtfulness with which each has written and rewritten their respective chapters, as well as their assistance with peer reviewing of chapters in this handbook. I am also indebted to my colleague and friend Cortina Pérez for her constructive feedback and advice on Chapter 1. In addition, I am very grateful to Sarah Veeder and Naomi Belotserkovsky for their highly professional assistance with editing the handbook. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge that this handbook was supported by Oranim Academic College of Education in Israel, which has been providing me a safe haven to progress academically for many years, and I am greatly indebted to my colleges and friends with whom I have been collaborating.

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Contents

1

Early Language Education as a Distinctive Research Area . . . . . . Mila Schwartz

Part I

1

General Foundations in Early Language Education . . . . . . . .

27

2

Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development . . . . . . . . Yuko Goto Butler

29

3

Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . He Sun and Bin Yin

57

4

Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natalia Gagarina and Alessandra Milano

83

Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miriam Minkov and Liubov Baladzhaeva

117

5

6

Early Language Education and Language Socialization . . . . . . . . Asta Cekaite

143

7

Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education . . . Åsa Palviainen and Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen

167

8

Ethical Issues in Research with Young Children in Early Second Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Máire Mhic Mhathúna and Nóirín Hayes

193

A Critical Overview of Research Methods Used in Studies on Early Foreign Language Education in Preschools . . . . . . . . . . . Marianne Nikolov and Réka Lugossy

221

9

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Contents

Part II

Diversity of Contexts in Early Language Education . . . . . .

259

10

Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift Renée DePalma and Iria Sobrino-Freire

.....

261

11

Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rukmini Becerra-Lubies, Dayna Moya, and Simona Mayo

287

Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tina M. Hickey

317

Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karita Mård-Miettinen, Stephanie Arnott, and Marie-Josée Vignola

347

12

13

14

Russian as a Home Language in Early Childhood Education . . . . Ekaterina Protassova, Anna Golubeva, and Ilze Mikelsone

15

Dual Language Education Models and Research in Early Childhood Education in the USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kathryn Lindholm-Leary

403

Vocabulary and Grammar Development in Young Learners of English as an Additional Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Faidra Faitaki, Annina Hessel, and Victoria A. Murphy

427

16

373

17

English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education Danijela Prošić-Santovac and Vera Savić

...

449

18

Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olivia Mair

475

Part III Caregivers in Interaction in Early Language Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

20

21

509

Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gee Macrory

511

The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . İrem Bezcioğlu-Göktolga

545

Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hanna Ragnarsdóttir

567

Contents

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22

Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . Gunhild Tomter Alstad

23

From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović and Stela Letica Krevelj

585

613

24

Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education . . . Mila Schwartz

641

25

Multilingual Children with Special Needs in Early Education . . . . Rama Novogrodsky and Natalia Meir

669

Part IV

Early Language Education in Different Countries . . . . . . .

26

Early Language Education in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susana A. Eisenchlas and Andrea C. Schalley

27

Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Themistoklis Aravossitas, Spyros Volonakis, and Momoye Sugiman

697 699

725

28

Early Language Education in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shulamit Kopeliovich

763

29

Early Language Education in Luxembourg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele

789

30

Early Language Education in Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ekaterina Protassova

813

31

Early Language Education in Malta Charles L. Mifsud and Lara Ann Vella

.......................

841

32

Early Language Education in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poh Wee Koh and Beth Ann O’Brien

867

33

Early Language Education in the United Arab Emirates Kay Gallagher

.......

893

Correction to: Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rukmini Becerra-Lubies, Dayna Moya, and Simona Mayo

C1

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Editor

Mila Schwartz is Professor of Language and Education and Head of Research Authority at Oranim Academic College of Education (Israel). She received her first degree from the Pedagogical State University of Saint-Petersburg in linguistics and literature and completed her MA and PhD at the University of Haifa, in learning disabilities and literacy development among bilingual and trilingual children. Professor Schwartz conducted her postdoc studies at Ben-Gurion University, Israel (the Kreitman Foundation Fellowships), and at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests include studying language policy and models of early language education; linguistic, cognitive, and socio-cultural development of early sequential bilinguals/multilinguals; and family language policy. Currently, her research focuses on theorizing the phenomenon of interactions between child languagebased agency, teacher’s agency, and parents’ agency in early language education. In this research, she draws on Bronfenbrenner’s human ecology theory (1979, 1994) that provides a framework for understanding the role of early language education in a young child’s life. Recently, she has proposed and elaborated on the following theoretical concepts: language-conducive context, language-conducive strategies, and child language-based agency. Her academic distinction at the international level is based on more than 20 years of extensive research and exemplary achievements in academia and at top-tier research organizations such as the International Symposium of Bilingualism, where she held the position of Secretary of the Steering Committee from 2015 to 2019, xv

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About the Editor

and the Multilingual Childhoods Network (known also as the Special Interest Group, SIG, of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association, EECERA), where she currently acts as convenor.

Contributors

Gunhild Tomter Alstad Faculty of Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway Themistoklis Aravossitas CERES-Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Stephanie Arnott Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Liubov Baladzhaeva University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Rukmini Becerra-Lubies Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Campus, Villarrica, Chile İrem Bezcioğlu-Göktolga Department of International Business, Avans University of Applied Sciences, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands Yuko Goto Butler Educational Linguistics Division, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, PA, USA Asta Cekaite Child Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen Department of Education, University of Bath, Bath, UK Renée DePalma University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain Susana A. Eisenchlas School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia Faidra Faitaki Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Natalia Gagarina Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany xvii

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Contributors

Kay Gallagher College of Education, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Anna Golubeva Narva College, University of Tartu, Narva, Estonia Nóirín Hayes School of Education, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Annina Hessel Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Department of Educational Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Tina M. Hickey School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Claudine Kirsch Department of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg Poh Wee Koh Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA Shulamit Kopeliovich Herzog College, Alon Shvut, Israel Stela Letica Krevelj Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Kathryn Lindholm-Leary San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA Réka Lugossy University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary Gee Macrory Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Olivia Mair Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy Karita Mård-Miettinen Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Simona Mayo Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez, Santiago, Chile Natalia Meir Department of English Literature and Linguistics, The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Máire Mhic Mhathúna School of Languages, Law and Social Sciences, Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Charles L. Mifsud Centre for Literacy, University of Malta, Msida, Malta Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Ilze Mikelsone University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia Alessandra Milano Language Teaching Institute (SLI), Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany Miriam Minkov Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Contributors

xix

Dayna Moya Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Campus, Villarrica, Chile Victoria A. Murphy Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Marianne Nikolov University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary Rama Novogrodsky Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Beth Ann O’Brien National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Åsa Palviainen Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Danijela Prošić-Santovac Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia Ekaterina Protassova Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Hanna Ragnarsdóttir School of Education, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland Vera Savić Faculty of Education in Jagodina, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia Andrea C. Schalley Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden Mila Schwartz Department of Research Authority, Oranim Academic College of Education, Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel Claudia Seele RAA Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e.V., Waren/Müritz, Germany Iria Sobrino-Freire University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain Momoye Sugiman Toronto District School Board, Toronto, ON, Canada He Sun National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore Lara Ann Vella Language Policy in Education Unit, The National Literacy Agency, Hamrun, Malta Marie-Josée Vignola Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Spyros Volonakis Network Child Care Services, Toronto, ON, Canada Bin Yin School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

1

Early Language Education as a Distinctive Research Area Mila Schwartz

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent Developments in Early Language Education Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Current Handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Handbook Structure and Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part I: General Foundations in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II: Diversity of Contexts in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part III: Caregivers in Interaction in Early Language Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part IV: Early Language Education in Different Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2 3 4 6 6 10 14 19 24 24

Abstract

This is the first international handbook that offers a comprehensive overview of findings from contemporary research, theory, and practice in early language education in various parts of the world and with different populations. This conceptual introductory chapter starts by tracing the chronicle of recent developments in theorizing early language education as a distinctive area of inquiry. It presents an ecological approach to language learning, drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s human ecology theory (The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979; International Encyclopedia of Education 3(2): 37–43, 1994) that provides a framework for understanding the role of early language education in a young child’s life. Continuing with the structure and content of the handbook, the introduction summarizes its 33 chapters, divided into four parts: (1) General foundations in early language education; (2) Diversity of contexts in early language education; (3) Caregivers in interaction in early language pedagogy, and (4) Early language education in different countries. M. Schwartz (*) Department of Research Authority, Oranim Academic College of Education, Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_1

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M. Schwartz

The concluding remarks call for the formation of a strong professional community of practice among researchers and educators in early language education. Keywords

Early language education · Distinctive research domain · Interdisciplinary · Ecological approach · Professional community of practice

Introduction This is the first handbook that brings together different strands of early language education research with contributions by leading scholars in this flourishing field. The volume offers a detailed review of findings from contemporary research, theory, and practice in ELE in various parts of the world and with different populations. We are delighted with the inclusion of this handbook in the Springer Multilingual Education series. The question of the precise definition of early language education (ELE) is complex. In this handbook, I deliberately avoid identifying ELE as monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual since the contributions address and overview ELE in regard to diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds, language programs, and models. The contributors refer to immigrant, indigenous, endangered, heritage, regional, minority, majority, and marginalized languages, as well as to foreign and second or third languages. All of these terms will be defined further and discussed in relation to ELE. Being aware of this variation, I suggest defining “early language education” as a type of setting (nursery school, kindergarten, early childhood education center, etc.) in which young children learn language or languages from birth until the beginning of compulsory elementary education in diverse socio-linguistic contexts. During the last decade, the need to conceptualize ELE as a distinctive research domain has been increasingly understood (Alstad & Mourão, 2021; Edelenbos et al. 2006; European Commission 2011; Hickey and de Mejía 2014; Mourão and Lourenço 2015; Schwartz and Palviainen 2016; Schwartz 2018). This awareness is inevitably related to international acknowledgment of the unique role of ELE in all aspects of children’s development through the life cycle. Thus, during the previous decade, many powerful bodies, such as international and government institutions, recognized the importance of early exposure to foreign language learning and of heritage language maintenance (Early Learning Languages Australia 2018; European Commission 2011; Canadian Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group 2014; UNESCO 2020). ELE is viewed as an essential dimension of young children’s well-being and development as well as their fundamental right worldwide. In parallel, bottom-up processes to found ELE, advanced by community leaders, parents, and educators, are growing and take into consideration local communities’ sociolinguistic and educational contexts (Chua and Baldauf 2011). Before proceeding with the handbook’s structure and content, I will address pioneering contributions to the development of this field of inquiry.

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Early Language Education as a Distinctive Research Area

3

Recent Developments in Early Language Education Research In tracing the chronicle of recent developments in conceptualizing ELE as an area of inquiry, I will start with the launch of the Multilingual Childhoods Network (known also as the Special Interest Group, SIG, of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association [EECERA] and Research in Early Years Language Learning [REYLL]; https://multilingualchildhoods.wordpress.com). The Multilingual Childhoods SIG was established at the 2015 EECERA conference in Barcelona by Sandie Mourão and Gunhild T. Alstad. The SIG was set up with a view to bringing together researchers investigating children aged 0–6 who are learning two or more languages at home, preschool, or in the community. Research includes aspects of language development in contexts of language awareness, heritage languages, endangered languages, additional languages, foreign languages, second languages, and bilingual or multilingual education worldwide. The network’s members are dedicated to enhancing our understanding of what is specific to young children as language learners compared to older, school-age children and under which environmental conditions this learning can be effective in educational settings and at home. Through the network, I have had the privilege of meeting many of this handbook’s contributing authors. A starting point in the attempt to define ELE as a distinctive research domain was in the Special Issue Immersion Education in the Early Years, edited by Tina Hickey and Anne-Marie de Mejia (2014). In this volume, Hickey and de Mejia focused on ELE that offers total or partial immersion education to children from about 2–6 years old. The volume presents a diversity of ELE models and their aims in the context of tension between a minority and a majority language when children’s immersion in the minority language (L1) is “under threat from a dominant majority language.” Immersion in this context is designed to enrich the threatened language, such as in the case of Welsh-medium preschools, cylchoedd meithrin, in Wales, and Irish-medium preschools, naíonraí, in Ireland. This significant work has promoted conceptualization of ELE by stressing the critical role of this education in language revitalization processes. Last but not least, this Special Issue called for policy makers, educators, and researchers to rethink teacher preparation that includes “strong foundations in child development and early years’ pedagogical approaches, work planning and organisation, and strong empathy for young children, . . . fluency in the target language” (Hickey and de Mejía 2014, p. 15). In 2015, Sandie Mourão and Mónica Lourenço published an edited volume, Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice. Focusing on second language and foreign language learning, this book questioned the common wisdom that young children learn languages “like sponges,” and demonstrated the complexity of ELE from the perspectives of policy makers, teachers, parents, and children. By forwarding this innovative research agenda, Mourão and Lourenço hoped that their volume would “light the spark that will become a flame for all to see the importance of research and dissemination of good practice related to L2 learning with young children” (p. 9).

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This hope led to the growth of new activities for consolidating the field. In the Special Issue Twenty-First-Century Preschool Bilingual Education: Facing Advantages and Challenges in Cross-Cultural Contexts, Mila Schwartz and Åsa Palviainen (2016) argued that distinctiveness of ELE is characterized by aspects such as dynamicity and flexibility in teacher practices caused by factors such as “the need to respond to the children’s emotional, cognitive, and social needs” (p. 4). The volume showed that, compared to school language education, ELE teachers emphasize young children’s developmental needs as a core priority in their decisions as to which language model to apply and how. Namely, the preschool educators promote “a child-centred approach rather than a model-centred approach” (p. 4). Finally, the message conveyed by Schwartz and Palviainen is that ELE demands partnership of agency between children, parents, and teachers, which is particularly critical to children’s well-being in preschool education. This call for an ecological approach to ELE research has been further elaborated in the edited book Preschool Bilingual Education: Agency in Interactions between Children, Teachers, and Parents (Schwartz 2018). By focusing on ELE in multilingual Europe, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of dynamics in interaction between adults (parents and teachers) and children. The book asks what is necessary to create a developmentally appropriate context for children’s engagement in a language learning process. ELE research in recent years is showing a shift in focus from early a bilingual to a multilingual environment. Gunhild Tomter Alstad and Sandie Mourão (2021) highlight this shift in the introduction to a new Special Issue on Multilingual Childhoods in the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal. They call for a multidisciplinary perspective in ELE research, since Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) views children’s development as interaction of diverse and inseparable domains. In addition, although Alstad and Mourão note a growing interest in ELE, their analyses of 18 studies published during the last 20 years in the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal point to a significant void in many areas related to early language learning and teaching.

The Current Handbook Drawing on the keystones presented above, this handbook is a first anthology that brings together the most recent trends in ELE research as a relatively new area of inquiry. The handbook consolidates, reflects, and expands on the key strands of ELE research, aiming to provide the most representative international overview of the field, illustrating its distinctive and interdisciplinary nature. Building on previous contributions, the first tenet of this Handbook is that ELE is a distinctive area of inquiry in language education at school. Why has this research area been defined as distinctive? The handbook shows that ELE as a research field is built on the intersection between two broad research domains: early childhood education and care and language education. What do I mean by this intersection? There is a universal consensus that high-quality early childhood education and care

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is beneficial for child development. Its components include providing safe and healthy care settings, developmentally appropriate stimulation and opportunities for learning, positive interactions with adults and peers, and the promotion of individual emotional growth, autonomy, and positive relationships with other children (Cryer et al. 2002). How does preschool language teaching and learning interact with these components to provide high-quality early childhood education? The handbook seeks to answer this complex question by investigating how language education policies and curricula, language teaching pedagogy, language teacher education, and collaboration among teachers, families, and communities do or do not address the core high-quality components mentioned above. The Handbook’s second tenet is that although early exposure to a novel language, namely to “a language that is neither acquired nor maintained at home and is nondominant in the child’s close environment” (Schwartz, 2021; p. 2), is a significant and influential event in a young child’s life; when taking an ecological approach toward language learning, this education is intertwined with other child development domains and environments. This claim draws on Bronfenbrenner’s human ecology theory (1979, 1994) that provides a useful framework for understanding the world of children and their development. This theory views child development as occurring from interactions between different systems across multiple levels. Only by exploring mutual accommodation of these systems can one fully grasp a child’s environments and interaction between them. This handbook explores how early language teaching and learning is embedded within children’s daily social interactions. Following Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, the handbook takes a close look at five out of six levels of influence, identified by Bronfenbrenner, on the child’s experience in a language learning classroom environment. Specifically, the handbook explores the inner individual system, namely the child’s personal characteristics including aptitude to early language acquisition and strategies of social interaction and learning; the microsystem, which includes direct contact with the close environment, such as parents and family at home and nearby, teachers and peers in the classroom, and the mesosystem, which relates to the interplay between two or more elements within the child’s microsystem, such as interactions between the parents and the preschool teacher. The volume also addresses the exosystem, pertaining to the possible linkages between two or more settings, one of which may not contain but may affect the developing child indirectly, such as how governments and communities interact to revitalize indigenous languages and how these interactions are illuminated in mass media. Finally, it looks at the macrosystem as the system most distant from the child, but still has a significant influence on the child’s life, such as (absence of) national/state policies regarding early language education. Moreover, this volume advances an ecological approach toward early language teaching and learning. It explores how children’s social and educational experience is intertwined with their intensive emotional, cognitive, and academic development during the preschool period from the perspective of children’s well-being. By delving into these issues, the handbook presents an interdisciplinary overview of research about ecology of ELE. This includes research domains such as

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psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, educational linguistics, teacher training, language education policies and planning, child rearing and parenting, and ethics. Last but not least, this handbook shows that an ecological approach toward learning a novel language in the early years is a key point not only in fields of inquiry such as sociolinguistics and educational linguistics, but also in psycholinguistic research. Many contributions that focus primarily on psycholinguistic phenomena such as ELE vocabulary and grammar development remind us of the critical role of a secure base and safe haven for children, particularly regarding the microsystem, where their interaction with caregivers and peers occurs. Ecological circumstances such as the family’s socioeconomic status as a part of the exosystem also has an impact on children’s language development and, in particular, on linguistic experiences at home. Thus, exploring how children’s ELE is embedded in their environment is of interest to both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches.

Handbook Structure and Content This is a first international volume on ELE that brings together 54 collaborating researchers from 23 countries and 5 continents. It includes 33 chapters with the aim of providing a comprehensive overview of the topic, explaining why the issue or area is important, and critically discussing the leading views and research in the area. Contributors were encouraged to expound their own views on the topic and to engage with the work of others. All contributions are structured following the same chapter format. The handbook is divided into the following four parts: I – General foundations in early language education; II – Diversity of contexts in early language education; III – Caregivers in interaction in early language pedagogy; and IV – Early language education in different countries. Each part, topic, and contribution will be briefly overviewed below.

Part I: General Foundations in Early Language Education Part I provides a general foundation for understanding ELE. It presents a comprehensive picture of methodological approaches in ELE research, psycholinguistic topics such as cognition and linguistics, and emergent literacy development in an ELE context, as well as sociolinguistic topics such as language education policies, language socialization, and ethical issues in conducting research with young children. These chapters highlight the view that the way to approach early bilingual/ multilingual development and education is to connect cognitive and linguistic aspects, such as control processing and language awareness, and sociolinguistic aspects, such as quantity and quality of linguistic input and the nature of the home language environment. As mentioned above, this connection is in congruence with an ecological approach to learning a novel language in the early years. A language is not acquired in an isolated, self-contained system of units such as its phonology,

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grammar, and vocabulary, but through the natural environment and social interactions (Haugen 2001). This connection is also consistent with the sociology of childhood that views the child as “a unique, complex, and individual subject” (Dahlberg et al. 2007; p. 50) rather than just an object whose life is constructed from isolated processes such as cognitive, linguistic, or social development. In ▶ Chap. 2, “Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development,” Yuko Goto Butler discusses diverse aspects of cognitive and metacognitive development of young language learners (YLLs) in the three widely researched areas: executive function, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness. Following this discussion, the author directs our attention to the novel research data in the field of neuroscience concerning YLLs’ cognition and language learning and in research examining the role of technologies (television and other digital media) in developing children’s cognitive and linguistic skills. Butler highlights the need to connect YLLs’ cognitive abilities and their linguistic development to help to build them a developmentally appropriate pedagogy. The chapter concludes with a critical statement that we are still far from understanding a clear mechanism of interrelations between cognition, early language development and education, and multiple individual and environmental factors. ▶ Chapters 3, “Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education,” and ▶ 4, “Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs,” move on to explore linguistic aspects of early language development and education. ▶ Chapter 3, “Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education,” traces the field of vocabulary development among YLLs with in-depth analysis of two dimensions: breadth (e.g., receptive vocabulary size) and depth (e.g., syntagmatic and paradigmatic knowledge) in both first and second languages. Drawing on a psycholinguistic basis of vocabulary development among YLLs, He Sun and Bin Yin explore theoretical models of how these learners may use conceptual knowledge gained through L1 to facilitate learning of L2 vocabulary. Following this, the chapter also ventures into vocabulary teaching principles that have been identified as effective: the priority of introducing conceptual knowledge, individualized pedagogy, and teaching words based on a hierarchical structure. The authors direct our attention to overwhelming presentation of studies from the United States in psychological publications, raising the question of the generalizability of their results. The authors note a void in studies on how specific teachers’ vocabulary strategies affect the development of its components in an ELE context. While in ▶ Chap. 3, “Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education,” He Sun and Bin Yin focus on how vocabulary development interacts with instructional strategies in children’s L1 and L2, in ▶ Chap. 4, “Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs,” Natalia Gagarina and Alessandra Milano give an overview of how research of young bilingual children’s grammatical development in both languages is connected to language support programs around the world. The authors discuss pitfalls they have found in current research data in the field, including a disagreement among the experts on bilinguals’ pace in grammar acquisition, a lack of conclusive evidence on the normal range of variability in bilingual development, and inconclusiveness of the

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findings about the effect of language support programs on this development. They also suggest directions for future research, highlighting the urgent need to create a methodology for the assessment and analysis of grammatical development in both the bilingual child’s languages. In terms of field application, the authors call for elaboration of research-based bilingual programs aimed at sustaining vulnerable areas of bilingual grammatical acquisition. In ▶ Chap. 5, “Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education,” Miriam Minkov and Liubov Baladzhaeva present a complex picture of emergent literacy development in children’s L1 and L2 within diverse sociolinguistic contexts of ELE. The researchers draw our attention to the fact that emergent biliteracy cannot be discussed without considering the diversity of preschool curricula worldwide; some countries promote an early start in literacy whereas others incorporate it only as part of the school curriculum. In addition, developing emergent biliteracy in ELE requires teachers to have knowledge of literacy acquisition and instruction in each target language. However, they must also be aware of the degree of proximity between these languages and scripts and the possible effect of cross-linguistic transfer of literacy-related skills. The authors also address the need to promote emergent biliteracy development through creative child-led play that encourages the use of target scripts for writing shopping lists or greeting cards. While previous chapters in Part I focus mainly on cognitive and linguistic foundations of ELE, ▶ Chap. 6, “Early Language Education and Language Socialization,” signals a transition to discussing sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects of state-of-the-art research in this growing field of inquiry. In this chapter, Asta Cekaite explores the phenomenon of language socialization and its role in ELE with a focus on immigrant children and their interaction with teachers and peers. Based on recent empirical research, the author vividly presents how young children’s novel language learning is influenced by classroom culture (e.g., nature of peer talk and engagement in peer activities) and norms of language use and code-switching. The chapter illustrates how YLLs, as agents, apply diverse strategies for socializing processes and even reconstruct monolingual language ideologies existing in their educational settings. The chapter critically evaluates the role of teachers in establishing orientations toward the monolingual norm in language use in classrooms and the hierarchical positioning of one language (in most cases, the socially dominant language) over home languages of young children with immigrant backgrounds. Moreover, the author directs our attention to the potentially negative role of peers in YLLs’ language socialization. They can provide less support for conversations than teachers and may even jeopardize access to social interaction and thus decrease the novice’s language learning opportunities. Identifying the specific language education policies in the preschool setting is critical to our understanding of how YLLs are socialized in this setting and progress in learning the target language/s. In ▶ Chap. 7, “Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education,” Åsa Palviainen and Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen continue this topic by in-depth analysis of language education policy in ECEC, incorporating planning, practices, and ideologies associated with the teaching and learning of languages in two multilingual and multiethnic geographic contexts:

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Continental Northern Europe and the UK. Based on their review of empirical studies, the authors highlight some critical issues, such as the overwhelming advantages for native speakers of the majority language (e.g., Swedish in Sweden and English in the UK). The steering documents for ECEC policy declare the majority language as a social norm, rather than supporting societal multilingualism and early multilingual education. Another critical point is the disengagement of parents, teachers, and children, and disregard of their agentic voices in elaborating language education policy. The chapter concludes by calling for more detailed analysis of public discourses about language education policies in ECEC and for exploring how these discourses influence teachers’ beliefs and attitudes toward multilingualism and multilingual development across the globe. The importance of listening to young children and to learn about their views has recently been discussed in research about ELE because it might be that children’s view on their learning experiences is not necessarily the same as of their teachers or parents. Children’s status as research participants in applied linguistics appears to have been largely overlooked for years. In the last decade, however, this has led to an important shift in emphasis from traditional and psycholinguistic research “on” or “about” children to research “with” children (Pinter and Zandian 2014). This shift in research paradigm is discussed in ▶ Chap. 8, “Ethical Issues in Research with Young Children in Early Second Language Education” by Máire Mhic Mhathúna and Nóirín Hayes, who address the ethical questions that arise while conducting research with YLLs in a variety of educational contexts. By claiming that ethics should be a fundamental basis in research with YLLs, the authors present some essential research principles, such as using developmentally appropriate methods, being sensitive to children’s reactions, acknowledging children’s right to express their voices in matters that concern them in language learning and socialization, and protection by maintaining their anonymity. The authors also provide a step-by-step guide on how to collect data with YLLs by paying attention to legal obligations and policy commitments in respect to children, adopting a child-centered approach to research with children, and considering pitfalls of power imbalance in adult–child relations. The last chapter in Part I, by Marianne Nikolov and Réka Lugossy, thoroughly examines methodological issues encountered in the field of early foreign language learning. The authors critically discuss pitfalls they identified in ELE research, such as a lack of generalizability of research results, limited information of research background and data analysis, and an overwhelming tendency to describe successful projects with restricted consideration of problems encountered by researchers. The authors provide a thorough analyses of diverse data collection approaches in an ELE context, drawing on a dataset of 22 peer-reviewed papers. The analysis includes a description and critical evaluation of the research questions, designs, samples, and tools, as well as the way the datasets have been analyzed and triangulated. They conclude their in-depth review by stating important lessons we need to learn. For example, we still lack knowledge of how children’s progress in ELE interacts with their teachers’ competence in the target language and their professional suitability.

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Part II: Diversity of Contexts in Early Language Education Equipped with the foundational background set out in Part I, Part II of the handbook directs our attention to the diversity of sociolinguistic contexts in ELE. Part II addresses different language models and sociolinguistic environments such as heritage language maintenance, language revitalization of endangered and indigenous languages, immersion in minority language education, dual language education, and foreign language learning. In this part, an overview is provided of each sociolinguistic context and/or language model, including its historical background, theoretical basis, and language education policies. In addition, each chapter addresses teachers’ pedagogical strategies and practices, as well as the way in which parents and community are engaged in developing and sustaining the ELE. In presenting bilingual models, Baker (2011) asserted that “one of the intrinsic limitations of typologies is that not all real-life examples will fit easily into the classification” (p. 208). This is vividly illustrated in our handbook. By presenting the growing diversity of “real-life examples” of ELE, it reflects the richness of its context. Diversity of ELE is essential for creating an ecology supporting revitalization of endangered languages and maintenance of heritage and indigenous languages. This connects YLLs to their identity, ideas, and beliefs about their ethnic and cultural heritage. In ▶ Chap. 10, “Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift,” Renée Depalma Úngaro and Iria Sobrino-Freire explore the role of ELE in tremendous efforts made by teachers and community leaders to revitalize endangered or minoritized languages. Generally, an endangered language can be defined as being at risk of becoming extinct (Grenoble and Whaley 2006). In their contribution, the authors use the alternative term “minoritized languages,” to stress the process of attitudinal minoritization of the target language in modern linguistic practices. They illustrate how minoritized languages such as Galician in Spain or Irish Gaelic in Ireland became “attractive, natural, and fun” (Úngaro and SobrinoFreire, this vol.) for YLLs, the majority of whose families do not use these languages at home. The authors bring the example of successful revitalization of Hebrew in the context of the lack of native speakers and parental competence in this language at the end of the nineteenth century in Palestine, serving as an inspiration for policy makers and early language educators worldwide. However, Úngaro and Sobrino-Freire claim that even if ELE encourages a positive attitude toward endangered languages among YLLs, it cannot address critical factors in language revitalization, such as sustainability of target language use at home and in the community, and challenges such as lack of relevance and underestimation of these languages beyond the preschool context. ▶ Chap. 11, “Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chilex,” describes language revitalization challenges by focusing on a case of indigenous language revival in early childhood education in Chile. In general, indigenous languages can be defined as languages spoken by small-scale indigenous communities, such as ethnic minorities (Walsh 2005). In this handbook, Rukmini BecerraLubies, Simona Mayo, and Aliza Fones draw on the language planning model

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developed by Chua and Baldauf (2011) to analyze past and present language education policies on supra, macro, micro, and infra-micro levels. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of efforts made by the government and communities to promote the teaching of indigenous languages. They critically explore points for improvement in this area such as a lack of specific linguistic revitalization policies in ECE, and the absence of a clear target of bilingual development in Spanish as a societally dominant language and in the indigenous languages. The authors describe a situation in which families no longer support indigenous languages. Hence the growing importance of the role of native-speaking indigenous language and culture educators who teach these languages in ECEC settings to all children (whether indigenous or not). In ▶ Chap. 12, “Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland,” Tina Hickey explores Irish immersion preschools established to sustain the Irish language that, for many young children in Ireland, is an endangered and a heritage language (see definition below). Immersion education is one type of bilingual education (Hickey and de Mejía 2014). Early Irish immersion is a form of full immersion in this language, where educators provide all teaching, classroom management, and support to the children who, in many cases, are native speakers of English and acquire the target language as a heritage language. In her historical background, the author shows how, since the establishment of an independent Irish state, on the macro level, the state was committed to Irish-medium education. The significant decline became gradually evident in the shift from using Irish as a medium of instruction for all subjects to the use of Irish for teaching Irish lessons only. Contrary to the decline in revitalization of Irish in schools, Hickey presents a grassroots initiative of parents as active agents who establish Irish-medium ECEC, naíonraí, in the country. Although the main aspiration of this education system is a strong presence of Irish as an endangered language in the ECEC in Ireland, Hickey identifies some drawbacks in teachers’ pedagogical approaches and views on early Irish teaching and learning. She criticizes the “naturalistic” view of young children’s language learning that “children are like sponges” and learn languages easily and naturally and calls for implementation of language-conducive strategies to promote productive Irish use. In addition, the author stresses the need to differentiate the language needs of children who are Irish heritage speakers and children learning Irish as a heritage language in terms of language learning targets and language delivery strategies. ▶ Chap. 13, “Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland,” continues the discussion on early immersion of children from majoritylanguage-speaking homes in a minority language (French) education context in Canada and a minority language (Swedish) context in Finland. In both countries of comparison, early immersion in a minority language has existed for decades; French immersion was initiated in Canada in the mid-1960s, and Swedish immersion programs have been implemented in Finland since the mid-1980s. The authors, Karita Mård-Miettinen, Marie-Josée Vignola, and Stephanie Arnott provide a unique crossnational evaluation regarding three areas of comparison: learner diversity, learning exceptionalities, and teacher training. These domains are related to current

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sociopolitical changes facing the target countries as well as to rethinking pedagogical approaches implemented in immersion education. Drawn on policy documents and existing empirical data, the comparisons reveal both similarities and differences between the countries. This offers a platform for mutual learning and for critically evaluating practical implications of immersion. The chapter calls for reconceptualization of the existing immersion programs and their curricula in all three domains of the cross-national comparison. To illustrate, the authors discuss a tendency toward a multilingual orientation in the immersion programs. This has developed in the Canadian context in light of the growing population of children from diverse linguistic backgrounds who, in many cases, are learning French as their L3. As for the Finnish context, there is an increasing tendency for young children’s exposure to different European languages in addition to Swedish. As highlighted by the authors, this tendency raises the discussion among stakeholders about the immersion programs’ suitability for linguistically diverse children. In ▶ Chap. 14, “Russian as a Home Language in Early Childhood Education,” Protassova focuses on Russian as the language of a large and diverse transnational diaspora community that can be defined as “trans-border” society as well (Bruneau, 2010; p. 35). When defining heritage language, Ortega (2019) stated that “the term . . . is widespread to designate the language experienced in the home, although other terms are also used, such as home, minority, and community language, or also regional, indigenous, ancestral, and local language” (p. 2). In this chapter, Protassova explores how Russian speakers maintain their language in the diaspora in early childhood education in various countries. Starting from the historical perspective of the first wave migration from Russia in the seventeenth century, Protassova demonstrates how, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many people who left the country as migrants sought the best option for maintaining their home language and bringing up their children multilingually. The author also raises theoretical and practical issues related to the complexity of interaction between the perspectives of parents on Russian language teaching, and those of heritage language teachers, as well as issues related to the respective language policies of each country and the status of Russian there. Finally, Protassova explores pedagogical aspects of curriculum planning in heritage language delivery that, despite the vast number of early heritage language educational settings throughout the world, have received relatively little research attention (Lee and Bang 2011). In ▶ Chap. 15, “Dual Language Education Models and Research in Early Childhood Education in the USA,” Lindholm-Leary critically evaluates ELE in a language minority–majority context in the United States, advocating additive bilingualism. Lambert (1974) coined this type of bilingual education that continues to develop children’s L1 while they are learning their L2. In her overview, Lindholm-Leary refers to young dual language learners as children who speak a language other than English at home. This is a linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse group comprising about 20–25% of preschool-age children in the United States. By tracing the historical perspectives on bilingual education from the Civil Rights period of the 1960s–1970s until today, Lindholm-Leary reveals how national policies have changed from founding a bilingual program supported by legislation to adhering

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to “English only” policy with minimal support of dual language development and education. Furthermore, the researcher emphasizes that current ELE settings using an additive bilingual model support mostly Spanish–English bilingualism, whereas only a negligible number of dual language programs exist for other immigrant language groups, “which means that most of these children receive English-only programs” (Lindholm-Leary, this vol). In advocating strong support of both languages of children in the ELE, Lindholm-Leary presents rich empirical evidence of how this support enhances socioemotional development and self-esteem, resulting in children’s stronger connections with their heritage culture and community. Finally, in light of continual research discussions about cognitive benefits of early additive bilingualism, the author claims that early additive bilingualism significantly predicts academic success at school and well-being throughout the life span. In ▶ Chap. 16, “Vocabulary and Grammar Development in Young Learners of English as an Additional Language,” Faidra Faitaki, Annina Hessel, and Victoria A. Murphy elaborate in-depth on ELE in language minority–majority contexts where English is an official language, zooming in on vocabulary and grammar development among children aged 3–6. The chapter delves into lexical and grammatical features of YLLs who, unfortunately, do not have access to sufficient linguistic and educational resources. The authors argue that a picture of young English learners’ lexical and grammatical development can be properly judged by considering three points: “first language (L1) typology; environmental factors; and methodological limitations” (Faitaki, Hessel, and Murphy, this vol.). Importantly, they highlight the role of the child’s ecology including factors such as the family’s SES and mother’s level of education as well as related factors such as richness of the home linguistic environment, for either promoting or inhibiting development of the child’s linguistic skills in English. Finally, the chapter calls us to reconsider an approach to measuring grammar and vocabulary among young English learners by stressing that standardized tests are norm-referenced via monolingual populations and are therefore invalid for young bilingual children. Instead, the researchers offer to use an experimental measure focusing on specific constructs relevant to English learning and considering individual differences between learners. Part II closes with ▶ Chaps. 17, “English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education,” and ▶ 18, “Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools,” that focus on English as a foreign language (EFL) in ELE. In many European countries as well as in diverse Asian regions, many parents are eager to start their children’s English language education as early as possible, to pave the way to educational and future economic success. As noted by Vera Savić and Danijela Prošić-Santovac in ▶ Chap. 17, “English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education,” in many countries, EFL is not part of the ECEC curriculum, and therefore is offered in private preschools or as a paid extracurricular activity. This rather elite ELE limits accessibility to early EFL. The increased interest of parents, policy makers, teachers, and researchers in early EFL “highlights the need for obtaining data on what actually happens in pre-primary institutions when it comes to teaching and learning English” (Lugossy 2018, p. 100). In ▶ Chap. 17, “English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education,” Vera

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Savić and Danijela Prošić-Santovac provide an extensive review of current EFL programs worldwide and their critical analyses. The authors raise important issues concerning current EFL programs such as the extent to which they are innovative, developmentally based and directed to deliver language through stimulating youngsters’ creativity, curiosity, and peer collaboration, and “to enable children to construct knowledge through an interaction with physical environment” (Savić and Prošić-Santovac, this vol.). Finally, the chapter poses a burning question about skills that EFL teachers need to develop beyond proficiency in English and its teaching as a subject highlighting the importance of professional training in ECEC. In recent years, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a model of EFL began to be applied in preschool education mostly in the European context. As the theoretical core of CLIL is the integration of foreign language and content to teach mainstream students, in ▶ Chap. 18, “Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools,” Olivia Mair provides a critical overview of this application. Mair notes that preschool CLIL programs are a rather novel and underresearched enterprise initiated, in many cases, by parents influenced by public discourses about benefits of an early start in foreign language learning. Thus, she characterizes these programs as pilots, mostly without support of macro state language policy and planning. The chapter explores which features disentangle this context from CLIL programs for school children. Specifically, Mair points to diversity in experience with English content varying from a low exposure approach to up to 50% of the curriculum taught in the foreign language. In addition, the author stresses the need to develop realistic expectations among parents and teachers, namely that the aim of these programs is to develop young children’s receptive skills and language awareness, in general, rather than to achieve productive language use. Finally, the author calls for support of these programs by continuity at primary school level. This call for sustainability is elaborated further by Jelena Mihaljevic Djigunovic and Stela Letica Krevelj in ▶ Chap. 23, “From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues.”

Part III: Caregivers in Interaction in Early Language Pedagogy ELE is deeply embedded in a relational context with parents and teachers as primary caregivers. According to attachment theory, when children feel that they can turn to an adult when they are in distress and that the adult will respond effectively and sensitively, they will feel protected and will be available to explore and learn (Bowlby 1969/1982). Although emotions and early language learning is currently a rather under-researched domain, there is growing evidence from ethnographic observations that young children’s first encounters with a novel language evoke diverse emotions. Thus, children may experience a wide range of emotions, ranging from pleasure, joy, and curiosity to anxiety, boredom, and fear, during exposure to a novel language (DePalma 2010; Lugossy 2018; Schwartz 2018). Children usually form emotional bonds with more than one adult, and these significant adults in the children’s lives provide them with security at different levels

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and in different contexts. In most cases, parents are the primary attachment figures. Scholars researching family language policy (see ▶ Chap. 20, “The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education”) discuss emotional aspects of home language maintenance and intergenerational transmission (Schalley and Eisenchlas 2020). However, preschool teachers also serve as attachment figures to whom children turn when they feel distressed. Sensitive teachers are consistently comforting, calming, and encouraging. They anticipate problems and emotional distress that may arise in children’s encounter with a novel language and are attentive to a lack of understanding or difficulties. When teachers are sensitive, the children feel comfortable approaching them for support and guidance, freely participating in the class, and are not afraid of making errors during the learning process (Pianta et al. 2008). Bronfenbrenner’s human ecology theory (1979, 1994) states that the most important developmental processes occur in the microsystem, in routine face-to-face interactions in the home environment, the classroom, between parents and children, between teachers and children, and between the children themselves. However, as mentioned above, these interactions are embedded in the mesosystem which, in the preschool classroom, refers to coordination between the teachers, and their interaction with parents and policy makers that occurs backstage to ELE. Finally, children’s developmental progress and outcomes are embedded in the macrosystem, which includes the teachers’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds as well as their professional training. Within this theoretical framework, Part III explores how caregivers interact as agents to either promote or inhibit children’s linguistic development in diverse contexts of ELE. This section raises questions about reciprocal awareness of caregivers’ agentic aspirations as well as of children’s rights. It explores also how teachers’ pedagogical approaches pave the way for typically developing children and for those with special needs to either learn a novel language or enrich their heritage language, by listening to their voices. In addition, Part III provides a critical overview of teacher training for ELE in varying educational contexts, including bilingual, multilingual, and monolingual preschool education. In addressing language planning in ELE, this section highlights coherence and continuity as key factors. The chapters in this part are subsumed into two topic areas. The first (▶ Chaps. 19, “Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education,” ▶ 20, “The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education,” and ▶ 21, “Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts”) explores ecological perspectives on parent, teacher, and child agency in interaction (Schwartz 2018). The second topic area (▶ Chaps. 22, “Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education,” ▶ 23, “From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues,” ▶ 24, “Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education,” and ▶ 25, “Multilingual Children with Special Needs in Early Education”) addresses how diverse pedagogical aspects including ELE of multilingual children with special needs and teacher training are embedded in the macrosystem of language policy and planning.

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Agents in Interaction in Early Language Education ▶ Chapter 19, “Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education,” directs our attention to caregivers’ linguistic interactions in early bilingual and multilingual development at home and in preschool. In this chapter, Gee Macrory provides a brief history of theoretical perspectives on diverse interactional patterns in which children might grow up. This is followed by an analysis of recent studies as the basis for an explicit discussion of the characteristics of caregivers’ interactional strategies over the last 30 years. She considers macro changes such as globalization and the European language policy shift toward plurilingualism at the individual level from early childhood. Plurilingualism can be defined as the capacity to learn more than one language and to use diverse languages in intercultural communication, as well as the value of linguistic and cultural tolerance within individuals and countries. It is associated with intercultural competence and democracy (Council of Europe, 2007). Specifically, Macrory discusses current research that calls to draw on the language resources of children with plurilingual home backgrounds and in the classroom including translanguaging, which is a key feature of plurilingual pedagogy (García 2009). She claims that, in our globalized word, bringing up plurilingual children cannot be the target of the family only, but a shared mission for teachers and parents as agents. This claim is developed further by Irem Bezcioglu-Göktolga in ▶ Chap. 20, “The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education.” Bezcioglu-Göktolga presents a comprehensive picture of the ecology of immigrant families in the mesosystem of their connections with teachers in mainstream preschools and community-based heritage language classes. Family is a social environment that provides a foundation in which children learn how to socialize. As the most intimate microsystem for children (Paat 2013), family creates a natural context for intergenerational transmission of heritage language. Drawing on family language policy and its components (Spolsky 2004), the chapter shows how immigrant families construct and reconstruct their language ideology and practices through their interaction with early educational settings. The author then reviews recent research on how family language policy might be modified under the pressure of mainstream educational institutions to adjust to mainly monolingual norms of the hosting society in countries such as the United States, the Netherlands, and France. She also notes the scarce number of studies that explore how teachers as agents of change in education advocate children’s plurilingual development by supporting parents’ efforts to maintain heritage language at home and by creating educational partnerships with them. In ▶ Chap. 21, “Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts,” Hanna Ragnarsdóttir expands the idea of an ecological approach to ELE by elaborating on the concept of educational partnerships of teachers, parents, and children in ELE (Epstein 2011). She calls for a replacement of the old ways of thinking about parental involvement with innovative ways of organizing effective programs based on school, family, and surrounding community partnerships. Parents’ active engagement may include participation such as communicating, volunteering, learning with the child at home, decision-making,

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and collaborating with the community in both preschool and home settings. Thus, teacher–parent partnership means equal status for parents and professionals as co-constructors of the child’s learning environment (Epstein 2011). In ELE, this phenomenon is relatively novel, and most studies to date have focused on immigrant parents and their interaction with mainstream teachers in ECEC. In her contribution, Ragnarsdóttir discusses research exploring the potential barriers to educational partnerships between teachers and parents in ELE. For example, immigrant parents frequently face challenges in engaging in partnerships with teachers. These may be rooted in significant differences in expectations from the teachers and preschool education between the host country and the country of origin. If educators lack sufficient knowledge and understanding of immigrant parents’ unique cultural characteristics, the barrier between teachers and families may be accentuated. Another factor that may influence immigrant families’ engagement in ELE activities, to some degree, is whether or not the ECEC context promotes values of “social justice and empowerment” for children and their families (Ragnarsdóttir, this vol.).

Pedagogical Aspects in Early Language Education Many chapters in this handbook critically address the issue of preparing teachers for ELE. They advocate multidimensional training that includes both theoretical knowledge about language and its acquisition at an early age as well as practical skills for teaching language to young children. In ▶ Chap. 22, “Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education,” Gunhild Tomter Alstad analyzes the changes that are becoming necessary in ECEC professional training to deal with the growing number of immigrant children who are learning the socially dominant language as their L2, while receiving exposure to other foreign languages in the classroom, as well. The author claims that ECEC language teachers today not only require declarative and procedural knowledge to create a classroom ecology that empowers linguistically and culturally diverse children and their families, but also need the practical wisdom “to make wise educational judgements about what is to be done in specific teaching settings” (▶ Chap. 22, “Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education”). Alstad draws our attention to the fact that the particularity and complexity of language teachers’ training in ECEC is related to the nature of the child population and of the program (e.g., bilingual, mainstream monolingual with a focus on language awareness). In light of the introduction of foreign languages at increasingly younger ages, this educational enterprise will presumably require the support of ECEC policy makers at the local, national, and international levels. However, as discussed in ▶ Chaps. 17, “English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education,” and ▶ 18, “Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools,” in many countries, young children’s early experience with foreign languages is not a part of the national or regional ECEC curriculum but occurs largely through local initiatives undertaken by preschool communities, teachers, and parents. In ▶ Chap. 23, “From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues,” Jelena Mihaljevic Djigunovic and Stela Letica Krevelj discuss how coherence and continuity as factors should be considered in the transition from

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pre-primary to primary school level in early foreign language learning. The authors refer to European documents to highlight continuity and coherence in early foreign language learning in the transition from preschool to primary school as critical factors for maintaining quality at both educational levels. In practice, however, policy makers and educators rarely consider these factors because of circumstances, such as a lack of publicly funded foreign language learning and a lack of coordination between authorities responsible for ECEC and for school education, including foreign language teaching. Addressing the ecological approach toward child development, the authors call for attention to continuity and coherence in early learning of English as a foreign language as highly important for protecting young learners from the negative effects of failure in the preschool to school transition. In ▶ Chap. 24, “Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education,” Schwartz continues to elaborate on the connection between pedagogical aspects of ELE and the ecology of child development. Building on sociocultural theory and an ecological perspective on language learning, van Lier (2004) views the process of novel language learning and its perception as mediated by diverse teachers’ strategies and physical and social environments that create a language-conducive context in a multilingual environment. Children do not voluntary choose either monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual preschool but are subject to their parents’ preferences. Their first encounter with the novel language as a novel learner overlaps with separation from home and meeting new actors in their lives – teachers and peers. A successful encounter with a novel language is inevitably connected to preschool classroom ecology and to teachers’ efforts to create this ecology (Schwartz 2018). Teachers are aware that children demonstrate mostly receptive knowledge of the language and help children produce output in the target language through implementing various language-conducive strategies instead of passively accepting children’s receptive bilingual skills. The author grounds theorization of languageconducive strategies in two related phenomena observed in preschools regarding novel language learning in different countries: children’s overuse of the socially dominant language and their fixation of receptive bilingual skills. The aim of these strategies is “to enhance children’s willingness to communicate” in a novel language (Schwartz 2018, p. 16). The chapter proposes a twofold classification of languageconducive strategies: didactic and management strategies. Schwartz highlights that teachers’ motivation to engage young children in learning a novel language is necessary for encouraging their willingness to be engaged. In ▶ Chap. 25, “Multilingual Children with Special Needs in Early Education,” Rama Novogrodsky and Natalia Meir address diagnostic and pedagogical dilemmas in ELE of children with special needs. The continuum of special needs that is discussed includes children with developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorders, hearing impairment, or intellectual development disorder. The authors present impressive empirical data on the lack of double deficits among this population, to explore myths about the possible deprivation role of multilingualism in language and cognitive development among children with special needs. They then assert that children brought up in a multilingual environment must be diagnosed and treated in all their languages of exposure. However, as noted by the researchers, even

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in countries where a child’s home language development is supported at the state level, as in Canada (see ▶ Chap. 27, “Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada”), both assessment and intervention are generally conducted in socially dominant languages and draw on norms for monolingual children. Finally, Novogrodsky and Meir call to enhance multilingual intervention programs for a positive effect on both languages of children: the home language and the socially dominant language.

Part IV: Early Language Education in Different Countries The handbook concludes with Part IV, describing early language education in various countries in the world including Singapore, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Canada, Luxemburg, Malta, Israel, and Canada and among different populations. This part includes contributions by scholars who analyze in depth how historical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of diverse countries are connected to the current picture of their ELE. The authors critically discuss how macro language planning policies proposed by government bodies are translated into micro ELE planning by local communities, such as preschools and ethnic community centers and by families at the infra-micro level (Chua and Baldauf 2011). For example, in ▶ Chap. 29, “Early Language Education in Luxembourg,” Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele explore how the new Children and Youth Act of 2017 in multilingual Luxemburg has been integrated into preschool teachers’ daily practices via their research-based professional development. The purpose of the Act is to develop children’s skills in both Luxembourgish and French, as official languages, as well as to value their home languages. Conversely, the authors show how agents such as community leaders, teachers, and parents might solve ELE problems at the micro level of local language policy and planning. In some cases, these agents’ activities might, sooner or later, receive government support and funding. To illustrate this, in ▶ Chap. 26, “Early Language Education in Australia,” Susana Eisenchlas and Andrea Schalley describe how the Australian Government has recognized community-based activities in the form of playgroups aimed at heritage language maintenance for preschool children. Another example, as presented by Ekaterina Protassova in ▶ Chap. 30, “Early Language Education in Russia,” is village-based activism designed to revitalize the Karelian language in Russia. In this village, local activists established preschool as a language nest with full immersion in Karelian, to encourage children to use the language as much as possible. A language nest is an educational approach to revitalize endangered languages in the early years through a full immersion ECEC program for children with either minor or no previous knowledge of the target language. Although started as a voluntary enterprise, this language nest has since received municipality funding, including salaries for teachers. In addition to focusing on language policy and planning, each chapter in Part IV covers issues related to language teaching and learning in the early years, in both formal and informal settings. Specifically, the authors explore how language policies are not

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simply translated into pedagogical practice in ELE but are negotiated by teachers in light of their beliefs, experiences, existing pedagogical practices, and the social contexts in which these policies are embedded. Importantly, the analyses presented show how interaction (or lack of it) between diverse agents has significant impact on children’s linguistic environment and development, albeit indirectly and from a distance. Although the sociolinguistic situation in each of the countries presented is unique, they may serve to illustrate innovative initiatives of how these societies face the challenge of globalization and of growing multilingualism in the world. In ▶ Chap. 26, “Early Language Education in Australia,” Susana Eisenchlas and Andrea Schalley use Chua and Baldauf’s (2011) language policy and planning model to explore ELE initiatives ranging from macro-level formal planning to micro-level community-based and infra-micro family-based language activities in Australia. To illustrate this at the macro level, the authors describe a recent government initiative to expose young children to diverse languages (e.g., Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Modern Greek, and Hindi) interactively and engagingly through an iPad. While there is no doubt of this project’s importance for developing early language awareness, the authors note that it does not target intergenerational language transmission. Given this fact, the contributors draw our attention to the micro level of language planning, as expressed in creative enterprises initiated by groups of migrant parents such as playgroups and community-language preschools. These grassroots early language activities are flourishing throughout the country and receive state funding. Nonetheless, as asserted by the authors, families’ individual agency is necessary for successful heritage language development. Families as agents are defined by the authors as “the principal language managers, responsible for the linguistic trajectories of their children” (▶ Chap. 26, “Early Language Education in Australia”). Family agency in home language support is summarized in two initiatives: recruiting target language speakers (grandparents, overseas family members, and au pairs) and sojourning in the country of origin. Heritage language maintenance in the early years at different levels of language policy and planning in Canada is covered in ▶ Chap. 27, “Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada,” as well. In this chapter, Themis Aravossitas, Spyros Volonakis, and Momoye Sugiman provide an analysis of ELE in Canada as an immigrant nation, similar to Australia. Starting from the historical perspective on “Canadianizing” all children from immigrant backgrounds and officially ignoring all languages other than English and French, the authors reflect on a multilingual shift in the mid-1980s with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. This federal document acknowledged the right of all Canadian citizens to maintain their culture and language of origin. Moreover, the chapter provides an overview of language policy documents on the federal government and provincial levels on empowering linguistic and cultural heritage, including in the early years, and how these documents are turned into practices undertaken by policy makers, educators, and parents. Today, the most popular ELE program is a dual-language model with heritage language and English or French instruction on a 50–50 basis. As emphasized by the authors, a key target of early heritage language education is to

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bring up children who are proud of their identity, thus celebrating the multiplicity of Canadian identities as a societal value. In the next chapter, Shulamit Kopeliovich explores historical narratives and current developments in ELE in Israel as a young multilingual country. Although most of the country’s Jewish population comprises generations of immigrants over more than five decades since its establishment in 1948, the national language policy was dedicated to enhancing Hebrew as a revitalized language of the young Zionist state. This language policy was inevitably coercive and, to some extent, even aggressive regarding immigrant children’s home languages. For that reason, as Kopeliovich notes, a young child educated in a mainstream Hebrew-speaking preschool was “compelled to become alienated from its multilingual roots” (this vol.). In light of these complex societal processes, the author highlights the sensitive role of preschool educators in translating top-down language policy into strict adherence to Hebrew in classrooms. Drawing on this historical background, Kopeliovich explains the reasons for current changes in language education policy toward a shift from a monolingual ideology to officially declared openness to heritage language maintenance at home, as well as to establishing early bilingual programs. Indeed, in the last 20 years, many community-based initiatives resulted in the launch of early bilingual settings, such as English–Hebrewspeaking preschools created as a response to parental pressure for an early start in English; or Hebrew–Arabic-speaking preschools aimed at raising children, together, from two separated ethnic groups. However, as the author notes, most of these initiatives are the result of community leadership or individual activism and are not state funded. Moreover, at the macro level, there is still a void in systematic planning of ELE. Kopeliovich concludes that there is a long way “each individual parent, educator, therapist and community leader may still need to go” (this vol.) in translating a declared multilingual ideology into educational values and practices. In ▶ Chap. 29, “Early Language Education in Luxembourg,” Claudine Kirsch and Claudia Seele continue to discuss a multilingual shift in ELE by focusing on Luxemburg as a small multilingual country in Western Europe. On the supra international level, the current European language policy appeals not only to early foreign language learning, as discussed above, but also to encourage maintenance and development of children’s heritage languages (European Commission 2011). This declared language policy is on the way to being realized in Luxembourg as a country with three official languages – Luxembourgish, French, and German – and with many languages of immigrants in daily use. The chapter explores how a new national language policy that adheres to the European language policy is turned into practices undertaken by ECEC practitioners. Kirsch and Seele trace the process of this top-down translation by zooming in on teachers’ research-based professional development. The authors highlight that the process of implementing a new language policy is not automatic, and its success depends largely on teachers’ professional development and beliefs about self-efficacy in working with linguistically diverse children. An important lesson that can be learned from teachers’ professional development, discussed by Kirsch and Seele, is that the process requires the support of a management team that constantly monitors their practices (e.g., switching from one language to another) and coaching sustained by experts.

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In ▶ Chap. 30, “Early Language Education in Russia,” Ekaterina Protassova provides an extensive review of the current post-Soviet ELE situation in Russia. During the Soviet era (1922–1991), many languages of ethnic minorities were oppressed and neglected in preschool teaching. Today, however, as Protassova describes, there are tremendous efforts on a micro regional language planning level to protect indigenous languages, some of which are at risk of disappearance. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this strong, growing activism is part of ethnic communities’ fight for civil rights. Moreover, increasing attention to maintaining ethnic languages alongside learning Russian as a state language is creating a fruitful ground for early bilingual education. Protassova illustrates some successful regional initiatives in early bilingual or multilingual education with Russian as a Federal language, one of the ethnic languages and, in some cases, one of the foreign languages. However, she notes that many preschool educators are still cautious about potential consequences of early multilingualism as overload for children. Another issue raised by Protassova is the lack of indigenous language support in families, even in cases when both parents are native speakers of the target language. It appears that, in urban areas in particular, Russian replaces the ethnic languages at home. The author concludes that issues of parental motivation for intergenerational language transmission can be addressed by their exposure to research data about benefits of early bilingual development by cooperation among ECEC educators, researchers, and parents. In ▶ Chap. 31, “Early Language Education in Malta,” Charles Mifsud and Lara Ann Vella focus on Malta, a small island state, as a case of societal bilingualism in Maltase and English. The authors explore why this small island presents a complex case of early language bilingual education and how this complexity is related to the macro level of asymmetry in the status of English and Maltese in Maltese society. In official documents, children’s mother tongue is registered as Maltese, with English as the second language. However, as presented by the authors, language dominance and use in families depends on socioeconomic status, education ideologies, and geographic area. Language use in ECEC centers also depends on geographical area and on the type of provider (the state, the church, and the independent sector). For example, the researchers show that despite a declared policy to develop balanced bilingualism in both state languages, in the central area of the island, English is the main input both at home and in preschools. At the same time, in the southern part of the island, both Maltese and English are languages of communication in preschools, while at home, parents prefer to use Maltese. To improve this linguistic discrepancy, one of the researchers’ suggestions is to rethink a strict language separation preschool reality called “parallel monolingualism” (Heller 1999), and to promote more flexible use of both languages by educators according to individual needs. In flexible language use as a pedagogical practice, two or more languages are used for different communicative purposes, e.g., switching to a child’s home language to handle emotional content or to ensure attention and understanding of a novel language. In conclusion, the authors call for early years educators and policy makers to work closely with parents to address a unique linguistic situation on the island by being constantly mindful of each child’s needs.

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In ▶ Chap. 32, “Early Language Education in Singapore,” Poh Wee and Beth O’Brien describe the historical background and current development in ELE in Singapore, as another small islandic state with educational bilingualism in English and one of the three official heritage languages (i.e., Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil). Indeed, as presented by the authors, the Singapore educational system is unique because, from preschool age, most children grow up bilingually with English as the language of academic instruction and an ethnic language taught as a language of communication and for their cultural and ethnic identity. In reality, however, many issues are related to this functional distinction between the languages. Thus, the Singaporean language education policy gives English higher status than the heritage language, reflected in differential curriculum time (75% vs. 25%). In addition, recent years have been characterized by an intensive language shift toward English dominance, not only as a preschool education language policy but also as a growing tendency in families of Chinese and Indian ethnic communities who report English as the language most often used at home. This shift has resulted in a significant decline in heritage language proficiency among young children, despite a declared Ministry of Education language policy to support the maintenance of one’s ethnic heritage language and culture. Thus, as the authors conclude, macro-level language policy and planning that places English at a higher status in society inevitably influences infra-micro language planning processes in Singaporean families. To prevent a total language shift in early childhood, both educators and parents need to cooperate in creating a language-conducive context (Schwartz, in this vol.) supporting heritage language use in children’s daily communication at home and in preschool. ▶ Chapter 33, “Early Language Education in the United Arab Emirates,” by Kay Gallagher is the last chapter on ELE around the world. It provides a detailed overview of ELE in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a multilingual state with English as a lingua franca and Arabic as a dominant ethnic language. Taking the current rapid educational progress in the UAE as her point of departure, Gallagher explores current education language policy in preschools. She distinguishes between state and private sectors. In private education, English is in extensive use as the medium of communication and instruction. In state education, it is taught as L2 and used as a co-medium of instruction. Concerning state-funded preschools available only for 4–5-year-old native Emirati children, the author describes co-teaching as a widely used pedagogical model. In this model, two classroom teachers share their responsibilities in classroom management according to the CLIL concept (Mair, in this vol.): The Arabic-speaking teacher is a model for Arabic and teaches Social Studies and Islamic Studies. The English-speaking teacher is a model for English and teaches Mathematics and Science in English. Regarding home language environment, Gallagher relates to phenomena particular to the Emirati society, such as the “child at home” approach. As addressed in many contributions in this handbook, family is an important domain, embedded in society, where informal ELE is provided. The author notes that in the UAE, where less than 5% of Emirati children attend nursery school before the age of 4, the role of maids is critical to initial language input at home. However, as the author critically points out, most home

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maids speak neither English nor Arabic as their first language. As a result, young Emirati children are mostly exposed to low quality input in these languages. This reduces the potential for developing Arabic as a mother tongue, as well for acquiring the expected proficiency in English.

Conclusions Taken together, the 33 chapters of this Handbook provide a rich, up-to-date overview of research all over the world. The Handbook views ELE as embedded in diverse socio-linguistic contexts, and as education referring to languages that can be defined not just as foreign or second languages, as other, still overwhelming volumes focus on, but also as immigrant, indigenous, endangered, heritage, regional, minority, majority, and marginalized languages. In addition, the Handbook brings a truly international perspective both in the worldwide affiliation of the different authors, and in terms of context studies, breaking with the traditional European hegemony that we have frequently discussed as a limitation (Schwartz, 2018). A comprehensive analysis of existing research provided by the authors leads to us to conclude that many important topics require further study. This claim is supported with recent analyses of cutting-edge tendencies in ELE research (see Alstad and Mourão 2021). These analyses found that out of 919 studies published between 2000 and 2020 in the EECERJ, the main European journal of ECEC, “just under 2% (n ¼ 18) were considered relevant to the theoretical and empirical investigation of reallife problems in ECEC in which more than one language is a central issue” (p. 6). Importantly, with consolidation of ELE as distinctive research field, we believe that this handbook will inspire enhancement of the significance of ELE and its research. Consequently, our aspiration is that more and more educational institutions will appreciate the need to train teachers and pedagogical leaders in those aspects of language education that address essential developmental needs of young children, together with instructional topics. Finally, we believe that the handbook encourages the formation of a strong professional community of practice among researchers and educators in ELE.

References Alstad, G. T., & Mourão, S. (2021). Research into multilingual issues in ECEC contexts: Proposing a transdisciplinary research field. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 29(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2021.1928845. Baker, C. (2011). Foundation of bilingual education and bilingualism (5th ed.). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. International Encyclopedia of Education, 3(2), 37–43. Bruneau, M. (2010). Diasporas, transnational spaces and communities. In R. Bauböck & T. Faist (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods (pp. 35–49). Amsterdam: IMISCOE Research, Amsterdam University Press. Chua, C. S. K., & Baldauf, R. B. (2011). Micro language planning. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. 2, pp. 936–951). New York: Routledge. CMEC Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group. (2014). CMEC early learning and development framework. Canada: Council of Ministers of Education. http://cmec.ca/ Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/327/2014-07-Early-Learning-Framework-EN.pdf Cryer, D., Tietze, W., & Wessels, H. (2002). Parents’ perceptions of their children’s child care: A cross-national comparison. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 17, 259–277. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2007). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: A postmodern perspective. London/New York: Routledge/Falmer. DePalma, R. (2010). Language use in the two-way classroom: Lessons from a Spanish-English bilingual kindergarten. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Early Learning Languages Australia. (2018). Retrieved December 19, 2018, from https://www.ella. edu.au/ Edelenbos, P., Johnstone, R., & Kubanek, A. (2006). The Main pedagogical principles underlying the teaching of languages to very young learners. Languages for the children of Europe: Published research, good practice and Main principles. Final Report of the EAC 89/04, Lot 1 study. European Commission: Education and Culture, Culture and Communication, Multilingualism Policy. Epstein, J. L. (2011). School, family and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools. Boulder: Westview Press. European Commission. (2011). Language learning at pre-primary school level: Making it efficient and sustainable. Policy Handbook. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/languages/ policy/language-policy/documents/early-language-learning-handbook_en.pdf. Accessed 27 Jan 2021. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Grenoble, L. A., & Whaley, L. J. (2006). Saving languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugen, E. (2001). The ecology of language. In A. Fill & P. Mühlhäusler (Eds.), The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology, environment (pp. 57–66). New York: Continuum. Heller, M. (1999). Linguistic minorities and modernity: A sociolinguistic ethnography. London: Longman. Hickey, T. M., & de Mejía, A.-M. (2014). Immersion in the early years. Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 17(2), 131–143. Lambert, W. E. (1974). Culture and language as factors in learning and education. In F. E. Aboud & R. D. Meade (Eds.), Cultural factors in learning and education. Proceedings of the Fifth Western Washington Symposium on Learning (pp. 99–122). Bellingham, WA: Western Washington University. Lee, S., & Bang, Y. (2011). Listening to teacher Lore: The challenges and resources of Korean heritage language teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27, 387–394. Lugossy, R. (2018). Whose challenge is it? Learners and teachers of English in Hungarian preschool contexts. In Schwartz (Ed.),. Preschool bilingual education: Agency in Interactions between children, teachers, and parent (Series Multilingual Education, pp. 99–131). Dordrecht: Springer. Mourão, S., & Lourenço, M. (Eds.). (2015). Early years second language education: International perspectives on theories and practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Ortega, L. (2019). The study of heritage language development from a bilingualism and social justice perspective. Language Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12347.

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Paat, Y. F. (2013). Working with immigrant children and their families: An application of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. Journal of Human Behaviour in the Social Environment, 23(8), 954–966. Pianta, R. C., La Paro, K. M., & Hamre, B. K. (2008). Classroom assessment scoring system™: Manual K-3. Paul H Brookes Publishing. Pinter, A., & Zandian, S. (2014). ‘I don’t ever want to leave this room’: Benefits of researching ‘with’ children. ELT Journal, 68(1), 64–74. Schalley, A. C., & Eisenchlas, S. A. (Eds.). (2020). Handbook of social and affective factors in home language maintenance and development. Mouton de Gruyter. Schwartz, M. (2018). Preschool bilingual education: Agency in interactions between children, teachers, and parents. In Schwartz, M. (Ed.), Preschool bilingual education: Agency in Interactions between children, teachers, and parents (Series Multilingual Education, pp. 1–24). Dordrecht: Springer. Schwartz, M., & Palviainen, Å. (2016). 21st century preschool bilingual education: Facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts. Introduction to the special issue. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(6), 603–613. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). (2020). Los Pinos declaration [Chapoltepek] – Making a decade of action for indigenous languages. Paris: UNESCO. van Lier, L. (2004). The ecology and semiotics of language learning: A sociocultural perspective. Boston: Kluwer Academy. Walsh, M. (2005). Will indigenous languages survive? Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 293–315.

Part I General Foundations in Early Language Education

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Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development Yuko Goto Butler

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Executive Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theory of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metalinguistic Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neuroscience Research on Children’s Cognitive and Language Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Cognitive and Language Development in a Changing Digital Environment . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Issues Related to Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Environmental Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaining a Better Understanding of Interrelational and Developmental Mechanisms . . . . . . . Focusing on the Role of Instruction and Social Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paying Greater Attention to Variability Across and Within Individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Because young language learners (YLLs) are in the midst of cognitive development while they are developing their languages, it is important for educators of YLLs to understand children’s cognitive abilities in relation to their linguistic development in order to develop appropriate pedagogy for them. This chapter offers a current understanding of major cognitive abilities that are associated with YLL’s language learning. After sketching main theoretical approaches in general Y. G. Butler (*) Educational Linguistics Division, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_2

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cognitive development, the chapter discusses major research findings concerning the potential influence of bilingualism in cognition/metacognition in the three most studied domains; namely, executive function, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness. The chapter also covers emerging neuropsycholinguistic research as well as studies concerning greater use of digital technology by children and its potential impact on cognition. The chapter pays special attention to the kinds of measurements that researchers have used to capture YLLs’ cognitive abilities, and the roles of linguistic inputs and other environmental factors (e.g., socioeconomic status). Although research indicates that there is certainly an association between bilingualism and cognition, there are also substantial variabilities in that association across studies. The underlying mechanisms explaining the nature of the relationships and developmental trajectories are not totally clear. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research. Keywords

Young learners · Bilingualism · Cognition · Executive function · Theory of mind · Metalinguistic awareness

Introduction A growing number of young children are learning additional language(s) from an early stage in their lives. Because such young language learners (YLLs) are in the process of drastic changes in their cognitive and language development, it is critically important to understand how YLLs develop cognition in relation to language so that we can develop cognitively and linguistically appropriate pedagogies, curriculum, and instructional materials for them. Researchers have long been interested in understanding the complex interrelationships between cognition and language development among children while uncovering the interplay of biological and environmental factors in such development. This mechanism is highly complicated given that various factors – individual, cultural, social, and instructional – play significant roles in the process. The mechanism is even more complicated if more than one language is involved in the process. This chapter offers a current understanding of such interrelations between cognition and language among YLLs. It is important to note that, depending on epistemological traditions, researchers have taken fundamentally different positions toward the nature of the relationship between language and cognition. Some researchers, or nativists, argue that language development is a specific, innate, and predetermined faculty that is separate from other general cognitive abilities. In contrast, constructivists and emergentists tend to take the position that language is part of general cognitive processing; naturally, they see language and other cognitive abilities as interrelated (Deák 2014). Although the debate continues, the present chapter is written from the perspective of the latter, constructivist/emergentist position.

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The chapter starts by presenting the main theoretical frameworks related to YLL’s cognitive and linguistic development, including Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, information-processing theories, and complexity theory. Next, it reviews major research contributions concerning the relationship between YLLs’ language learning and cognition in the domains of executive function, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness. Thanks to rapid advancement of various technologies, there are emerging neuropsycholinguistic studies as well as studies concerning greater use of digital technology and its potential impact on cognition. The chapter covers these technology-related studies concerning children’s cognition and language. The chapter also discusses challenges that researchers face when investigating the interrelationship between cognitive and language development: namely, measurement issues and the roles of linguistic inputs and other environmental factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, SES). Finally, suggestions are made for future research directions. There are a couple of important notes about terminology. First, YLLs in this chapter are defined as children who have been learning more than one language in various settings (e.g., home, community, preschool, etc.) before either the age of 6 or the end of preschool. Second, since YLLs are often exposed to more than one language from birth (Takanishi and Le Menestrel 2017), this chapter does not distinguish between simultaneous bilinguals (conventionally referring to as children who learn more than one language from birth) and early sequential bilinguals (children who learn more than one language early in life, usually before age 6), except in cases where the distinction makes a critical difference in outcome. Similarly, the chapter does not distinguish between bilinguals and multilinguals. The terms YLLs, bilinguals, and multilinguals are used interchangeably in this chapter.

Main Theoretical Concepts The theories of Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934) had tremendous influences on the relations between cognition and language development in children. This section provides an overview of the major characteristics of the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky, followed by other influential frameworks that built on or were developed based on either Piaget’s or Vygotsky’s approach to child cognitive development. Piaget (1952) considered children’s language development as a reflection of their stage-based progression of mental structures. He viewed children’s cognitive development as a result of the interaction between biologically determined maturation and environment. According to Piaget, children’s development advances in stages. Each stage represents a unique set of mental actions that allow children to interact in a different way with the environment. Children begin understanding the world through motor actions (sensorimotor period, from birth to age 2). As children start using symbols, including words and gestures, they start reconstructing action-based concepts (schemes) of objects in a new mental representation (preoperational period, ages 2–7). Despite their egocentrism and underdeveloped communicative skills,

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children’s mental representations are increasingly organized and generate logical and/or causal thinking about objects and events. Building on these increasingly logical structures, school-age children (i.e., concrete operational period, ages 7– 11) can engage in various mental operations. Logic becomes more important than perception in their thinking, which is in turn more abstract and flexible. Finally, when children reach the formal operational period (ages 11–15), their mental operations are not limited to concrete objects and events, but they also can be applied to abstract, logical, and hypothetical situations and relations. This fourstage process of cognitive development is considered universal (Miller 2014). Piaget’s stage theory has substantially advanced the understanding of children’s cognitive development while also generating a great deal of criticism. A group of researchers referred to as “Neo-Piagetian” (e.g., Robbie Case, Andreas Demetriou, Kurt Fischer, and Graeme Halford) refined Piaget’s theory while maintaining some of his basic premises, such as stage-based progressions of cognitive structures and the qualitative differences in cognitive structures across stages (Mascolo 2015). Others, however, have criticized the theory from a number of fronts (Miller 2014). One of the major criticisms is Piaget’s very notion of stages and the idea of a monotonic or linear increase of functions during the course of development. Piaget failed to show clear evidence of qualitative difference in thinking among children who belong to different stages, and he did not account for substantial individual differences. In addition, critics took issue with a heavy reliance on verbal responses in his methodology and an insufficient consideration of cultural and instructional factors in children’s cognitive development (Barrouillet 2015; Donaldson 1978; Miller 2014). Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky (1978) viewed culture as the central factor in children’s cognitive development, and he viewed cognitive and linguistic development as interdependent processes. A given culture has its own system of symbolic artifacts. Various symbolic artifacts, most notably linguistic symbols, are internalized (i.e., acquired) while children interact with parents, teachers, and other mediators (i.e., material or psychological tools to connect one’s mind and the world). By internalizing these symbolic artifacts, children can shape their higher mental functions such as memory, attention, and problem solving (Gajdamaschko 2015; Lantolf 2000; Vygotsky 1978). Distinctly, in Vygotsky’s theory, children’s speech that is not directed to others (i.e., private speech), which Piaget viewed as a reflection of their egocentric thought, was considered as an important tool for cultivating self-regulation and verbal thinking (Vygotsky 1986). Moreover, in each period of development, certain types of culturally specific activities are considered critical for children in order to facilitate their cognitive and emotional development. It is important to keep in mind, however, that such “periods” are developmentally determined in a particular social context rather than by chronological age. In many cultures, during the preschool years, sociodramatic play – play where children create imaginary situations, act out roles, and follow rules regulated by the specific role that they perform – helps children develop the flexibility to switch roles as well as self-regulative abilities and greater sophistication of symbolic thoughts. Such abilities are all important for formal school learning; they serve “as a prerequisite for the acquisition of literacy and other symbolic systems used at school” (Kozulin 2015, p. 327).

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Contrary to Piaget, who believed that cognitive development precedes instruction (so that instructors must wait until a child is developmentally ready to learn), Vygotsky saw instruction as having an active role in children’s development. In making a distinction between children’s everyday concepts (spontaneous concepts developed through daily experiences) and their scientific concepts (concepts for academic reasoning), Vygotsky claimed that children’s everyday concepts cannot naturally lend themselves to scientific concepts; academic reasoning is only possible through deliberate instruction. Whereas Piaget focused on children’s readily available psychological functions that they can display independently, Vygotsky proposed to capture children’s emergent functions by paying attention to their zone of proximal development (ZDP) – a gap between what a child can do independently and what he/she can do with the help of capable others such as teachers (Vygotsky 1978). Of the many other theories (besides Piaget 1952; Vygotsky 1978, 1986) that have been proposed to understand cognitive development, information processing theories are particularly relevant for understanding cognitive processing in relation to language learning in children. Relying on the metaphor of a computer, information processing theories explain children’s mental processes through their attention to incoming information stimuli, working memory capacities for holding and processing that information, and long-term memory for storing and retaining the information. Earlier theoretical models mainly originated from neo-Piagetian approaches, in which researchers often proposed metrics to capture the cognitive complexity of tasks (e.g., the number of variables to process in parallel in Chapman 1987; processing speed in Kail 1986; relational complexity in Halford et al. 1998; types of rules to use in Zelazo et al. 2003), and explained children’s mental development by showing their age-related abilities when they deal with tasks with increasing cognitive complexity (Halford and Andrews 2015). In information processing theories, using a language is a cognitively highly complex task composed of a series of skills, and children first have to master basic skills and then move on to higher-order skills as they progress in language use. More recently, information processing theories linked to neuroscience have provided some theoretical grounds for understanding the relationship between the brain and cognitive developmental trajectories, which in turn are considered to be the result of multiple and complex interactions between biological (e.g., genes) and environmental (e.g., experience) factors (Halford and Andrews 2015). Moving away from the traditional linear approaches to development, where psychological structures are treated in isolation as independent entities, complexity theory (also referred to as complex dynamic systems theory) views human development as nonlinear and relational. More specifically, the theory views human development as embedded in multilayered dynamic interactions among actors in a given complex system (de Bot 2017). The system is open and adaptive and, therefore, does not create a stable state; instead, it is constantly changing and self-organizing itself in response to environmental or contextual changes. Similarly, the system also influences the environment/context because the system and context are not seen as independent. In complexity theory, language is no longer considered a product but rather viewed as a constantly evolving process; thus, complexity theorists prefer the

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term language development to language acquisition. Complexity theory and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory both consider cognitive development as being realized through social interaction. However, complexity theory is distinguished from Vygotsky’s theory in its view of mutually adaptive mechanisms between the system and context (Larsen-Freeman 2011). To summarize, all of the aforementioned major theories differ in how they conceptualize development taking place and how instruction, social interaction, and context play out in that process. Accordingly, the theories have had varying influences on research on the cognitive and language development of YLLs. It is also notable, as one can see below, that the association between general cognitive theories discussed above and current empirical investigations is increasingly complex due to accelerated interdisciplinary efforts in psychological research with linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy, along with methodological and analytical innovations (Borghi and Fini 2019).

Major Contributions Since the publication of a signature study by Peal and Lambert (1962), our perception of bilingualism and cognition has changed significantly. Prior to Peal and Lambert’s study, learning more than one language was believed to be so demanding that it could exceed children’s cognitive capacity, thereby delaying or negatively influencing their cognitive development as well as their language development. Indeed, earlier studies (e.g., Anastasi and Cordova 1953; Smith 1939; Yoshioka 1929) showed poorer performance among bilinguals than their monolingual counterparts in various tasks – both verbal and nonverbal intelligence tasks as well as academic performance such as math and reading. These early studies suffered from a number of methodological and conceptual problems, however, including ill-defined concepts of bilingualism, lack of control over influential variables, mismatched comparisons, and low validity and reliability of measurements. After solving such problems, researchers started reporting more positive effects of bilingualism and early L2 learning on cognition, at least in some domains of cognition (for relevant literature reviews, see Adesope et al. 2010; Barac et al. 2014). Following this line of positive views of bilingualism, Bialystok (1994) proposed a model of language use composed of two processing elements – analysis of knowledge and control of processing – and argued that bilinguals have an advantage in skills related to control of processing. As she acknowledged, however, given the fact that some studies found no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals in cognitive/metalinguistic tasks, it is not yet totally clear which cognitive abilities are influenced by bilingualism and what accounts for the variability of effects found in some research (Barac et al. 2014). Among various cognitive and metacognitive abilities that children develop during the preschool years, the following subsections focus on the most extensively studied cognitive domains in relation to language: namely, executive functions, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness.

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Executive Functions Executive functions (EFs) are considered to be critical in children’s mental development, including their language development and academic achievement at school, and have received tremendous attention among researchers (Schwarz and Shaul 2018). EFs are generally considered to be a composition of various interrelated mental processes for controlling thoughts and behaviors. What processes count as EFs, however, is controversial. Researchers often include inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to control prepotent responses), working memory (i.e., the ability to update and monitor information), cognitive flexibility (i.e., the ability to shift or adjust mental sets according to goals), and planning (i.e., the ability to anticipate strategies to achieve a goal) as major components of EFs (Best and Miller 2010; Zelazo et al. 2003). Some researchers use the terms attention control and executive function interchangeably, or see attention as an EF (e.g., Ladas et al. 2015), while others treat them separately (e.g., Sorge et al. 2017). Research indicates that EFs emerge early in life (by the end of the first year if not earlier) but show drastic development during children’s preschool years. The greatest changes appear to occur sometime between 4 and 5 years of age (Šimleša and Cepanec 2015). A number of tasks have been used to measure children’s EFs. The Stroop task is a well-known task for inhibitory control. In a typical Stroop task, a dimension of stimuli (e.g., color terms) are displayed along with another dimension (colors). Participants’ reaction times are recorded in a congruent condition (e.g., reading aloud the color term “red” displayed in red), an incongruent condition (e.g., reading aloud the color term “red” when displayed in blue), and a neutral condition (e.g., only a color term or a color is presented). To successfully complete the task, children need to (a) hold instructional/procedural information during the task, (b) suppress a habitual response evoked by perceptual stimuli, and (c) exhibit a completing response (Šimleša and Cepanec 2015, p. 492). Other major tasks often used include the Digit Span task for working memory, the Dimensional Change Card Sort for cognitive flexibility, and the Tower of Hanoi for planning. In the Digit Span task, a series of numbers are displayed on the computer screen and then they disappear. After a beep, participants click (or type) the numbers that they remember. In the Dimensional Change Card Sort task, participants are asked to sort cards, first according to a dimension (e.g., color), and then resort according to another dimension (e.g., shape). The Tower of Hanoi is a mathematical game composed of three rods and a number of disks, which are initially placed on one of the rods in order from smallest to largest in size. Participants are asked to move the entire stack of disks from one rod to another while adhering to certain rules (e.g., one can move only one disk at a time; a larger disk cannot be placed on a smaller disk, etc.) (Diamond 2013). As these tasks exemplify, EF tasks are not necessarily mapped onto a particular cognitive construct (e.g., inhibition). After all, researchers differ in their conceptualizations of cognitive constructs for EFs. Some researchers (e.g., Zelazo et al. 2003) take a unitary position, while others see each construct of EF as separable and independent (e.g., Diamond 2006). Still others take a middle-ground position. Miyake and his colleagues (2000) reported that these constructs were “separable”

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but “correlated” psychometrically, reflecting EFs’ “unity” as well as “diversity” (p. 87). Research among monolingual preschool children as well as children at risk of dyslexia or other language-related difficulties has frequently shown that children’s executive functions are significantly correlated with their language measures (e.g., Gooch et al. 2016; Šimleša et al. 2017). However, causal mechanisms (e.g., why and how language development facilitates EF development or vice versa, or how they mutually influence one another) remain unclear. For example, Gooch et al.’s (2016) longitudinal study showed that, while there was a strong concurrent correlation between EFs and language skills, the cross-lagged effects from language to EFs and from EFs to language were both nonsignificant. It is often hypothesized that bilinguals may have an advantage in EFs. Because bilingual children constantly use multiple languages and switch between them, it seems reasonable to assume that they should be good at inhibiting language(s) that are not in use, or that they can have mental flexibility in control processing. Empirical results of bilinguals’ inhibition, however, have been somewhat inconsistent. While many studies have reported that bilinguals have advantages in EFs compared with their monolingual counterparts, others have failed to find any bilingual advantages or have found advantages only in certain cognitive aspects of EFs (see Barac et al. 2014; Bialystok 2018; Valian 2015 for research reviews). Compared with inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning have received far less research attention, but the limited studies on these constructs have shown results similar to the findings concerning inhibition. While the studies often report a bilingual advantage, there is substantial variability across studies (Barac et al. 2014; Grundy and Timmer 2017). Overall, such variability appears to be more evident among younger bilingual children than older children and adults (de Cat et al. 2018). There are likely many reasons for these inconsistent results. Different results may depend on which confounding variables (e.g., age, verbal and nonverbal abilities, socioeconomic status [SES]) are controlled or how they are controlled (Valian 2015). The selection of bilingual participants and EF tasks also influences the results. Thomas-Sunesson, Hakuta, and Bialystok (2018), for example, reported that the degree of bilingualism mattered; more balanced bilingual children showed higher performance in EF tasks. Bialystok (2018) argued that inconsistent results are largely due to researchers’ oversimplified conceptualizations of bilingualism and executive functions, and suggested that both concepts should be treated as a continuum rather than as discrete categories. In contrast, Sabourin and Vīnerte (2015) asserted that simultaneous bilinguals and early sequential bilinguals (exposed to L2 between ages 1 and 6 in their study) may have different underlying processing mechanisms. Moreover, what EF tasks measure is often unclear (e.g., see MacLeod 2015, for a case of the Stroop task). It is also possible that publication bias – the tendency to publish studies with expected findings and not to publish studies that fail to find expected results – could have skewed reality (de Bruin et al. 2015). In essence, there is some association between EFs and language abilities. However, despite the substantial amount of research on this topic, the precise underlying

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mechanism of their association remains unknown. Researchers today face both theoretical and methodological challenges in uncovering mechanisms of relations between EFs and language development among young bilingual children.

Theory of Mind Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to attribute beliefs, emotions, and other mental states to others and to explain and predict other people’s behaviors based on those attributions (Wellman 2014). The word “theory” in the name reflects the fact that we infer and predict the mental states of others. This social-cognitive ability is considered foundational for social interaction, including verbal communication. In order to infer and understand the meaning of words and utterances in verbal communication, a child needs to understand his/her partner’s communicative intent and beliefs. A sign of ToM can be observed during the first year of life, but critical development takes place during a child’s preschool years. By age 4, many children can pass ToM tasks, including false-beliefs tasks. In a popular false-beliefs task, Sally-Anne’s task (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985), for instance, an experimenter shows a child that Sally, one of two characters in the experiment, puts an object in her empty basket. After Sally leaves, the child sees that another character, Anne, picks up the object from Sally’s basket and puts it into her own basket. The child then is asked in which basket Sally would look for the object when she returns. In order to complete the task successfully, the child needs to recognize that (a) other people form beliefs; (b) their beliefs are based on their own knowledge, which may contradict reality; and (c) their actions are controlled by such false beliefs (Wellman 2014). Previous studies consistently indicate that bilingual preschool children outperform their monolingual counterparts in ToM tasks (see Barac et al. 2014 for a review of such studies). However, here again, the precise mechanisms underlying this bilingual advantage in ToM development remain unclear. Some empirical studies have presented evidence indicating a close connection between ToM and EFs, particularly inhibitory control (e.g., Bialystok and Senman 2004; Farhadian et al. 2010; Goetz 2003; Kovács 2009); note that bilinguals’ advantage in EF tasks has often been reported, as discussed in section “Executive Functions.” Indeed, in order to successfully complete many ToM tasks, a certain degree of inhibitory control is required. In Sally-Anne’s task, children need to inhibit their own prepotent knowledge of reality (the object is in Anne’s basket). Moreover, both inhibitory and ToM abilities appear to develop at a similar time (i.e., preschool years), and they operate in the same brain region – specifically, the prefrontal cortex (Carlson and Moses 2001). While ToM and EFs show a close connection, however, they are more likely to be distinct constructs, judging from their asymmetric developmental patterns. According to Devine and Hughes (2014), the predictability of early EF performance for later false-belief task performance is greater than the predictability of early false-belief performance for later EF performance. In contrast, other studies (e.g., Cheung et al. 2010; Fan et al. 2015; Liberman et al. 2017) attributed bilinguals’ advantage in ToM to their unique social and bilingual

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environments, not to inhibitory control. Cheung et al. (2010), for example, showed that bilingual children’s (age 3–4) sociolinguistic awareness contributed positively to their false belief understanding. Fan et al. (2015) reported that not only could bilingual children (aged 4–6) detect others’ perspectives better than their monolingual counterparts. Interestingly, Fan et al. also found that monolingual children who were exposed to bilingual contexts but who were not bilingual themselves performed as well as bilingual children despite having lower inhibitory scores than the bilingual counterparts. Finally, a longitudinal investigation by Diaz and Farrar (2018) showed that, while early performance in language proficiency and inhibitory control predicted later performance (a year later) in false belief tasks among monolingual preschool children, only early metalinguistic awareness (see section “Metalinguistic Awareness” for a full discussion of this concept) predicted later false-belief performance among bilingual preschoolers. This result suggests that underlying mechanisms for ToM development may be different between monolinguals and bilinguals. Assuming that being exposed to two or more languages should facilitate children’s explicit knowledge about how language works, metalinguistic awareness has attracted researchers’ attention, as discussed next.

Metalinguistic Awareness Metalinguistic awareness refers to “the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate language forms” (Koda 2005, p. 72). This conscious reflection on language is developed greatly during preschool years, and it is a strong predictor of both oral and written language development in children. Because bilinguals are exposed to different linguistic forms and structures, they are likely in a better position to develop a higher degree of metalinguistic awareness than monolinguals. As indicated in a review done by Barac and her colleague, the majority of studies on metalinguistic awareness among bilingual children have examined phonological awareness (PA), and have reported mixed results in this domain (Barac et al. 2014). (For details on phonological awareness, also refer to ▶ Chap. 5, “Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education” by Minkov and Baladzhaeva in this handbook.) Research findings generally support bilinguals’ advantages in morphological and syntactic awareness (e.g., Chen and Schwartz 2018; Davidson et al. 2010), although empirical investigation in those domains has been limited. PA involves explicit skills to identify and manipulate sound structures of spoken words, including syllables, onsets and rhymes, and phonemes. Various tasks have been developed to measure children’s PA by asking children to detect, delete, blend, and segment sound units (i.e., syllables, onsets and rhymes, and phonemes). The language combination and specific characteristics of language(s) that children learn seem to be major factors explaining varying results showing bilingual advantages in PA. More specifically, relative distance and complexity of phonological structures between languages appear to be influential. Children’s orthographic experiences (exposure to alphabet vs. nonalphabet systems) play a critical role as well. For instance, in a study by Loizou and Stuart (2003), 5-year-old English–Greek

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bilinguals (i.e., English as L1 and Greek as L2) outperformed their English monolingual peers, but the bilingual advantage was not found in Greek–English bilinguals (Greek as L1 and English as L2) when compared with Greek monolinguals. Loizou and Stuart proposed that the “bilingual enhancement effect” (p. 3) can be obtained when bilinguals’ L2 is phonologically simpler than their L1. More research is needed to confirm their proposal, however. In addition to phonological structures of oral languages, studies have identified other factors influencing bilinguals’ PA. Such factors include vocabulary knowledge in both L1 and L2, orthographic depth (i.e., the consistency of grapheme-phoneme/ syllable correspondence), literacy instruction (e.g., phonics instruction) that children received in L1 and/or L2, age, and types of tasks used in studies (e.g., Bialystok et al. 2003; Dixon et al. 2012; Kuo and Anderson 2008; Rolla San Francisco et al. 2006). Importantly, such variables appear to interact in complicated ways. For example, in Dixon, Chuang, and Quiroz (2012), a study conducted among bilingual kindergarten children in Singapore, the children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge in English predicted higher PA in English. When it comes to the effect of their home languages (Malay-, Tamil-, and Chinese-speaking groups were tested in this study), Malayspeaking children performed best among the three groups, perhaps because Malay uses a phoneme-based, highly shallow orthography (i.e., the sound-print correspondence is regular) and the children benefit from receiving phonics-basic instruction when learning Malay. Curiously, Chinese-speaking children performed better than Tamil-speaking children in an English PA test despite the fact that Tamil also uses a fairly shallow orthography whereas Chinese has a deep orthography (i.e., the soundprint correspondence is rather irregular). This result suggested that orthographic depth alone cannot be a sufficient explanation for the result. The authors speculated that syllabic complexity, in addition to orthographic depth, which is confounded with literacy instruction, plays some role in the differing results among the three ethnic groups of children. As Dixon et al.’s study exemplifies, the mixed results across studies on bilingual advantages in phonological awareness partially stem from the complex interplay of multiple variables. Compared with PA, syntactic awareness, or grammatical sensitivity, has been studied far less extensively. In the few studies that have examined this topic (e.g., Davidson et al. 2010; Foursha-Stevenson and Nicoladis 2011), preschool bilinguals (Urdu–English bilinguals for Davidson et al. and French–English bilinguals for Foursha-Stevenson and Nicoladis, respectively) outperformed monolinguals in grammaticality judgment tasks, but the reasons for their advantage are not clear. A number of factors appear to influence children’s syntactic awareness, including cross-linguistic transfer, children’s age and proficiency levels in each language, and the long-term trajectory (e.g., how long the bilingual advantage lasts). The precise effects of such variables, however, are not well understood. In Davidson et al., for example, because bilingual advantage in incorrect sentences was found among older children (ages 5–6) but not among younger children (ages 3–4), the researchers hypothesized that younger children may have relied more on meaning than syntax in making judgments. Considering the children’s (both older and younger children’s) asymmetric performance in judging correct and incorrect

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sentences, the validity of the syntactic awareness tasks may need to be carefully examined as well. Finally, a general bilingual advantage is also found in morphological awareness, or one’s explicit knowledge of the smallest unit of meaning in the given language, namely, morphemes (e.g., Eviatar et al. 2018; Schwarz et al. 2016). As with syntactic awareness, however, there are not many empirical studies on morphological awareness among young bilingual children. The few studies that have been published show that bilingual advantage in morphological awareness was found even among young emergent bilinguals and that morphological awareness contributes to children’s literacy-related measures (e.g., word reading, comprehension of vocabulary and reading) for both monolingual and bilingual children regardless of the language(s) they learn. At the same time, due to the variability of morphological systems and orthographic systems across languages, cross-language and crossmodality influences of morphological awareness among bilinguals vary depending on the language combination (e.g., typological similarities or differences), types of morphological awareness examined (e.g., inflection, derivations, compounds), task types (e.g., blending, segmenting, judgment, and analogy tasks), the students’ age, proficiency of L1 and L2, and learning contexts (Chen and Schwartz 2018; Schwarz et al. 2016). It is important to note that the challenges of interpreting the results of these studies are, in part, due to multifaceted or ambiguous conceptualizations of “morphological awareness” among researchers (Apel 2014) and the lack of a theory explaining cross-language transfer (Chen and Schwartz 2018). In sum, there is ample evidence that preschool children’s bilingualism positively relates to their cognition, but substantial variability of the associations has been reported. Precise mechanisms of the developmental interrelationships between early bilingualism and cognition are not yet well understood.

New Projects In this section, two new lines of research are discussed: (a) neuroscience research and (b) research concerning the role of various digital technologies in children’s cognitive and language development.

Neuroscience Research on Children’s Cognitive and Language Development Thanks to the development of noninvasive techniques in recent years, there has been a rapid increase in neuroscience research concerning infants’ and children’s cognition and language learning. Detailed discussions of such neuroscience studies are beyond the scope of this chapter; however, a couple of important findings are worth noting because they can provide us with unique information that has not been available in research at the behavioral level.

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First, neuroscience research has begun to uncover the amazing development that human brains undergo during the first couple of years of life. Rapid neural connections, or the creation of synapses, occur during these early years, corresponding first to the development of sensory functions such as hearing and vision, immediately followed by the development of language and high-cognitive functions. By the age of 2 or 3, infants create more synapses than they need. These surplus neural connections gradually diminish overtime, as a result of an interplay between genetic and environmental factors. In other words, infants’ brains are genetically “wired” to adjust according to the experiences that infants have in their environment. Bilingual input, as specific environmental experiences, certainly greatly influences brain organization and neural activation processes during the first couple of years (Berken et al. 2017), as discussed below. A productive research topic related to cognition and language during the first 1 or 2 years of life is the relationship between infants’ bilingual experiences and sensory functions. Researchers have discovered substantial plasticity in the development of infants’ phonetic perceptual systems due to their unique early linguistic experiences (Kuhl 2011). It is known that infants at birth are able to discriminate all sounds used in spoken languages, but by their twelfth month, monolingual children lose the ability to discriminate nonnative phoneme contrasts while improving the ability to process their native language (e.g., Bosseler et al. 2013). In contrast, simultaneous bilinguals can maintain the ability to discriminate phonemic contrasts in both languages (e.g., Burns et al. 2007). Strikingly, Conboy and Kuhl (2011), using event-related potentials (ERPs), showed that, with a short-term exposure to L2 during 9.5–10.5 months of age, infants not only could reverse their ability to discriminate L2 phonemes but also could show improvements in their native phonetic processing, suggesting that young infants have impressive plasticity based on linguistic stimuli. Second, although neuroscience research related to bilingualism has mostly been conducted among adults, it has gradually revealed that successive bilingual experiences change both neural activation processes and brain structures. For example, in Krizman et al. (2012), adolescent bilinguals’ blood flows in their brainstems – an indicator of neural activity – were larger than in their monolingual counterparts when they listened to a speech sound with background noises, suggesting the superiority in auditory attention among bilinguals due to their experience attending to multiple languages. It is possible that a similar neural activity may occur in young children’s brains, although we need empirical investigations to confirm this hypothesis. Bilingual children (age 4–6) who experienced more conversational turns with adults showed increased activation of the left inferior frontal area during a story-listening task (Romeo et al. 2018). Early bilingual experiences (e.g., when and how one is exposed to L2) and L2 proficiency positively correlate with gray volume density in the left inferior parietal cortex as well as the development of language-specific white matter volume among bilingual children, indicating the influence of bilingualism over the brain structures themselves (e.g., Mohades et al. 2012). In sum, neuro-based studies allow researchers to better understand the effect of bilingual experiences on mental processing and performance of linguistic and

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nonlinguistic cognitive activities, which may not be sufficiently understood by behavioral evidence alone. Such research can also provide researchers with additional evidence to support behavioral data. Recent advances in neuroscientific innovation are particularly promising for better understanding precise language processing among very young bilingual children whose behavioral data are often challenging to obtain. Moreover, neuroscientific research may provide additional information to examine finer-grade variability among bilinguals who have varying experiences with the target languages.

Children’s Cognitive and Language Development in a Changing Digital Environment Recent innovations in technology are rapidly changing children’s lives. Accordingly, there has been a surge in studies examining the role of technologies such as television and other digital media in children’s cognition and language development. Researchers’ primary concerns have been twofold: (a) how the digital environment as well as interaction through new technology impacts children’s cognitive and language development both in terms of process and acquisition; and (b) how technology should be designed in such a way that it can support cognitive and language development among children with diverse needs, including L2 learners and children with various physical and learning difficulties (Vulchanova et al. 2017). The effects of television and other digital media on children’s development appear to depend on children’s individual factors, such as age, the quality of the media design and content, as well as the way that media is used (Reid Chassiakos et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2019). Among children younger than two, negative effects on their cognitive and language development are often reported (e.g., Zimmerman et al. 2007). There is also some evidence indicating that early exposure to digital media negatively influences children’s later EF development during their preschool years (Nathanson et al. 2014). In addition, young children do not process information through digital media as they do when interacting with humans; consequently, little language learning occurs through digital media alone. This may be partially due to young children’s developmental capacities, including memory, flexibility, attention, and ability to comprehend media content (Anderson and Pempek 2005; Barr 2013). As children get older, they can make better use of digital media. For example, viewing time, treated as an indication of attention, increases drastically between 2 and 3 years of age. They also pay greater attention to the content of the media rather than its formal features, such as music or bright colors (Anderson and Pempek 2005). Considering that underlying attentional processes are very similar between younger and older children, one can speculate that the challenges for younger children with attending to and processing information through media are also associated with their ability to comprehend the content (Bus et al. 2015). Indeed, viewing level- and age-appropriate content or repeated viewing of such content can assist young children’s attention and processing, which in turn can contribute to language learning (Anderson and Pempek 2005; Ferguson and Donnellan 2014).

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Unfortunately, many so-called educational apps and e-books that are commercially available are not built upon evidence-based designs and are often limited to rote skill development (Vulchanova et al. 2017). A key element for the positive influence of technology on children’s cognitive and language development appears to be meaningful interaction with adults or peers as well as sufficient mediation. While viewing media alone may deprive children of adult interaction, coviewing media, along with interaction with adults and peers, can enhance children’s comprehension and learning. For example, Strouse, O’Doherty, and Troseth (2013) reported that parent-led dialogic questioning interventions, which were composed of a series of prompts (e.g., recall prompts, wh-questions, open-ended prompts, distancing prompts, etc.) during coviewing of videos, positively influenced preschoolers’ story comprehension and expressive vocabulary learning. The researchers explained that the parent-led dialogic questioning directed children’s attention, stimulated their cognitive reasoning and inference-making, and helped children connect the given story with their experiences. During the parent-led dialogic questioning interventions, the parents and children used the target vocabulary more often than in other control conditions, which in turn contributed to the children’s vocabulary learning. Studies of digital games also indicate that their effects on cognition and motivation are enhanced if learners can play the game with others and if the game playing is supplemented with other instructional methods, such as teacher-led explicit practice or explanation and follow-up discussions (Wouters et al. 2013; also see Butler 2018, for a review of digital games and children’s language development). Positive effects on knowledge and interpersonal skill acquisition as well as on language were found not only with serious games (games specifically designed for learning) but also with games primarily designed for entertainment (Clark et al. 2016). Based on their review of the effect of massive multiple online role-playing games on language learning, Zhang et al. (2017) proposed that, given the fact the several brain regions (e.g., the hippocampus, the fusiform gyrus, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe) are activated in both game playing and language processing, in-game interaction may facilitate functional neuroconnectivity that is associated with language processing. Although we need more neuroscience research to confirm their hypothesis, it seems that cognitive and socio-cognitive abilities and language abilities can be mutually facilitated through incorporating digital games in early language programs. Finally, child–robot interactions are a promising area of inquiry, although few empirical studies are available. Human-like features of social robots, including gestures and emotional expressions, allow children to have seminatural social interaction with the robots, which in turn is expected to facilitate their language learning. Preschool children tend to pay greater attention to and have more engagement with social robots than virtual figures (Belpaeme et al. 2018). Preliminary studies suggest that, in order to motivate and facilitate preschool children’s L2 learning, artificial intelligence tutoring robots need to respond to children contingently and appropriately in light of the children’s proficiency levels, establish joint attention while using gaze and gestures effectively, and provide children with timely and meaningful feedback while accurately monitoring their learning progress (Vogt et al. 2017).

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To sum up, because many children grow up with digital technology, how they develop their cognition and language abilities under the changing digital environment is a topic of great interest. The key for the effective use of technology seems to be whether the technology can provide children with developmentally appropriate and meaningful interactions with peers or teachers/tutors.

Critical Issues and Topics The studies reviewed above suggest the complexity of accurately understanding the relationships between cognition and language development. To improve this understanding, at least two critical issues need close attention: (a) measurement and (b) the role of environmental factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and the quality and quantity of input and social interaction.

Issues Related to Measurement Developing and administering highly valid and reliable measurements is always challenging, particularly for children who require considerations because of their age, developmental variability, or exposure to various experiences. The studies reviewed above are no exception. While different tasks have been used to measure EFs and ToM, there is some debate about whether these tasks actually measure their intended target or instead measure something else (e.g., Bialystok 2018; Paap et al. 2018). Moreover, a number of construct-irrelevant factors may mask the results of children’s performance in those tasks. As Deák’s (2014) review revealed, most EF tasks involve language skills, but researchers often fail to sufficiently control for the demands of language processing in EF tasks, leaving open the possibility that children’s EF task performance could be confounded by their language abilities. This problem is often referred to as task impurity (Miyake and Friedman 2012). Additionally, the role of language differs depending on the task. In Carlson and Meltzoff (2008), for example, vocabulary knowledge was related to EF tasks but contributed differently to each task. The role of affective factors in EF tasks has been addressed as well. For instance, children’s performance could be influenced by whether or not they think the rewards for completing the tasks are attractive (Zelazo and Müller 2014). Similarly, researchers have pointed out potential biases based on verbal intelligence and culture in popular ToM tasks. Liu and his colleagues (2008), for example, argued that the language used as part of the instructions for a false-belief task negatively influenced Chinese-speaking children’s understanding of the task because Chinese has belief verbs that mark one’s belief as false. Indeed, translating tasks requires a series of validity and reliability checks. Devine and Hughes’s (2014) meta-analysis indicated that a single false-belief task suffers from limited variance, suggesting the merits of using aggregated scores of multiple tasks as a way to provide a more reliable account of children’s performance. Their analysis also found ceiling effects in some of the

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tasks they reviewed. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the associations between EFs and ToM vary depending on the tasks used.

The Role of Environmental Factors Researchers have recently started paying more attention to the role of environmental factors in understanding YLLs’ language and cognition. A number of studies have included children from both lower and middle SES backgrounds and examined the role of SES in their cognitive abilities (e.g., Engel de Abreu et al. 2012; Nguyen and Astington 2014; White and Greenfield 2017, for executive control; Marchman et al. 2017, for processing speed; Romeo et al. 2018, for neural language processing). Among monolingual children, Lawson, Hook, and Farah’s (2018) meta-analysis indicated a small to moderate correlation, on average, between SES and EF but with substantial variability across individual studies. When it comes to bilingual children, the relationship between SES and EF is not well understood. While there is some suggestion that the influence of bilingualism on cognition may be manifested at a certain SES group (Woodard and Rodman 2007), others found little impact of SES on cognitive advantage among bilingual children (Adesope et al. 2010). How SES is measured also appears to influence the results. It is important to note that what SES entails is not very clear. SES is a composite of multiple indicators of one’s social and economic standing such as educational level, household income, occupation, and place of residence, which in turn have varied associations with a number of variables that have the potential to influence cognitive measures. Such variables include cultural practices and beliefs (or socalled funds of knowledge, Moll et al. 1992), parents’ expectations, and their interactional styles with children, diet, and so forth (American Psychological Association 2019). Despite the potential significance of such variables, their roles have not been sufficiently investigated. Parental attitudes toward children’s self-control seem to have some associations with children’s EF performance (Carlson and Meltzoff 2008). Different developmental trajectories in ToM by cultural practices were also found. For example, Shahaeian, Peterson, Slaughter, and Wellman (2011) reported that 3–6-year-old Farsi-speaking Iranian children understood knowledge access (a step in completing ToM tasks) earlier than opinion diversity (another step in completing ToM tasks), whereas their English-speaking Australian counterparts showed progress in the reverse order. Somewhat related to SES, another influential factor that has been emphasized in research is the type of linguistic inputs and social interactions that YLLs receive and experience. Efforts have been made to estimate the quantity of exposure to the target languages through parental surveys and other means. For example, in addition to relying on traditional parental reports of estimated use of language with children, Marchman et al. (2017) used a wearable recording device and examined proportions of caregivers’ child-directed speech in L1 and L2 in 5-min interactions. Although both measures were mildly correlated, the number of words directed to the child as observed through the device better predicted the children’s language processing

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efficiency and language skills, suggesting that relying solely on parental estimates may not be entirely reliable. When it comes to the quality of inputs and social interaction, little attempt has been made to capture it systematically or directly. Pierce et al. (2017) reviewed studies concerning the development of phonological working memory and compared groups of children who had delayed exposure to a language with or without prior experience with another language. In other words, they compared deaf children, who received a cochlear implant and thus experienced delayed oral language exposure, and internationally adopted children, who had delayed exposure to the language of their adopted environment. Pierce and her colleagues found that both the quantity and quality of linguistic input as well as the timing of the input influence phonological working memory and later language development. In essence, input and social interaction, both in terms of the quality and quantity of the input and interaction, have been found to be the key elements for young children’s cognition and language. Neuroscience research also indicates that engaging in social activities also led to increased attention and memory load in one’s brain, which in turn relates to language development (Kuhl 2010). Accurately capturing the quality of social interaction is a challenge for researchers, however.

Future Research Directions After reviewing research concerning the relationship between language and cognitive development, Deák (2014) stated that the “available evidence does not permit any uniform, simplistic conclusions” (p. 290) except for one: that language learning is more likely part of general cognitive processing rather than a specialized faculty (as asserted by Chomskyan approaches). When it comes to children who are exposed to more than one language, the picture is even more obscure. Therefore, this final section proposes three goals for future research: (a) a better understanding of interrelational and developmental mechanisms; (b) more focus on the role of instruction and interaction; and (c) greater attention to variability across and within individuals.

Gaining a Better Understanding of Interrelational and Developmental Mechanisms Much of the research focusing on YLLs has examined either the effect of bilingualism on cognition or correlations among various variables, but little is understood about the dynamic interrelationships between language and cognitive development over time and the causal mechanisms of such relations. If bilinguals indeed have any cognitive advantages, we need to better understand the underlying mechanisms for such advantages, which cognitive domains are affected, and when in the development process they are affected in relation to their bilingual development. Studies have often compared cognitive abilities between monolingual and bilingual children

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(namely, the effect of bilingualism on cognition), but the effect of cognition on bilingual language development has received scant attention. Bidirectional relationships should be better understood. Longitudinal research on EFs and ToM is very limited (Devine and Hughes 2014); as a result, the developmental trajectory of cognition in relation to bilingual development is not well understood. More research on cross-linguistic influences on cognition among bilinguals with various L1–L2 combinations would be beneficial as well. Multiple mechanisms of learning (e.g., implicit and explicit learning), in interaction with external factors, appear to be responsible for language and cognitive development, and researchers have just begun to reveal the complex nature of such mechanisms. For example, a topical issue in language and cognitive development is statistical learning – one’s sensitivity to probabilistic structures in input – which is often considered to be an example of implicit learning. (It is important to note, however, that the relationship between statistical learning and implicit learning is not totally clear; see Erickson and Thiessen 2015 for a detailed discussion.) Although statistical learning certainly plays a critical role in learning, researchers also accept that it does not sufficiently explain the process of learning. Due to a lack of a clear understanding of the mechanism of statistical learning, the scope of the statistical learning remains unclear, especially in relation to other plausible learning, such as hypothesis-testing, rule-based learning, and perception-based learning (Romberg and Saffran 2010). The relationship between statistical learning and age is also inconclusive (Raviv and Arnon 2018). Various other analytical approaches that have been proposed and implemented can be promising pathways for uncovering the complex mechanisms of language and cognitive development. Such approaches include social-network analysis (Butler and Liu 2019), Bayesian approaches (Gopnik and Bonawitz 2015; Pearl and Goldwater 2016), and other sophisticated statistical modeling techniques that allow researchers to deal with nonlinearity and individuality as well as systematicity (e.g., generalized additive mixed models in Murakami 2016). In addition to qualitative methods (e.g., diary studies, observations, etc.), combining qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed methods research) is also increasingly popular.

Focusing on the Role of Instruction and Social Interaction Research concerning the effect of bilingualism on cognition has predominantly focused on very young children (i.e., children up to 2 years of age) or adults. The target group tends to be simultaneous bilinguals. More research is needed on older children who are exposed to one or more additional languages sometime later in life (not from birth) and on children who learn one or more additional languages in various instructional settings. Expanding the target groups and contexts would potentially have important pedagogical and theoretical implications because the number of early sequential bilinguals in instructional settings is rapidly growing worldwide. As discussed already, both quantity and quality of linguistic input as well as the timing of this input are of critical importance in understanding the linguistic and

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cognitive development of any children. This is especially the case for sequential bilingual children because there is so much variability in those inputs for this subset of children. The roles of social interaction cannot be overstated. Researchers accept that verbal communication is essentially a social activity. Studies in early language development pay close attention to the role of social interactions – such as caregivers’ gaze, gestures, and emotions – and examine how infants develop the ability to infer others’ intentions (which is considered to be related to ToM) and to learn from observing and imitating others’ behaviors and emotions (Verga and Kotz 2013). Thanks to recent advancements in neuroimaging techniques, researchers can examine two people’s brain activities simultaneously, and they have observed that neuroactivities in a region for inhibition and control (right inferior frontal gyrus) between two interacting people are synchronized (e.g., Saito et al. 2010). It would be fruitful to have similar research concerning the roles of social interaction, both at micro-levels of influence (e.g., eye gaze in interaction) and macro-levels of influence (e.g., different instructional programs), among sequential bilingual children in instructional settings. Similarly, developmental researchers increasingly treat emotion and cognition as integrated and bidirectional in children’s development (Calkins and Bell 2010); more research directly looking into the role of emotion in children’s cognitive and language development is called for. It is important to note that emotion is also an interpersonal mechanism, rather than an individual property, and is primarily transmitted through language (Oatley et al. 2011). Considering such complex interrelationships among cognition, language, and emotion, these research areas are in need of far more methodological innovation and creativity.

Paying Greater Attention to Variability Across and Within Individuals Although bilingual children are extremely heterogeneous, there is limited research focusing on individual differences in their language and cognitive development except in the domain of vocabulary development. In studies on individual differences in vocabulary development among bilinguals, the roles of cognition (mostly nonverbal intelligence as measured by a standardized test) in the acquisition of vocabulary knowledge were examined, along with other individual variables such as gender, birth order, parental linguistic input, motivation, and SES (e.g., Paradis 2011; Sun et al. 2018). In other studies, these individual factors were controlled for in order to see the effect of bilingualism (see Butler 2019, which includes a review of such studies). However, these studies tend to treat individual variables (including cognition) as somewhat stable and to focus only on systematicity. Individual differences (variability across individuals, or interindividual variability) in the process of language acquisition have not been well investigated. In addition to interindividual variability, the importance of understanding variability within an individual (intraindividual variability) has been proposed in developmental studies (Alibali and Sidney 2015). Children’s linguistic and cognitive task performance can substantially vary within the same individual over time, across

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different tasks at a given point in development, or even within a single task at a given point in time. Longitudinal studies, although very limited in number, have begun to capture the first type of intraindividual variability (variability across time) among bilingual children (e.g., David and Wei 2008). However, the latter two types are rarely captured systematically in bilingual research, despite the fact that L1 developmental research has often documented that children may use both a target form (e.g., “went”) and a nontarget form (e.g., “goed”) simultaneously within a single task (Butler 2017). Such intraindividual variability can shed new light on mechanisms of language and cognitive development. In complex dynamic systems theory, for example, variability, which is seen as a state of instability, signals a transition from one system to another, and thus is an indication of a structural change in one’s knowledge, namely “learning” (Lewis 2000).

Conclusions This chapter reviews some of the major issues concerning the interrelationship between cognitive and language development, focusing on young children who learn more than one language. Uncovering such interrelations is challenging because multiple individual and environmental factors are responsible for the mutual development of cognition and language, and the precise mechanism of such interrelationships and its changes over time are not yet fully understood. Child development studies, however, are at an exciting moment. As described in this chapter, new research activities have emerged along with the ongoing advancement of neuroscientific tools and the penetration of various types of digital technologies into children’s lives. As the field increasingly acknowledges that language is social in nature and that language and cognition (as well as emotion) are interrelated and develop while interacting with environment, various analytical approaches, both quantitative and qualitative methods, have been proposed and implemented. Although bilingual research and research on second language acquisition among YLLs have not yet fully utilized all of the newer analytical approaches mentioned in this chapter, incorporating various analytical tools would help researchers untangle some of the complexities in cognition and bilingual and early L2 development. Empirical research concerning the relationship between cognitive and duallanguage development among early sequential bilinguals remains limited. However, considering that more enriching environments are likely to have positive effects on children’s cognition earlier in their lives, it is safe to assume that providing children with bilingual or multilingual input would be beneficial for them. Research on this topic indicates the importance of social interaction in children’s language and cognitive development. As discussed, having children watch digital videos alone appears to be of little value. For educators and parents eager to use interaction to maximize children’s potential in their cognitive and language development, the role of social interaction remains an important research topic. Considering that the

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number of children who are developing dual or multiple languages sequentially is ever increasing, research focusing on this group should have profound implications for practice.

Cross-References ▶ A Critical Overview of Research Methods Used in Studies on Early Foreign Language Education in Preschools ▶ Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education ▶ Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psycholinguistic Base of Bilingual Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psycholinguistic Base of Vocabulary Education in Bilingual Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Bilingual Programs and Children’s Breadth of Vocabulary Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Bilingual Programs and Children’s Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instructional Principles and Strategies in Early Bilingual Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Building lexical knowledge is one of the most fundamental developments in early childhood; as such development is associated with children’s later academic achievement and other language abilities. Both breadth (e.g., receptive vocabulary size) and depth (e.g., syntagmatic and paradigmatic knowledge) of lexical knowledge are vital, as the former indicates how much children know and the latter indicates how well they know it. Therefore, it would be crucial for any language program to provide qualified teaching for preschoolers to develop their lexical knowledge. The current review has synthesized findings published in H. Sun (*) National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] B. Yin School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_3

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recent years on preschoolers’ lexical development in early bilingual education programs, to explore the theoretical frameworks (e.g., the thresholds theory) and the effectiveness of these programs in improving bilingual children’s lexical breadth and depth in both first and second languages. Instructional strategies, such as shared book reading and multimodality, which have been proved to be effective in vocabulary teaching across various types of bilingual language programs, have been summarized. At the end of the chapter, future research directions of vocabulary development in early language programs have been proposed. Keywords

Vocabulary breadth · Vocabulary depth · Early language education · Strategies of vocabulary instruction · Early bilingualism

Introduction Vocabulary development is considered to reflect children’s overall language status at the early stages of language development. It predicts children’s morphosyntactic development (Bates et al. 1988) and is strongly correlated with their cognitive development and future academic performance (Sénéchal et al. 2006). Taking children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge as an example, kindergarteners’ receptive vocabulary size has been found to predict children’s vocabulary performance and reading ability through fourth grade (Storch and Whitehurst 2002). For monolingual children, those with a delay in vocabulary development at age 2 were found to be at risk of having weaker morphological and syntactic knowledge and literacyrelated skills (Lee 2011). Bilingual children, who could be broadly defined as those develop and receive education in two languages (Baker 2001), have demonstrated the same trend, as their vocabulary size also predicts their later grammatical abilities (Parra et al. 2011). Compared to monolingual children, vocabulary plays an even more important role for bilingual learners as it has been revealed to be a stronger predictor of growth in reading comprehension for L2 learners (Lervåg and Aukrust 2010). It is perceived as the “single most encountered obstacle” for ESL (English as a Second Language) learners to read and learn from texts at school by Jiménez (1994, p. 103), as bilingual children usually have a smaller English vocabulary than their monolingual peers (Carlo et al. 2004). To properly address vocabulary development in early years requires an explicit definition of vocabulary knowledge. According to Chapelle’s multidimensional model (Chapelle 1998), vocabulary knowledge entails four aspects, including receptive and productive vocabulary sizes (i.e., the number of words that a speaker could comprehend and produce), knowledge of word characteristics (e.g., semantic features and collocations), lexical organization (e.g., part-whole relationship), and lexical access (i.e., the speed to access a lexical item) (see also Nagy and Scott 2000; Nation 2001). Vocabulary size, knowledge of word characteristics, and

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lexical organization are related to the distinction of the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge (Wesche and Paribakht 1996). Breadth refers to the quantity of the receptive or productive words a learner may know (i.e., the number of words) and is commonly measured with standardized tests such as Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn and Dunn 2007) or Expressive One Word Productive Vocabulary (Brownell 2010). Depth, on the other hand, refers to the qualitative aspects of vocabulary knowledge and could be assessed with word definition (Verhallen and Schoonen 1993) and word association tasks (Vermeer 2001). There are two fundamental semantic relations between units of meaning: paradigmatic and syntagmatic knowledge (Cruse 1986; Schwartz 2014; Sun et al. 2018a). Paradigmatic knowledge is about semantically hierarchical relations, such as superordination and subordination. For instance, the superordinate category “fruit” includes the (lower) subordinate categories such as pear, apple, orange, and so on. Paradigmatic knowledge is associated with children’s development in conceptualization, categorization, classification, and decontextualization of word concept and is heavily influenced by their academic experience (Ordóñez et al. 2002). Syntagmatic knowledge entails horizontal relations and reflects children’s vocabulary richness, indicating their knowledge on objects’ distinctive attributes like appearance, location, or functions (Schwartz and Katzir 2012). To date, most studies on early vocabulary development are about children’s vocabulary breadth but not depth (Schwartz and Katzir 2012). The limited number of studies that assessed both aspects of vocabulary knowledge demonstrated that early language programs at school might influence both children’s vocabulary breadth and depth (e.g., Schwartz and Katzir 2012). Between 3 and 5 years old of age, children experience rapid and intensive vocabulary development, acquiring about 200 words every month (King 2011). In the past decade, increasingly more studies have been conducted to understand the vocabulary development of bilingual preschoolers in their L1 and L2 in the home setting (e.g., Sun et al. 2018b). Much less has been done to explore children’s vocabulary development in relation to bilingual programs at preschools (Rolstad et al. 2005; Schwartz 2014; Sun et al. 2020a). Such exploration is considered crucial and necessary because of the central status of vocabulary in the overall language and literacy development. More importantly, bilingual education is found to be one of the main methods to maintain and revitalize children’s minority language (usually their first language, L1) and to acquire the majority language (usually children’s second language, L2) (Schwartz et al. 2012). Therefore, it is important for various stakeholders (e.g., language-minority parents, educators, and policymakers) to be well informed about what factors in the early language environment that would promote or hamper children’s vocabulary development in two languages (Schwartz 2014). The current chapter aims to synthesize existing literature on the breadth and depth of early vocabulary development in bilingual and monolingual programs, mainly at the preschool phase. The major theories of the bilingual programs are reviewed, children’s vocabulary outcome of bilingual and monolingual programs is compared, specific vocabulary teaching approaches and effects are summarized, and future directions are outlined at the end of the chapter.

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Main Theoretical Concepts Psycholinguistic Base of Bilingual Education One of the early models on bilingual knowledge representation was the Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) model (Cummins 1980). According to this model, the two languages of a bilingual person share an underlying system (Central Operating System) that is manifested on the surface as having different features for the two languages. This is in contrast to the Separate Underlying Proficiency model, which postulates that the two languages of a bilingual are stored and operate separately from each other (Cummins 1980). Evidence for the Common Underlying Proficiency model comes from bilingual lexical processing studies showing that bilinguals are unable to suppress the language that is not in use (Starreveld et al. 2014). For instance, a Dutch-French bilingual operating in Dutch cannot suppress the activation of the French word “oui” (meaning yes) when encountering the crosslinguistic homophonic Dutch word “wie” (meaning we) in real-time processing (Van Wijnendaele and Brysbaert 2002). Neurolinguistic studies (Hoshino and Thierry 2011) and studies on listening and speaking (De Groot 2011) came to the same conclusions. Nevertheless, it has also been pointed out that current evidence for the CUP model is largely correlational, and positive transfer effects are subject to alternative interpretations such as common language learning environments for the two languages, rather than a shared underlying proficiency per se (Goodrich and Lonigan 2017). Related to the CUP model was the interdependence hypothesis, which allows for positive transfer between the two languages of a bilingual “to the extent that instruction in Lx is effective in promoting proficiency in Lx, transfer of this proficiency to Ly will occur provided there is adequate exposure to Ly” (Cummins 2000, p. 38). This implies that gains in the first language can result in gains in the second. In a review study, August and Shanahan (2006) found evidence supporting significant relationships between bilinguals’ literacy competency in the two languages, including word reading, cognate vocabulary, reading comprehension, spelling, and writing. This interdependence between the two languages of a bilingual therefore constitutes the foundation for bilingual education programs (Cummins 2000). If students would like to benefit from bilingualism in their cognitive and academic development, certain thresholds of proficiencies must be reached. Researchers have referred to two thresholds in proficiency attainment (Cummins 1979). While attaining the lower thresholds for both languages will prevent any emergence of negative consequences of bilingualism (such as being unable to function in the classroom in either language (Baker 2001), it is important to reach the higher level of proficiency thresholds in order to obtain long-term benefits of bilingualism in academic performance and cognitive development. For instance, in relation to the French immersion programs in Canada, it is noted that there is usually a temporary lag at the beginning of the immersion program, compared with students in monolingual programs. Once proficiency in French has been developed enough to

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cope with curriculum material, the lag disappears, and positive cognitive advantages ensue (Cummins 2000). One criticism of the threshold hypothesis outlined above is the lack of precise definitions of the lower and higher thresholds (Baker 2001). A possible way to address this issue is through the dichotomy of BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) and CALP (cognitive/academic language proficiency, Cummins 1984). Specifically, BICS refers to language use in context-embedded situations where nonverbal support exists to assist in understanding. On the other hand, CALP occurs in context-reduced situations that require the discussion of topics removed from the “here and now,” typical for academic language in school settings. BICS, which could be thought of as the lower threshold for bilingualism, typically takes a shorter amount of time to attain than CALP does (Cummins 1979).

Psycholinguistic Base of Vocabulary Education in Bilingual Programs As mentioned above, the interdependence hypothesis is the base for bilingual education, such as for lexical learning. Lexicon refers to “the aspect of a language, or of a linguist’ account of a language, that is centered on individual words or similar units” (Matthews 2007). In this chapter, we use the term “lexicon” interchangeably with “vocabulary.” Early bilingual learners may use the conceptual knowledge gained through L1 to facilitate the learning of L2 lexical items. It has been found that this bilingual model of instruction is more effective than L2-only instructions of vocabulary (Leseman 2000; Schwartz 2014). Lugo-Neris et al. (2010) found that providing vocabulary definitions in the L1 of the bilingual learners led to more effective L2 expressive lexical learning than L2-only instructions, particularly for beginning learners, as consistent with the scaffolding and mediation strategies elaborated in Bruner (1986). Farver’s, Lonigan’s, and Eppe’s (Farver et al. 2009) study involving the Head Start program (a United States program that promotes school readiness of children up to age 5 who come from low-income families; Administration for Children and Families 2007) likewise showed that preschoolers in the bilingual instruction condition outperformed those in the English-only condition in terms of gains in expressive English vocabulary as well as in Spanish outcome measures. Even though most research shows young bilinguals’ L2 vocabulary to be inferior to that of their monolingual peers (e.g., Bialystok et al. 2010), the reverse can also happen, as indicated in Farver et al. (2009). Most likely, this is because a foundation of strong L1 lexical knowledge helps promote L2 development, particularly in paradigmatic knowledge (e.g., Schwartz 2014). This bilingual advantage can be seen as providing support for the “strong forms” of bilingual education where children are educated in their ethnic language rather than the socially dominant language (Baker 2001). The position that at least at the beginning, acquisition of L2 vocabulary takes place through L1 is also supported by the word association model (e.g., De Groot and Hoeks 1995). According to this model, L2 does not have direct access to the conceptual system, but rather must be mediated through the L1. Further along in the

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developmental process, bilingual learners are expected to form direct links between the conceptual layer and their L2 leading to independence of the two languages, known as the concept mediation model (Kroll and Stewart 1994). Figures 1 and 2 (adapted from Kroll and Stewart 1994) illustrate the association and mediation models, respectively. The transition from the word association model to the concept mediation model might depend on the strength of the relationship between the two languages of a bilingual in terms of proficiency and dominance. This may take place after more than 2 years of learning the L2 when the bilingual becomes more balanced in his/her two languages in terms of the breadth/depth of their lexical knowledge. Moreover, it has often been observed that bilingual learners’ vocabularies in each of their languages are usually below age-appropriate norms for monolingual Fig. 1 Word association

Fig. 2 Concept mediation

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preschoolers. However, when their lexicons in both languages are considered, the bilingual and monolingual populations are more comparable (Hoff and McKay 2005). This phenomenon has been described in terms of the distributed characteristic (Oller 2005) or the Complementarity Principle (Grosjean 2008) of bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge. This happens because bilingual children acquire languagespecific vocabulary items in a context-specific manner. For example, they might learn home-related words in their home language and school-related lexical items in the school language. Bialystok et al. (2010) examined this distributed characteristic of bilingual lexicons of 966 bilingual children living in Canada who spoke English and a nonEnglish language. The children ranged in age from 3 to 10 years old and were from 34 language backgrounds. It was found that the bilinguals scored significantly below monolinguals in receptive vocabulary measures in both languages. However, once items were analyzed separately according to the domains of learning (home versus school), the gaps between the two groups narrowed. Home-related items included words for food and household items (e.g., squash, camcorder, and pitcher) and culture-specific items (e.g., canoe, camper), whereas school-related items included words for professions (e.g., astronaut), animals/plants (e.g., raccoon), shapes (e.g., rectangle), and other categories. Given this, the relatively smaller vocabulary size of bilinguals in each of their languages should not be seen as a disadvantage, but rather a reality of bilingualism that needs to be taken into account in education and research settings (Bialystok et al. 2010). In addition, research by Pearson et al. (1995) shows that bilingual children, particularly those with more or less balanced proficiencies in their two languages do store translation equivalents in their vocabularies. Therefore, the distribution of lexical items for bilinguals would also seem to be influenced by learners’ relative proficiencies in their two languages. To sum up, results from psycholinguistic studies support the teaching of L2 vocabulary via L1 (at least at the beginning stage) and argue for a differential treatment of bilingual versus monolingual vocabulary knowledge in assessment.

Major Contributions Many bilingual language programs start in kindergarten, when children begin to receive formal education at the age of 3–6. However, the evaluations of the programs usually focus on the language and academic outcomes of students at primary school onwards (Bergstrӧm et al. 2016). Out of the few program evaluations that focused on bilingual preschoolers’ achievements, most examined the effectiveness of early bilingual language programs by comparing the developmental rate and route of (1) bilingual language learners with their monolingual peers or (2) bilingual language learners in bilingual programs versus those in monolingual programs. In the current chapter, preschool is used as a general term to refer to any institution providing early childhood care and education services. Most studies took children’s vocabulary performance as one of the most important indicators of the effectiveness of the bilingual programs. Different types of bilingual programs have been

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investigated, including transitional programs and two-way immersion. The fundamental conclusion is that early bilingual programs promote rather than hamper children’s vocabulary development in societal dominant languages. Moreover, bilingual programs help children maintain their heritage language, enabling them to be balanced bilinguals (Cobo-Lewis et al. 2002; Barnett et al. 2007; Schwartz et al. 2012). A strong minority language capability has been found to facilitate the acquisition of the socially dominant language at preschool (Barnett et al. 2007; Espinosa 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014) and at primary school (Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010), suggesting the importance of minority language or bilingual language instruction at preschools (Lindholm-Leary 2018). The advantage of early bilingual language programs may not be demonstrated immediately when one compares bilingual learners with their monolingual speaking counterparts. Lindholm-Leary and colleagues in their large-scale review studies in the USA on ESL learners have explicitly pointed out that children in SpanishEnglish bilingual language programs were found to score below grade level and perform worse than or similar to their monolingual peers in the early years of the programs (grades K-3) (Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010; also see Bergstrӧm et al. 2016; Steinlen et al. 2010). Nevertheless, they would catch up with and even outperform their monolingual peers in later years. This is most evident in bilingual learners who stay in the bilingual language programs for 5 or 6 years and is apparent by the end of primary school, at least in receptive language skills in English as ESL (Oller et al. 2007; Rhys and Thomas 2013). Higher levels of bilingual proficiency have been related to better academic and cognitive performances (Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2008). To place bilinguals in monolingual classroom instruction too early may lead to subtractive bilingualism, where children’s development of the L2 (mostly the mainstream societal language) would probably be at the expense of the acquisition of children’s L1 (e.g., the immigrants’ heritage language; Baker 2001). Eventually, the early monolingual programs in the societal language may hinder both children’s L1 and L2 development (Akoğlu and Yağmur 2016; Leseman 2000). Leseman (2000) compared Turkish preschooler’s Dutch vocabulary with that of their Dutch peers in the all-Dutch programs and found that the former’s vocabulary development was significantly behind their Dutch counterparts between 3 and 4 years old over repetitive testing. Turkish children’s receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of Dutch indeed increased over time. Nevertheless, the differences with their Dutch peers were still as big as three to four standard deviations by age 4. Akoğlu and Yağmur (2016) compared bilingual Turkish immigrant children in the Netherlands and monolingual Turkish speakers in Turkey in their Turkish language proficiency. They found that Turkish immigrant children who were placed in the all-Dutch programs lagged behind their peers in Turkey in their first language cognitive concepts, lexical, syntactic, and textual skills. The two findings revealed the potential negative influence of early placement of bilingual children in monolingual language programs. The advantages of bilingual education at early grade levels may show up earlier if one compares emergent bilinguals in bilingual programs with those in monolingual

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programs. A number of studies demonstrate that preschool bilingual learners in the bilingual programs outperformed their counterparts in the English-only programs (Barnett et al. 2007; Lindholm-Leary 2014). For instance, Barnett et al. (2007) found that Spanish-speaking preschool children from disadvantaged homes in the USA would benefit from a 50:50 two-way English-Spanish program, compared to those in English-only programs. In that program, students alternated between Englishmedium and Spanish-medium instruction on a weekly basis. They obtained a larger receptive vocabulary size in Spanish and better performance in English (L2) and Spanish (L1) phonological awareness. In other words, better L1 receptive vocabulary development has not hindered the development of their English receptive vocabulary. Children from the two types of programs performed similarly in literacy tests (e.g., alphabet recognition) at the age of 3–4 years old in kindergarten. Another classic example came from the “Miami study” in which researchers traced children’s language development in two-way education programs (in Spanish and English) and English-only programs longitudinally in the USA (Cobo-Lewis et al. 2002). The results demonstrated that those in the two-way education programs outperformed their peers in the English-only program in various Spanish language tests, such as letter-word knowledge, receptive vocabulary, and passage comprehension. The Spanish language scores on most tests were similar at kindergarten for children from the two types of programs; nevertheless, the advantage of the children in the two-way programs is substantial at second and fifth grades compared with their peers in English-only programs. In Lindholm-Leary’s study (2014), children in the bilingual program (i.e., half or more of the instructional time in Spanish, and 20–50% of the time in English) were found to start out lower in English than their bilingual counterparts in English-only programs but higher in Spanish. The bilingual children in the English-only programs started to show deteriorating Spanish along the way. In the second grade, half of these children were identified with limited Spanish, and a third was considered to have no Spanish proficiency. Continued bilingual programs since preschool would be essential to maintain children’s Spanish language development. Placing them in English-only programs at a young age may result in heritage language attrition. To sum up, it is beneficial for children to attend bilingual programs from an early age and develop their age-appropriate English and primary language.

Early Bilingual Programs and Children’s Breadth of Vocabulary Knowledge Most studies on the effectiveness of early bilingual education have assessed children’s breadth of vocabulary knowledge and taken it as an important aspect of children’s achievement. As mentioned above, the general findings support bilingual education for 3- and 4-year-old language-minority children, as children’s progress in their L1/heritage/minority language would not hinder the development of their receptive vocabulary in the socially dominant language (Barnett et al. 2007; Bergstrӧm et al. 2016; Schwartz et al. 2012). Compared to their peers in monolingual

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programs, bilingual program children’s English receptive vocabulary has been found to significantly improve cross-sectionally and longitudinally (Bergstrӧm et al. 2016). Researchers also focused on the effectiveness of using specific language in bilingual education. Durán et al. (2010) randomly assigned 31 Spanish-speaking (L1) preschoolers (age 38–48 months) to either English (L2) or Spanish class and found that Spanish language instruction would enhance English language learners’ Spanish productive and receptive vocabulary without adversely affecting their English language learning. This implies that transitional bilingual education, which refers to the language programs where children are taught to read primarily or completely in their native language through the primary grades and are then transited to majority language reading instruction between second grade and third grade (“early-exit” models), or after elementary school (“late-exist” model), may be a viable candidate to replace traditional English-only programs. Collins (2014) followed 163 Latino Spanish-English language learners from kindergarten to second grade in Spanish-English programs, English instruction with support programs, and English-only programs. The Spanish-English program refers to classes where instruction was provided in both English and Spanish, while English instruction with support program refers to the classes “where all instruction was in English but included accommodations such as English as a Second Language (ESL) services, scaffolding of content, and materials specifically designed for English language learners” (p. 392). The researcher found children in the dual language program made substantial progress in both languages, reaching ageappropriate levels of proficiencies, whereas those in the English-only/English instruction with support programs only achieved significant growth in English but not in Spanish.

Early Bilingual Programs and Children’s Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge The effectiveness of early bilingual language education on children’s vocabulary depth is underresearched. Very few studies have adopted a multidimensional approach to address both children’s vocabulary breadth and depth (but see Schwartz 2014; Sun et al. 2018a). Schwartz et al. (2012) explored both aspects in their cross-sectional and longitudinal studies by comparing Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge in Hebrew monolingual school and Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschools. The results revealed that the bilingual program promoted both children’s vocabulary depth and vocabulary breadth in Russian (L1). Specifically, the bilingual children from the Hebrew monolingual preschools have shown little progress in their paradigmatic semantic knowledge in Russian over one academic year at preschool, implying that such knowledge may mainly be obtained by children from direct and structured language teaching at school (Snow 1990) and that children’s colloquial lexical knowledge may not be able to transform automatically into children’s academic language (Proctor et al. 2009). It indirectly demonstrated the importance of early bilingual education in maintaining children’s vocabulary depth of heritage language. Besides,

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as paradigmatic knowledge develops relatively late, at around 6–7 years old, exposing children to an L2 monolingual environment at an early age may slow down their development in their heritage language (Leseman 2000). In a follow-up study, Schwartz (2014) further revealed that the differences in the depth of children’s Russian (L1) vocabulary knowledge (i.e., paradigmatic and syntagmatic knowledge) between children in monolingual programs and bilingual programs could be as large as 12 times, regardless of their sociocultural and family background. In the Hebrew-only context, the Russian-speaking children’s Russian vocabulary knowledge seems fossilized, with the risk of losing their heritage language (Schwartz 2014). In contrast, the bilingual educational context creates opportunities for children to practice their syntagmatic vocabulary in both Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2), probably due to the positive atmosphere for communication and language development (Rom et al. 2003).

Instructional Principles and Strategies in Early Bilingual Programs The premise of successful implementation of the instructional principles and strategies in vocabulary instruction within early language education is to act in accordance with the characteristics (e.g., prior knowledge, age) of the young bilingual language learners. In the following section, the pedagogical principles and teachers’ strategies based on these major characteristics are synthesized. We see principles as overarching propositions and strategies as concrete classroom teaching acts informed by such propositions in service of effective instruction. Instructional principles can be defined as the fundamental proposition that that underlies effective teaching and learning in class. These main instructional principles will be addressed below: the priority of conceptual knowledge introduction, developmentally appropriate instruction, individualized pedagogy, and teaching words based on the hierarchical structure. The first principle is that teachers should prioritize the establishment of conceptual knowledge in children. In the preschool phase, bilingual children are developing their dual languages intensively and have relatively less developed vocabulary knowledge in both languages. Therefore, the emphasis of instruction should not be on children’s less developed language only. Instead, teachers should help children establish conceptual ideas in general, regardless of the language through which the concepts are acquired (Hindman and Wasik 2015). Another principle is to apply the right strategy based on children’s chronological age. Teachers should not assume that emergent bilinguals are blank slates when they start to learn the second language. Otherwise, they may adopt “motherese” as in infant-directed speech, paying more attention to increasing speech intelligibility and stretching acoustic cues. An emphasis on L2 word pronunciation and repetition may result in the overlooking of children’s individual differences in phonological awareness, which would help children acquire L2 vocabulary. The “motherese” talk in this case may therefore hinder children’s fast mapping of novel words to concepts through interaction with caregivers. (Nicolay and Poncelet 2013).

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The third principle is to implement strategies based on individual needs (e.g., ▶ Chap. 12, “Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland,” by Hickey, this volume). Substantial individual differences have been found in children’s “strong language proficiency” (Sun et al. 2018a). For instance, Lindholm-Leary (2014) found in her study that a quarter of the young Spanish children enter preschool with proficient Spanish; less than half with limited Spanish proficiency; and approximately one third with little Spanish proficiency based on the assessment of children’s sound/phrase recognition, sound/phrase reproduction, vocabulary, comprehension, and story retelling. The large individual difference in language proficiency suggests that bilingual preschoolers should not be taken as a homogeneous group, even when they come from the same ethnic background and have similar social economic statuses. When designing the curriculum, teachers should keep these individual differences in mind and match the strategies they are going to use with children’s language proficiency (e.g., questions with different cognitive loads; Sun et al. 2020b). The last principle is that bilingual vocabulary instruction in early language programs might follow a hierarchy. For instance, based on the three-tier vocabulary model proposed by Beck et al. (2002), vocabulary could be generally divided into three levels. Tier One words convey common concepts that are often expressed at home (e.g., door). Tier Two words are high-frequency vocabulary with academic orientation (e.g., measure). Tier Three words are low-frequency domain specific vocabulary (e.g., economy). Before their language education at preschool, bilingual children may have already acquired Tier One words in their L1/home language, and what they lack are the equivalents for these words in their L2/less developed language (Lin and Johnson 2014). Instructional principles. Teachers’ strategies refer to patterns of acts that serve to ensure students’ effective learning and engagement, and the attainment of defined instructional objectives. Against the backdrop of the essential principles, a series of strategies have proved useful in promoting emergent bilinguals’ vocabulary acquisition. The main strategies will be addressed below: bilingual modalities, shared book reading, multimodal strategies, proper definition, repeated exposures, and cultural relevant content. Bilingual modality. Studies have demonstrated that bilingual modality would promote typical bilingual preschoolers’ L2 vocabulary learning by presenting the word in children’s first/dominant language and then followed by L2 shared book reading, where an adult reads and discusses a book in the L2 with young children to help them develop emergent language and literacy skills (Farver et al. 2009). Such a bilingual modality approach is especially helpful at the beginning of the school year (August and Shanahan 2006; Durán et al. 2010; Hindman and Wasik 2015; Lugo-Neris et al. 2010). For instance, Farver et al. (2009) reported that Head Start preschoolers who learned vocabulary in the Spanish-then-English bilingual modality performed better than their counterparts in the English-only group in their productive English vocabulary. The same children also demonstrated gains in Spanish language outcomes, indicating that the bilingual modality may facilitate children’s dual language acquisition. Méndez et al. (2015) supported this finding and

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demonstrated in their study that strategically using both L1 and L2 as languages of instruction would better promote children’s L2, in this case, English. These results suggest that the concern that instruction in children’s dominant language may delay children’s acquisition of their L2 is invalid, as no theoretical model or empirical evidence suggests interference effects (Barnett et al. 2007; Durán et al. 2010; Restrepo et al. 2013). Shared book reading. It has been widely used in early language education and is considered one of the most effective approaches to help preschoolers build vocabulary (De Temple and Snow 2003; Sun et al. 2019; Sun 2019). In the bilingual setting, the employment of dual language books (Sneddon 2008) and the presence of books in children’s L1 in the classroom (Ernst-Slavit and Mulhern 2003) have been found to be effective language-teaching strategies in particular. The target words are embedded in the story and the contextualization enables children to better understand the word meaning (Sun et al. 2020b). Teachers are suggested to actively engage children in defining, discussing, analyzing, repeating, and spelling new words, helping children connect new concepts with what they have learned, and reinforcing the word meaning with various approaches (Silverman 2007). Multimodal strategies. This strategy has been found to promote both monolingual and dual language learning (DLL) preschoolers’ vocabulary (Moats 2001), particularly in the bilingual context as DLL speakers tend to use more gestures in their L2 speech (Hadar et al. 2001). Teachers may employ various modalities, such as visual aids, props, drawings, multimedia, and body language, to present the target word meaning in various contexts and help children establish a novel word association with additional semantic contexts (Silverman 2007; Silverman et al. 2013). Proper definition. Child-friendly definitions may also enhance both monolingual and DLL children’s vocabulary learning. Such brief definitions (e.g., “gardeners are people who work in gardens and make them pretty,” Lugo-Neris et al. 2010, p. 318) would facilitate novel word acquisition as they offer children insights about how the word is used in daily situations (Beck et al. 2002). Teachers may borrow children’s familiar context to explain the new context and help them relate the novel meaning to their own experience. Repeated exposures. This strategy is considered necessary to teach DLL children new vocabulary (Lugo-Neris et al. 2010). By experiencing the same word in a different context, children may establish a deep memory trace about the word concept (Gutiérrez-Clellen et al. 2013). In some shared book reading studies, preschool DLLs were not able to acquire a new word until they are exposed to the same word for five or six times (Collins 2010). Culturally relevant content. The last strategy refers to the presentation of the novel words related to children’s L1 culture via books and pedagogical materials. It may activate children’s prior knowledge and facilitate word comprehension and memory (Conrad et al. 2004). Bilingual children have been found to take advantage of their background knowledge to interpret L2 vocabulary when reading culturally familiar stories (Freeman and Freeman 2004). Concerning the effectiveness of the presented strategies, it is important to highlight that these strategies could work independently, but if used in an integrative

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manner (e.g., the combination of using shared book reading, proper definition, and repeated exposure as in Silverman’s study, Silverman 2007), these strategies might demonstrate greater power on vocabulary instruction. The successful employment of multiple strategies relies on “thoughtful sequencing of tasks to intentionally combine new information with what the learner already knows” (Pollard-Durodola et al. 2018, p. 4). For instance, a novel word might be briefly defined in children’s L1 for their better comprehension, and then the teacher could invite children to act out the meaning of the word using their body language, and read aloud the word in L2 following the teacher’s instruction.

New Projects This section presents a summary of studies in the past 5 years on bilingual vocabulary acquisition. Thirteen papers have been identified from the literature and each was further assessed with the following inclusion criteria in mind: (1) the study included preschool-age children; (2) participants were in a bilingual program with appropriate comparison/control groups (e.g., students in a monolingual program); and (3) vocabulary in both languages has been tested as outcome variables and was reported independently. Nine studies were removed from the collection due to having no control groups (i.e., Hindman and Wasik 2015; Sun et al. 2018a), having only English measures (i.e., Nicolay and Poncelet 2013; Pollard-Durodola et al. 2018), or having no separate vocabulary outcomes (i.e., Collins 2014; LindholmLeary 2014). The number of studies thus selected is rather small (n ¼ 7) but is comparable to results of other review studies (e.g., Reljić et al. 2015). Table 1 shows an emerging trend in focusing on the preschool population in bilingual lexical learning. This is important since achievement gaps between children actually begin in preschool years (West et al. 2001), in addition to the vital role early childhood education plays in intergenerational language transmission. Since vocabulary is a strong predictor of literacy achievement, it would be insightful to understand bilingual children’s vocabulary attainment and the factors influencing such outcomes. Second, it seems that studies tend to encompass a wider range of outcome measures, rather than vocabulary measures alone. Therefore, children were also tested for their competencies in grammar, comprehension, word recognition, listening, and reading. The results from the wide range of tests enable a better understanding of the participants’ oral language skills and their literacy abilities, thus providing a better evaluation of bilingual education programs. In some cases, both researcher-developed instruments and standardized tests were employed in measuring vocabulary development (Méndez et al. 2015). As mentioned in the study, this is due to the fact that standardized tests may not capture language growth after a short period of time of instruction. Overall, the findings from the studies in Table 1 show that young learners in bilingual programs outperformed those in monolingual programs in ethnic vocabulary measures (Méndez et al. 2015, 2018; Rhys and Thomas 2013; Schwartz 2014). On the other hand, bilingual learners’ vocabulary performance in the L2 is generally lower than or equal to that of their

Year 2018

2016

2014

2015

Study Méndez et al.

Bergström et al.

Lin and Johnson

Méndez et al.

Instructional context American Latino DLL preschoolers (mean age ¼ 51.8 months); bilingual approach vs. English-only approach; 60 minutes per week, lasting 5 weeks German 2–6 years old kindergarteners; four measurementpoints over 2.5 years; GermanEnglish immersion program vs. conventional English instructional program (30 minutes per week) Mandarin speaking preschoolers in Taiwan in an English immersion program (average age: 60.6 months) or a Chinese program (average age: 63.8 months) American Latino DLL preschoolers (mean age ¼ 51.8 months); bilingual approach vs. English-only approach; a culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) bilingualapproach

Not specific

Not specific

Vocabulary teaching a culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) bilingualapproach

English and Spanish receptive vocabulary (both researcherdeveloped tests and standardized measures

English and Mandarin receptive and expressive vocabulary (PPVT-IIIl; EVT; Chinese PPVT; Chinese EVT)

German productive vocabulary and receptive grammar; English receptive and productive vocabulary; English sentence comprehension

Measures English and Spanish receptive vocabulary (both researcherdeveloped tests and standardized measures

Table 1 Summary of studies on bilingual vocabulary acquisition by early language learners

Bilingual approach children’s Spanish vocabulary > English only approach children’s Spanish vocabulary

Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education (continued)

Bilingual approach children’s English vocabulary > Englishonly approach children’s English vocabulary

English-medium bilingual preschoolers < English monolingual norms

the immersion group > the conventional group in English receptive vocabulary

the immersion group ¼ the conventional in German productive vocabulary

English-medium bilingual preschoolers < Chinese-medium preschoolers

L2 vocabulary Bilingual approach children’s English vocabulary > Englishonly approach children’s English vocabulary

L1 vocabulary Bilingual approach children’s Spanish vocabulary > Englishonly approach children’s Spanish vocabulary

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Year

2014

2014

2013

Study

Schwartz

Smithson et al.

Rhys and Thomas

Table 1 (continued)

60 minutes per week, lasting 5 weeks Russian-Hebrew preschool children in bilingual programs (Russian and Hebrew) vs. monolingual programs (Hebrew) Canadian EnglishFrench bilingual preschoolers (3–5 years old) with French being the medium of instruction. English monolingual preschoolers (48 to 67 months). French monolingual children (39 to 63 months) Welsh-English bilinguals who (1) had Welsh as L1, or (2) simultaneous Welsh-English bilinguals, or (3) had English as L1; aged 7–11 years old

Instructional context

Not Specific

Not Specific

Not Specific

Vocabulary teaching

Welsh receptive vocabulary; English receptive vocabulary; reading comprehension in English and Welsh

English receptive vocabulary (PPVT-IIIA); French receptive vocabulary (EVIP)

Depth of vocabulary in Russian and Hebrew

Measures

For Welsh vocabulary: L1 Welsh bilinguals > L1 English bilinguals; simultaneous bilinguals

Bilingual children’s French vocabulary ¼ monolingual children’s French vocabulary

Bilingual > monolingual in Russian vocabulary depth measures

L1 vocabulary

For English vocabulary: Monolinguals and L1 English bilinguals > simultaneous bilinguals; L1 Welsh bilinguals

Bilingual children’s English vocabulary ¼ monolingual children’s English vocabulary

Bilingual ¼ monolingual in Hebrew vocabulary depth after 2 years of instruction

L2 vocabulary

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monolingual peers (Rhys and Thomas 2013; Schwartz 2014), sometimes even exceeding their monolingual peers (Méndez et al. 2015, 2018). Lastly, for its importance in language competence, it is curious that most studies do not actually include any information on how vocabulary knowledge has been taught in the programs reported in the studies. In Table 1, only Méndez et al. (2015, 2018) provided information on the teaching strategy employed in the programs. Nevertheless, vocabulary teaching is an important part of language instruction and can be done either implicitly or explicitly. It is important that future studies include a description of any vocabulary teaching approaches in the program that they report on. Therefore, these approaches will be overviewed and analyzed in the following subsection.

Critical Issues and Topics In this section, we discuss issues and topics that we identify as critical to bilingual research, based on our review conducted so far in this chapter. These areas then form the basis for discussing important future directions in the next section. Lack of research from non-US contexts. As the foregoing review shows, the majority of studies on vocabulary acquisition by dual language learners took place in the USA, with the focus on preschoolers speaking Spanish at home and learning English at school. A teaching approach that does not adequately support students’ home language at school tends to lead to subtractive bilingualism. There are at least a number of issues related to this current state of affairs. First, it is another example of the overrepresentation of American studies in psychological publications (Arnett 2008). The meta-analysis of Reljić et al. (2015) on the effectiveness of bilingual programs was able to gather only seven European studies that met their criteria of inclusion, in comparison to the abundance of US studies in the existing literature. This goes to show how US studies significantly outnumber studies in other contexts. Second, the bilingualism configuration in US studies, including the statuses of each of the two languages represents only one possibility that may not be true for other contexts, namely, minority-majority language hierarchy. As Smithson et al. (2014) pointed out, Spanish does not have a constitutional status in the USA, which has implications for the sociocultural status of the language in the USA. Things might be different in other bilingual learning situations, for instance, in Canada where both French and English enjoy constitutional status as the official language of the nation. Smithson’s, Paradis’, and Nicoladis’ study (Smithson et al. 2014) in the Canadian context showed that most of their bilingual participants had comparable or higher receptive vocabulary scores than monolingual controls, in a departure from the distributed characteristics hypothesis of bilingual lexical learning. This was explained as an effect of the socioeconomic environment in Canada that is highly conducive to teaching and learning both English and French. In addition, as we note in this review, there is a lack of information on teaching methods in US bilingual programs as reported in existing studies, which makes evaluation and generalization difficult. Lastly, the typological similarity between Spanish and English also restricts

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the generalizability of findings from the USA (for that matter, Canada and European settings) to other contexts. Lack of information about instruction principles and amount of instruction. As mentioned above in the section “New Projects,” most studies do not provide information about the specific vocabulary teaching approaches adopted in their studies. It could very well be that most programs do not include an explicit vocabulary teaching component. However, given the importance of vocabulary in language development (Bates et al. 1988), and the efficacy of explicit vocabulary teaching (Spycher 2009), it is important that bilingual teaching programs have vocabulary components, and studies should accurately report any particular teaching principles/strategies adopted. Having such information will enable a better understanding of the causal effects of teaching and learning. After all, if vocabulary knowledge is measured and analyzed as an outcome variable independently, it would be of interest to know which part of the teaching contributes to vocabulary learning (dependent variable). Such insights will then be able to inform further program development and curriculum design. Currently, there is still a lack of research assessing the impact of different instructional principles/strategies on learning. In addition, the question remains how much instruction in a bilingual program should be conducted in each of the children’s two languages. It has been suggested that 50–80% of the instruction time should be devoted to the nonsocietal language so that the child can maintain an academic level in their ethnic language (LindholmLeary 2018). On the other hand, 20% of instruction in the societal language (e.g., English) is deemed sufficient to maintain oral proficiency in that language. It is interesting to note that a greater amount of instruction through English does not necessarily lead to better proficiencies in that language (Lindholm-Leary 2014). It is never easy to quantify and implement the allocation of instruction time in a dual language program. Many studies do not provide any further quantitative information beyond labeling a program as bilingual or monolingual. Further, the suggested proportion of instruction time again comes from US-based research with English as the majority and Spanish as minority languages. Other language combinations might warrant different proportions for the two languages of the DLL students. Lack of research on children’s vocabulary depth. As mentioned in the section “Major Contributions,” only a few of studies have addressed the vocabulary depth of preschoolers. The acquisition of the vocabulary depth may be influenced by learning contexts and developmental factors (Snow 1990; Schwartz 2014). For example, the finding that paradigmatic semantic knowledge is best acquired in a structured school setting, rather than in home environments (Schwartz et al. 2012), was particularly insightful. However, the pedagogical relevance of such claims will have to await further investigations. Lack of better understanding on the role of SES. In addition, it is important for studies to control for external factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and maternal language use. Family SES has a strong effect on vocabulary outcomes (Golberg et al. 2008; Paradis 2009; Scheele et al. 2010). In monolingual acquisition,

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the role of SES is quite straightforward, namely, the higher the SES status, the larger the vocabulary size of the child. Studies have been able to document vocabulary size differences among children from professional, working class, and low-SES backgrounds from the very beginning of their learning (Hart and Risley 1995). Such differences widened further as children progressed to the next stage of development. In dual language learning situations, the role of SES seems to depend on the language in question. In the US context, SES is generally positively related to vocabulary outcomes in English, the societally dominant language (higher SES children outperforming lower SES children). However, the opposite can be true for Spanish vocabulary measures (Cobo-Lewis et al. 2002). Namely, the lower SES children were found to have outperformed the higher SES children, even though both groups report speaking only Spanish at home. This could be due to the fact that lower SES parents spoke comparatively more Spanish at home because they were only fluent in that language. Maternal language use is another factor whose effect might differ according to language. It was found that for children enrolled in primarily English-speaking programs (e.g., Head Start), mothers’ increase in the use of English or continued use of Spanish over time had no effect on children’s English vocabulary outcomes (Hammer et al. 2009; Mancilla-Martinez and Leseaux 2011). The reason could be that children in such programs already had sufficient exposure to English, and additional input at home had no further effects. On the other hand, maternal language use had a discernible impact on bilingual children’s acquisition of Spanish vocabulary. Specifically, mothers’ increase of English negatively affected children’s Spanish vocabulary acquisition, whereas the continued use of Spanish at home contributed to children’s faster vocabulary growth in Spanish (Hammer et al. 2014). These results show the importance of controlling for crucial external factors when assessing bilingual preschoolers’ vocabulary outcomes.

Future Research Directions Given the critical issues identified in the previous section, we believe the following issues/directions are worthy of further investigations in the field of early bilingual vocabulary acquisition. First of all, given the overrepresentation of US-based research on this topic, it is important that more research be conducted in other contexts where the minority language and its speakers enjoy different political, social, and economic statuses. Non-US-based studies also allows for the examination of emerging bilingual literacy learning where the two languages differ in linguistic proximity (such as the existence or absence of cognates) to pursue issues such as simultaneous versus successive teaching of literacy for dual language learners (Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2008). This way, a more balanced global perspective on bilingual vocabulary acquisition may be obtained. Second, as identified in our review, not much is yet known about the role of instruction in bilingual vocabulary acquisition. Future research should provide information on the instructional approaches used in the bilingual program, and teaching time allocation for the two languages. This way, we may gain a better

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understanding of the relationship between instruction and learning in bilingual vocabulary development. In addition, research findings may be more easily translated into classroom practice when these pedagogical variables are explicitly identified and investigated. Also worthy of further investigations is children’s vocabulary depth in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic lexical knowledge. While it may be expedient to only examine vocabulary breadth in research studies, for a more complete understanding on lexical development, it is very important to also include vocabulary depth measures as an outcome. This way, we may gain an understanding on the role of learning contexts and developmental factors in shaping vocabulary outcomes. Lastly, more research is also needed for the preschool population. As pointed out in the section “Major Contributions,” while many bilingual programs start out in preschool, evaluation tends to focus on school-aged children. More future research should focus on the outcome achievements of preschoolers so that the earlier stages of bilingual vocabulary development can be better understood, which may in turn inform any necessary changes to program conception and implementation.

Conclusions This chapter reviews recent findings on bilingual children’s vocabulary development in early language programs. Both vocabulary breadth and depth are considered. The psycholinguistic base of bilingual education and vocabulary education in bilingual programs are revisited, and the recent projects on vocabulary instruction of the early language programs have been synthesized. Moreover, the principles (e.g., the developmentally appropriate instruction, individualized pedagogy) and the specific strategies (e.g., shared book reading, multimodality) related to teachers’ daily practices are summarized. Overall, the findings from existing research are promising as to the utility of bilingual programs in promoting vocabulary growth of both the ethnic language and the L2. In some cases, advantages of bilingual programs were demonstrated over monolingual programs, which lend support to the adoption of bilingual education models (e.g., using heritage language as the medium of instruction). At the same time, we note that each program must be evaluated separately, as factors such as the status and societal support for the languages in question, and the socioeconomic status of the family would affect learning outcomes. Future studies on children’s vocabulary learning in the bilingual programs are suggested to explore more contexts outside the USA to better understand how different language pairings and the social status of minority languages impact bilingual learning outcomes. To enable effective program evaluation and to provide pedagogical insights, research should also explicitly discuss the vocabulary instruction used in their program. Given the important influence of familial background on bilingual acquisition, SES is another factor that warrants closer scrutiny. Lastly, an informed understanding of lexical knowledge entails assessing both vocabulary breadth and depth in children, which is currently lacking in the bilingual research literature.

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Cross-References ▶ Dual Language Education Models and Research in Early Childhood Education in the USA

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Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs Natalia Gagarina and Alessandra Milano

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Development in Monolinguals and Bilinguals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grammatical Development in Bilingual Preschoolers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Factors Affecting Grammatical Development in L2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Do Bilingual Children Close the Gap in L2 Grammar? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Support Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Support Programs: Strong and Weak Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Europe: Language Support Programs and Their Impact on Early Bilingual Grammatical Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The USA and Canada: Language Support Programs and Their Impact on Grammatical Development in L2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary of the Impact of Language Support Programs Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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N. Gagarina (*) Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Milano Language Teaching Institute (SLI), Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_4

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Abstract

This chapter provides an outline of research on grammatical development within the context of early bilingual education and offers an overview of language support programs and their impact on the early grammatical development of bilingual preschool children. In particular, this chapter addresses studies investigating how grammar develops within various constellations of first and second languages and examining the vulnerable areas of bilingual grammatical acquisition. The choice of studies was governed by their thematic matching, actuality, as well as their quality as defined via the peer-review process. Studies on children’s bilingual grammatical development in various countries give rise to diverse results, providing evidence of great variability. The overall picture of the results dealing with the impact of language support or language support programs is inconclusive. Some studies report positive effects of such programs on some (vulnerable) domains of grammatical development, while others do not. The reviewed studies often do not disentangle grammatical development from lexical development. Separating grammatical skills, given their complex composite nature, from general language proficiency skill has proven to be very difficult. The desideratum for future research in order to develop language support programs which will effectively boost early bilingual lexicon and grammar in preschool and primary school children is the following: to elaborate reliable language assessment instruments, to identify vulnerable domains in grammar production and perception (and comprehension), to establish the impact of background factors on these domains, and to perform intervention studies comparing the effectiveness of language support programs. Keywords

Bilingual education · Support · Grammar · Early development

Introduction Nowadays, many children grow up in multilingual settings with different language combinations and cultural and socioeconomic environments. Therefore, the (balanced) grammatical development within a context of early bilingualism is subject to various influences, as for instance the institutional settings, the language acquisition environments including the input divided across their languages, and the language policy differences between various countries, cultures, and families. Given this diversity of factors, the analysis of the grammatical development in early bilinguals poses many challenges. However, knowledge of typical bilingual grammatical acquisition is an indispensable basis for the development of early specific language support programs and for teachers’ professional development in early bilingual education, which begins in nursery schools and kindergartens. Since the sensitive phase of grammatical development chronologically overlaps with the age at which

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children attend nursery and kindergarten, the impact of such early language support on the grammatical development in bilingual children should not be overestimated (Gagarina et al. 2018). Although the role of institutions is self-evident and of crucial importance in the context of bilingual education, it is still unclear what is the impact of institutionalized language support programs on the balanced development of bilingual grammar, as only few studies focused on this topic. The goal of this chapter is twofold: to provide an overview of children’s dual language grammatical development in various countries and with diverse language combinations and to summarize research on language support programs and their impact on the early grammatical development of preschool bilinguals. Ideally, language programs supporting grammatical development within a context of early bilingual education should be applied in the case of atypical development of the child’s two languages (for example, in the case speech or cognitive impairments) and should target the domains which lag behind typical bilingual development (i.e., speech and language development of a child without any developmental language disorder). However, the current research on the speed of acquisition of grammar among typically and/or atypically developing bilinguals is inconclusive and contradictory (Hoff et al. 2012; McCardle and Hoff 2006), and evidence on the normal range of variability in bilingual development could have embraced more languages and populations (see, for example, Paradis 2005, 2010, 2011; Paradis et al. 2003, 2011 on bilingualism in Canada). Prior to the overview of the language support programs and their impact on early grammatical development, the current state of research on grammatical development within the context of early bilingualism will be briefly addressed and the theoretical background will be presented.

Main Theoretical Concepts Language Development in Monolinguals and Bilinguals In the early childhood years, typical language development advances with high speed and without special intervention: “[w]ithin three years of birth, children acquire several thousand words, figure out how to build and understand complex sentences, and master the sound system of their language – all before they can tie their shoes” (O’Grady 2005: p. i). The speed of language development in general, and of early grammatical development in particular, is positively associated with the degree morphological richness, i.e., the set of rules that allow the combination of inflectional morphology with lemmas to be acquired in the language, that children receive in child-directed speech (Xanthos et al. 2011 on noun and verb morphology in nine languages). While monolingual grammatical development in preschoolers has been extensively examined for a number of languages (Bittner et al. 2003; Stephany and Voeikova 2007), bilingual development has received much less attention. Typical monolingual acquisition of grammar seems to show less variation as compared to

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bilingual acquisition of grammar, which takes place in a more heterogeneous environment and is surrounded by a constellation of a highly diverse factors. These include factors such as institutional support of home languages (metropolises with bilingual kindergartens and schools vs. small cities with no opportunities for bilingual education), age of L2 onset (simultaneous bilinguals, with the age of L2 onset up to 1;11 vs. sequential bilinguals, with the age of L2 onset between 2;0 and 3;11, and child second language acquirers with the age of onset between 4;0 and 9;11; see Ruberg 2013), various combinations of language pairs (home language and environmental language), etc. (see section “Factors Affecting Grammatical Development in L2,” this volume). In addition to these factors, one of the most crucial conditions of successful language acquisition, qualitative and quantitative sustainable input, varies strongly across cultures and populations in bilingual children. These heterogeneous acquisitional settings complicate the possibility of establishing generalizations about the bilingual acquisition of grammar and make it more difficult to establish averages in the developmental range of bilingual grammar (Genesee 2006; Marchman et al. 2010). Consequently, for the design of language support programs, it is necessary to know which grammatical domains are robust or vulnerable in bilingual acquisition, and which background factors impact development and to what extent (Haman et al. 2017; Gagarina and Klassert 2018; Müller 2003). For example, some studies have shown that after 1 year of intensive contact with German or Hebrew in monolingual kindergartens, the language performance in L2 German or Hebrew of one-third of 5-year-old bilingual children still falls below the monolingual average (ArmonLotem et al. 2011), and without special intervention, this gap only widens with age (Gagarina et al. 2014). In the following chapter, deeper insights into bilingual grammatical development will be given.

Grammatical Development in Bilingual Preschoolers Both theoretical “poles” investigating early grammatical development – the Universal Grammar (henceforth: UG) and the usage-based theories – acknowledge the role of input in this process but attribute various functions to it. Usage-based accounts assume a crucial role of children’s dynamic linguistic experience, which is shaped by use, in the acquisition of (grammatical) categories. Generalizations, constraints, and rule-based systems arise from multiple usages of a given unit or construction (Bybee 1995; Langacker 1987), and this process is driven by the communicative function of a language (Tomasello 2003). Formal UG-based theories schematize the language acquisition process in abstract categories and formal representations, knowledge of which a child is born with (e.g., the Language Acquisition Device discussed in Chomsky 1959). Research by the proponents of either theory on grammatical development in bilingual preschoolers deals mainly with one of their languages, either their first language (L1) or second language (L2). More seldomly researchers address the development of both of the children’s languages (but see Armon-Lotem et al. 2015; Dieser 2009; Paradis and Navarro 2003; Simon-Cereijido and Gutiérrez-

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Clellen 2009). In studies on L1 (also called the family language, language of origin, minority or heritage language), two strands can be identified: language acquisition versus attrition, and restructuring of the heritage language grammar versus the baseline language, i.e., the language spoken in the country of a heritage speaker’s origin (for an overview, see Gagarina 2014). A large number of studies on L1 acquisition have been carried out in the USA and deal with Spanish (see Anderson 2001; Beaudrie and Fairclough 2012; Cuza and Strik 2012; Montrul 2008; SilvaCorvalán 2003; Wilson and Martínez 2011), Korean (Lee and Shin 2008; Oh 2003; Shin 2004), Chinese (Wang 1996), other East Asian languages (Kondo-Brown 2006), and Russian (Andrews, 2008; Bar-Shalom and Zaretsky 2008; Kehler 2001). Various L1s, like Polish, Turkish, and some Romance languages, as well as the phenomenon of language attrition, defined as the weakening, reduction, or even loss of a first or second language, have been investigated in the European context (for an overview, see Gagarina 2014). A contemporary point of view on such changes suggests another perspective, which treats these changes as dynamic and restructuring rather than as attrition or loss (Flores and Rinke 2020; Lohndal et al. 2019; Muysken 2020). These studies show similarities in attrition across different L1s: for example, the pro-drop feature (from “pronoun-dropping,” languages that allow the omission of personal pronouns in the subject position) can undergo attrition or restructuring, a term that refers to the dynamic changes in a language. To illustrate, young heritage speakers use overt pronouns – to some extent – in contexts in which a monolingual speaker would not use a pronoun, although language dominance might change the children’s use of null and overt pronouns (see Argyri and Sorace 2007; Daskalaki et al. 2019). Generally, the more vulnerable domains (e.g., case on nouns) are more likely to undergo language attrition or, taking another perspective, restructuring. For example, in Russian, a child at age 3 uses accusative marking in daj lamp-u, “give-IMP lampACC,” “give me a/the lamp,” but 2 years later, the child uses the nontarget nominative form in the same construction: daj lamp-a, “give-IMP lamp-NOM,” “give me a/the lamp.” This use can be considered as attrition of the accusative case marking on nouns; alternatively, it can be described as the restructuring of the case system of a language. Background factors affect L1 in various ways and to different extents. For example, Gagarina and Klassert (2018) found that chronological age and gender have the strongest impact on the acquisition of verb inflection, whereas L1 use in the nuclear family and the age of onset of L2 mainly affect case on nouns, which is acquired than verb inflection by children, speaking Russian as heritage language and acquiring German as the societal language. Thus, individual time of acquisition of a given category is associated with the structural (linguistically intrinsic) characteristics of this category and with background factors which impact the acquisition process in various ways.

Bilingual Grammatical Development: Myths, Current Research, and Controversies The acquisition of grammar and, specifically, of inflectional morphology in the L2 poses a real challenge for many bilingual preschoolers and elementary pupils. In fact,

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a great number of studies have shown how bilingual children struggle with the development of this linguistic domain (Gathercole 2007; Nicoladis et al. 2007; Paradis and Kirova 2014; Schelletter 2007; Schwartz et al. 2015). For example, Paradis et al. (2011) conducted a longitudinal study with 25 bilingual children (mean age 5;6 years, length of exposure to L2-English: 9.5 months) over the course of 2 years. They demonstrated that, by the end of the testing sessions, the morphological competence of a large percentage of the children fell far behind monolingual standards, even though they attained the same performance levels as monolinguals in narration grammar tasks and a fair score on vocabulary measures. Similar results were also found in Paradis (2016), who, based on a sample of 169 children (mean age 5;10 years) divided by length of exposure to L2-English, reported that bilingual children perform on par with monolinguals in narratives, but show poorer knowledge of inflectional verb morphology in comparison to their age-matched monolingual peers. The same developmental profile (attesting the acquisition of story grammar before vocabulary, and vocabulary before morphology) was also found in Paradis and Kirova (2014) with 4-year-olds attending half-day preschool programs. In spite of these results, a question that has been little addressed in research is whether the grammatical development of bilingual children differs purely quantitatively (number of errors produced by bilingual children in comparison to monolinguals) or also qualitatively (different error patterns, different trajectories of language acquisition of bilingual children in comparison to monolinguals), and whether this initial gap in grammatical competence between monolinguals and bilinguals can be closed later in life. To answer these questions, Schwartz et al. (2015) analyzed the acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children. The researchers compared four groups of bilingual preschoolers (aged between 4;0–5;0; total number of bilingual participants: 70) from different linguistic backgrounds (English, German, Finnish, Hebrew) to a group of younger monolinguals (3;2–3;10) and a group of age-matched Russian-speaking monolinguals (4;1–4;8; total number of age-matched and younger monolingual participants: 40). The results showed “no qualitative difference between bilingual and both younger and age-matched monolingual children” (Schwartz et al. 2015, p. 739). Although the types of errors in gender agreement that both monolingual and bilingual children produced did not differ, there were significant differences in the quantity of errors produced by the groups. The older monolingual group not only outperformed the younger group but also all the bilingual children. All bilingual groups had a higher error rate when producing gender agreement, which made their performance similar to that of the younger monolinguals. These results imply that the developmental trajectories of grammar acquisition of monolinguals and bilingual children are very similar, but that the bilingual children seem to progress at a slower pace in comparison to their monolingual peers when it comes to morphology acquisition. This theory is also supported by the previous research on Russian gender agreement in case studies of bilingual and trilingual children conducted by Dieser (2007a, 2007b, 2009). In her investigations, she also discovered that bilingual children seem to produce certain error patterns for a longer time in comparison to monolingual children.

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Further evidence in favor of this theory is given by the investigations of Gathercole (2007), who also surveyed the grammatical development of bilingual children. Gathercole (2007) compares the results of her research with 311 EnglishSpanish-speaking children attending 2nd and 5th grade living in Miami, Florida (Gathercole 2002a, b, c; Gathercole and Montes 1997; see also Oller and Eilers 2002) with the results of her research with 274 English-Welsh-speaking children between 5 and 9 years of age (Gathercole and Thomas 2005; Gathercole et al. 2001). She concluded that both groups of bilinguals showed qualitative similarities to monolingual grammatical development, as they “go through the same sequential stages of development” (Gathercole 2007, p. 238). In comparison to monolinguals, however, bilingual children take “longer to discover the patterns applicable to each of their languages” (Gathercole 2007, p. 238). These studies demonstrate how differences between monolingual and bilingual children in the domain of grammar seem to reside on the quantitative level than on the qualitative one. In fact, these investigations did not find any significant qualitative differences in grammatical development, but only a difference in the amount of grammatical errors produced and in the speed of acquisition of grammatical rules by bilingual children. As the following paragraph will illustrate, a great variety of factors and language acquisition settings can contribute to the abovementioned developmental trajectories of early bilingual grammar.

Factors Affecting Grammatical Development in L2 The abovementioned studies also try to find an explanation for the delay in grammatical development in bilingual children. Different investigations have pointed out how internal as well as external factors play a major role in boosting or delaying morphological acquisition (Bialystok 1986, 1988; Hoff et al. 2012; Paradis 2011, 2019; Unsworth and Blom 2010). One possible hypothesis for the slower speed of grammatical development is the reduced input that bilingual children receive in both of their languages. In fact, “bilingual children have their input space divided between two languages” (Paradis 2019, p. 15), whereas monolingual children receive input in only one language in all contexts. The consequence of this is that the bilingual input in specific contexts might be reduced and, therefore, that bilingual children are less exposed to certain linguistic structures in comparison to their monolingual peers. A study supporting this theory was conducted by Hoff et al. (2012). They tested 47 Spanish-English bilinguals between age 1;10 and 2;6 (as compared to 56 age-matched English-speaking monolinguals) and found that their development was “entirely consistent with the argument that language development is a function of the relative amount of exposure” (Hoff et al. 2012, p. 22; see also Gathercole 2002a, b, c; Oller and Eilers 2002). Gathercole (2007) also supports this claim, explaining that “the pacing of development for particular structures is linked to the amount of [. . .] exposure to a critical mass of data. The bilingual child should take longer to reach that critical mass than the monolingual child, given generally more limited exposure” (Gathercole 2007, p. 241).

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Furthermore, the grammatical similarities and differences between the L1 and L2 also play a major role in the development of vulnerable areas of grammatical acquisition for bilingual children. The idea that interaction between languages might accelerate or delay the acquisition of linguistic structures is shared and widely attested in the literature (Blom et al. 2012; Döpke 2001; Hernandez et al. 1994; Hulk and Müller 2000; Meisel 2001; Paradis 2011; Paradis and Genesee 1996). On the one hand, the presence of grammatical similarities between the L1 and L2 may boost the acquisition of grammatical rules. On the other hand, grammatical domains existing in the L1 but not in the L2 and vice versa can delay, in combination with the reduced input in the two languages, the acquisition of certain grammatical rules. To illustrate, children from L1 languages with a similar gender and morphological system to Russian, for example German, made significantly fewer errors in nounadjective gender agreement tasks than children from L1 languages such as English that are gender-neutral (Schwartz et al. 2015). Similar results were also found by Schwartz et al. (2014) with the investigation of six early sequential Russian-Hebrewspeaking bilinguals with an age of onset of L2 of around 3 years (and with the so-called “First Language First Approach,” “which maintains sequential exposure to a second language after relative maturity in L1,” Schwartz 2012: International.ucla. edu). Schwartz et al. (2014) found a remarkable similarity in the development of pluralization between the monolingual and bilingual acquisition of Hebrew and concluded that such accelerated bilingual development might be due to the similarities in this grammatical category between Russian and Hebrew. In spite of this evidence, it is still unclear and controversial how and in which domains this interaction takes place and how significant the influence of one language on another is (Epstein et al. 1996; Hawkins and Chan 1997; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994; Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1994; Unsworth and Blom 2010). Another possible explanation for the slower pace of the grammatical development of bilingual speakers considers the transparency and saliency of grammatical structures and their frequency in the input. As Dressler (2012) argues, the phonological transparency and saliency of the input determine the developmental trajectories of morphology. The more transparent, salient, and consistent a morphological form is, the earlier, faster, and better monolingual and bilingual children will learn it (Brown 2013). Therefore, regular forms are generally acquired before irregular forms, which are rarer and constitute a smaller part of the morphological input the child receives (Berman 1985 2004; Ravid 1995a, 1995b). Schwartz et al. (2015) also reach similar conclusions in their previously mentioned study. An additional significant aspect to consider when investigating the development of morphological structures in bilingual children is their age of exposure to the L2. A common myth is that the earlier a child picks up a new language, the better his or her competence and long-term outcomes will be. Comparisons of the long-term performance of early and sequential bilinguals to that of late L2-learners who started learning the L2 in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood seem to support this idea (DeKeyser 2012). In fact, earlier exposure to the L2 generally also implies longer exposure to L2 input, which “is significantly and positively associated with larger vocabularies, greater accuracy with morphology, stronger narrative skills and

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greater use of complex sentences” (Paradis 2019, p. 17; see also Blom et al. 2012; Govindarajan and Paradis 2019; Paradis 2011; Paradis et al. 2017). However, there are also studies contradicting this theory. For example, Paradis (2011) found the opposite pattern when analyzing the verb inflectional morphology of 169 bilingual children with different L1s (Chinese, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Spanish, and Arabic). In this case, children who started acquiring an L2 later showed better morphological skills than early bilinguals. Paradis (2011) explains that the greater cognitive abilities as well as the more developed linguistic maturity of older children represent an advantage for the L2 morphological development. This finding, nonetheless, is not supported by Meisel (2001), who identifies the threshold for monolingual-like inflectional morphology development at around 4 years of age. The morphological acquisition of an L2 after this “critical period” will resemble, according to Meisel (2001), the morphological acquisition of adult L2-learners (see also Unsworth and Blom 2010). Due to these inconsistent findings, it is not yet clear how the age of exposure plays a role in the grammatical development of children. Another child-external factor to consider when analyzing the grammatical development of bilingual children is the linguistic environment to which they are exposed. Defining the linguistic environment can be very challenging as many different aspects of a child’s life fall under this category. Studies have found that the “richness of children’s L2 environment” (Paradis 2019), including the use of books and media, friends, siblings, schooling, as well as extracurricular activities, is positively connected to better linguistic skills, both in lexis and grammar (see also Paradis et al. 2017; Paradis 2011). A richer environment in the L1 and L2 implies a higher degree of exposure and, therefore, more input in the two languages. To illustrate, using a questionnaire, Paradis (2011) and Paradis et al. (2017) analyzed the density of extracurricular activities children attended in the L2 and found out that the richer the environment is, the larger the vocabularies and the greater the grammatical accuracy become. Other studies focus more on the lexical richness in bilingual households. For example, Sorenson Duncan and Paradis (2020) found that vocabulary size, ability in storytelling, and morphological accuracy are only influenced by the child’s usage of the L2 with older siblings, whereas the mother’s input in the L2 was not connected with the child’s lexical and grammatical development. The researchers hypothesized that older siblings had greater fluency in the L2 in comparison to mothers, because the L2 is the language in which they were schooled. Their input in the L2 was therefore richer than that of the mothers and had a more influential impact on the lexical and grammatical development of their younger siblings. Another study conducted by Sorenson Duncan and Paradis (2018) showed that the level of maternal education and fluency in the L1 and L2 also has an impact on the development of a child’s lexical and grammatical abilities. In fact, the level of fluency of mothers in the L2 predicted stronger L2 abilities in children, as for example more complex syntactic structures. Finally, child-internal factors such as intelligence and cognitive abilities can also influence grammatical acquisition in the L2 (▶ Chap. 2, “Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development,” by Butler in this volume), although the results

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in this area are highly controversial. Paradis (2011) and Paradis et al. (2017) find that there is an effect of short-term verbal memory and analytic reasoning on the accuracy of verb morphology and on the production of complex syntactic structures in the L2 in spontaneous narrative production. The recent study of Stadtmiller et al. (2021) provides a more detailed insight into the interaction of working memory and language and scrutinize for this purpose omissions in a sentence repetition tasks of 5-year-old Russian-speaking bilinguals. In contrast, the studies of Bialystok (1986, 1988) and Barac and Bialystok (2012) show that while cognition in bilingual individuals does have an impact on, for example metalinguistic awareness, it is the level of linguistic knowledge, but not cognitive control, which influences grammaticality judgment tasks.

Do Bilingual Children Close the Gap in L2 Grammar? A final question to address is whether bilingual children make up for the initial delay in morphological acquisition and what long-term outcomes are attained. Many studies present evidence that bilingual children eventually recover the initial delay in vocabulary and grammar (Cummins 2000; Hakuta et al. 2000; Saunders and O’Biren 2006; Schwartz et al. 2009), but that the time for this development can vary between 3 and 7 years and the outcomes are not always certain. For example, Paradis and Jia (2017) found that in 90% of the cases, bilingual children around 8 and 10 years of age reach monolingual-like linguistic skills in domains such as expressive and receptive vocabulary size, lexical semantics, general morphosyntactic abilities, and oral comprehension. In contrast, Gagarina et al. (2014) found that Russian-German bilingual children fall behind the monolingual average beyond the kindergarten years as far as lexicon and grammatical development are concerned. As mentioned above, the factors to consider when analyzing the closing of the gap in the grammatical skills of bilingual children in comparison to monolinguals (if such comparisons are to be done at all) are manifold. The inconsistency of the results on bilingual acquisition may therefore stem from different ways of measuring childexternal factors, such as language exposure, parental education, schooling, and the linguistic environment of bilingual children. These aspects are closely related to the linguistic input children receive. Also, the structural similarities as well as the differences between the languages taken into consideration in these studies may account for the divergent results in the area of grammatical development.

Summary As it is possible to attest based on the abovementioned studies, a great number of factors play a role in a more or less consistent grammatical acquisition in the L2, and the combination of aspects such as quantity and quality of input, similarities between L1 and L2, age and length of exposure, parental education, socioeconomic background, and cognition can account for the individual variance in the results of many

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bilingual children. In addition, on the basis of this brief review of studies, it becomes evident how important it is that children already receive sufficient input and exposure to both their languages in the preschool years. In the following section, we will analyze the different types of early education programs that contribute to the development of their grammatical skills and their long-term outcomes.

Major Contributions Language Support Programs With the steady growth of the bilingual population, there is an increased demand for preschool systems that can guarantee equal chances of academic success for monoand bilinguals and provide the necessary language support. The implementation and effectiveness of language support programs have been mostly studied in the context of the elementary and secondary schools (see, for instance, García 2009; OsorioO’Dea 2000), whereas little is known about the effects of bilingual instruction in preschools (but see Schwartz 2018). This is surprising given the fact that the analysis of the impact of bilingual support measures on early linguistic development might represent an essential step towards better understanding the key to successful academic outcomes. In the following sections, we address different approaches and theoretical frameworks aimed at achieving positive language support outcomes for bilingual children.

Language Support Programs: Strong and Weak Types Teachers who are involved in bilingual programs in schools or preschools face similar challenges everywhere in the world (Schwartz et al. 2016). In this chapter, we will address the one major question that concerns bilingual education the most: What are the language programs that best support the grammatical development of children in the L1 and L2? The classic differentiation between strong and weak forms of bilingual intervention (Baker 1993) is very helpful in identifying the measures considered in different countries in bilingual education. Whereas the strong type of bilingual instruction provides a full immersion in the L1 and/or L2, the weak type tends to offer a more transitional or less in-depth insight into the acquisition of the L2. The strong type of language support program intends to integrate children of the majority and minority languages not only by providing input in two different languages but also by accepting a diverse cultural background. The weak type of bilingual language support is the transitional education system, sustaining the learning in the L1 only until bilinguals have achieved sufficient competences to attend curricular subjects in the L2 (Močinić 2011). Although these programs have been gradually implemented in bilingual preschools, little is known about their effectiveness in language development. Therefore, the following subsections contain a close-up analysis of many of

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the strong and weak programs adopted in different European countries as well as in Canada and the USA, in order to evaluate the impact various linguistic interventions have on the development of grammar in the early years of education.

Europe: Language Support Programs and Their Impact on Early Bilingual Grammatical Development Bilingual schooling methods in Europe vary from country to country. Mainstream Education with Foreign Language Teaching (Močinić 2011, p. 178) is one of the most widely used weak forms of language program, which integrates one or more foreign languages as curricular subjects in school. This program, which mainly helps children from the majority language to learn a second language, often does not lead to functional bilingualism, or to the ability to use two languages competently across the “encyclopedia of everyday events” (Baker 1993, p. 13). In fact, the quantity of input in the foreign language provided by this program is often not sufficient to reach proficiency levels in the L2. Other well-known programs are, for example, Content and Language Integrated Learning (henceforth: CLIL; in Europe also known as European Schools), which belongs to the strong type of programs mentioned earlier, and in which two or more languages are used to teach mandatory subjects, such as history, geography, or mathematics. This program targets the majority group, that is, the ethnic group numerically dominant in a certain area, with the aim of “creating” proficient bilinguals and enriching the cultural perspectives of children. The outcome of these language programs is well known for the children of such majority groups: these children generally reach high fluency level in their L2, without, however, achieving monolingual-like grammatical accuracy (see section “The Canadian Context”). On the opposite, little is known about their impact – specifically on the grammatical development – of bilingual children in their L1 and L2. Furthermore, the abovementioned programs are mainly implemented starting from elementary school, so even less is known about the impact of language support programs on the grammatical development of bilingual children during preschool education. In the case of preschool education, more fine-grained forms of bilingual instruction have been developed. Gagarina et al. (2018) differentiate two categories of language support programs in day care centers: a child-based and an educator-based support program. In a child-based program, bilingual children in need of support in their L2 receive, parallel to their everyday activities in the day care centers, specific training by specialized caregivers or experts in linguistics and language development in small groups. The aim of this program is to target children’s specific difficulties and tailor the linguistic support in the L2 based on their needs. In contrast, an educator-based program aims at improving the preparation of caregivers when facing the challenge of supporting bilingual children in the acquisition of their L2. In this case, teachers receive specific instruction on how to improve the quantity and the quality of the linguistic input in the L2 they provide bilingual children with. The effectiveness of these language support programs in the grammatical development of bilingual preschoolers, however, is still under debate. For example, in the

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context of Germany, Gagarina et al. (2018) compared in a longitudinal study the impact of child-based versus educator-based language support programs on the grammatical development of 160 bilingual children living in Berlin with L2 German and either L1 Russian or L1 Turkish. The L2 development of these two groups was compared to a control group of bilingual children who did not attend a special support program. This comparison demonstrated a positive effect of linguistic support programs, as children participating in these scored higher on grammar and lexical tasks than children from the control group. Furthermore, the study reported a significant improvement in L2 children receiving the child-based support program as compared to the educator-based intervention and to the control group. Further evidence backing the idea of a positive effect of linguistic support programs comes from Wales (Gathercole and Thomas 2005), where many schools promote programs for “minority language survival.” These programs aim at revitalizing and stopping the decline in the use of languages in areas of the world where a majority language is more widely spoken, like Welsh (minority language) and English (majority language) in Wales. Preschools and schools in Wales can choose whether they provide education in Welsh only or in both Welsh and English. The group of children analyzed by Gathercole and Thomas (2005) included 324 children from 2 to 11 years attending either Welsh-only schools or bilingual schools, in which Welsh and English were both used as a medium of instruction. The authors considered the data from the 5- to 9-years-olds for testing plural markings on nouns, nounadjective agreement, and possessive markings on feminine and masculine nouns. Gathercole and Thomas (2005) discovered that children attending Welsh-only schools performed consistently better in noun-adjective agreement as well as in possessive markings in Welsh, especially with masculine nouns, than children attending a bilingual school. These results show that the quantity of the input received in Welsh, which is higher in Welsh-only schools than in bilingual schools, is connected with greater grammatical accuracy in the minority language. However, other studies do not report a significant positive improvement in grammatical development associated with language support programs. Simon and Sachse (2013) provide an example showing various impacts of language support programs on different populations. Their study was also carried out in Germany with 146 children aged between 3 and 5 with different home languages. The goal of the study was to test whether an educator-based program can support and have a positive impact on the lexical and grammatical development of bilingual preschoolers. Educators were trained on the topics of bilingualism and language support. After 4 months of the program, a battery of linguistic tests was carried out. The study demonstrated that an educator-based language support program does not have an impact on the grammatical development of children in their L2. In fact, children did not show an improvement in the areas of morphology or syntax. However, positive effects of the program were reported on the lexical level and regarding the language enthusiasm children had in speaking in their L2. Roos et al. (2010) also found “neutral” results regarding language support programs. They compared three groups of preschool children in Germany between 4;3 and 6;6 years of age from different linguistic backgrounds (mainly Polish, Turkish,

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Russian, and Italian). The first group received specific (comparable to child-based) language support in German, the second received a general (comparable to educatorbased) support program, and the third control group had no support program. In this longitudinal study, measures for cognitive skills and grammatical and lexical development were analyzed as possible variables that could be influenced by the language intervention program. The results showed no significant improvement in any of these domains and no differences in the grammatical abilities of children receiving a support program in comparison to those who did not receive support. Finally, other studies performed in Germany, for example, Beller et al. (2009), report mixed results on the impact of language support programs. The researchers hypothesized that an educator-based language support program in German would have a positive impact on the development of German monolingual and Turkish-German bilingual 4- and 5-year-old children. Beller et al. (2009) compared a group of monolingual and bilingual children receiving an educator-based program to a control group of children who did not receive a support program. Educators were instructed on how to optimize their language input and create situations in which both monolingual and bilingual children could participate and engage in conversation. The results showed a significant improvement in lexis and grammar only for the younger monolingual and bilingual group as a function of the language support program. In comparison to the control group, 4-year-old monolingual and bilingual children in the program achieved higher results in tests concerning lexical and grammatical development. The intervention was most effective for the bilingual children. The Turkish-German bilingual children showed deficits in the areas of grammar and lexis before the start of the program. Although their linguistic skills continued to lag behind those of their monolingual peers after the program, a significant improvement in their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge was registered. In contrast, no significant effect of the support program was found for 5-year-old children. Beller et al. (2009) explain that this kind of program may be more effective for younger children. They also suggest that the effects of the intervention in the case of 5-year-old children may only be visible long-term, that is, in elementary school. In light of these results, Beller et al. (2009) emphasize the importance of the professional education. Through their study, they show that the self-awareness of educators regarding the quantity and quality of the input they give to children can be very effective for improving the grammatical and lexical development of both younger monolingual and bilingual children. The inconsistent results of these studies, which focus on the impact of specific language support programs in European preschools on grammatical development in the environment language, show that there is a need for more extensive research in this field. In fact, several factors, as for example different methodologies, distance between the L1 and L2 of the children, specific training of teachers, and the evaluation of the child’s background, can influence the results and account for the divergent outcomes of language support programs. A unified methodology would help in recognizing similar patterns of development over larger population samples and in potentially discovering more about the effectiveness of the language support programs in preschools.

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The USA and Canada: Language Support Programs and Their Impact on Grammatical Development in L2 The USA and Canada are both countries with a high percentage of bilinguals in their population. The language support programs in these countries target different linguistic groups to sustain and improve bilingual education. Studies on the effectiveness of these programs take into consideration different measures of linguistic development and show, as in Europe, inconsistent results.

The Canadian Context In Canada, a very popular language support program is immersion bilingual education. Similarly to the CLIL program used in Europe (discussed above), an immersion program involves the use of two or more languages as academic languages in schools. The goals and methods of the CLIL and language immersion programs in Canada often overlap. In fact, the goal of both programs is to produce functional bilinguals by teaching curricular subjects in two languages. However, one of the major differences is that the languages used in the CLIL programs are clearly foreign languages, whereas immersion programs often offer a second locally spoken language as a means of instruction (Cenoz et al. 2014). For instance, in Canada, immersion programs aim not only at creating highly functional bilinguals in French and English through French immersion programs, but also at helping children achieve high proficiency in other heritage and aboriginal languages (Dicks and Genesee 2017). The bilingual immersion programs in Canada are also implemented in kindergartens to support literacy in primary and secondary schools (see the homepage of the Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en.html). These language support programs have been proven to be highly successful, as children who attend them achieved the same or in some cases even higher academic levels as compared to their age-matched peers in non-immersion programs (Dicks and Genesee 2017). Not only do these children show high proficiency in spoken languages, but they also attain comparable results in other curricular activities (Dicks and Genesee 2017). Furthermore, the studies do not report any negative effects of immersion programs in a foreign language on L1 skills (Cummins and Chen-Bumgardner 2011; Cummins and Danesi 1990; Dicks and Genesee 2017). However, it is quite challenging to attest the impact of these programs on the grammatical development of children, especially when looking at the preschool context. In fact, most research has focused on academic success as well as on vocabulary development, while less attention has been given to the accuracy of grammatical forms. This is a reason for concern according to Hammerly (1989), who underlines how much attention French immersion programs give to fluency and how little to the accuracy of linguistic forms and structures. Genesee (1987) also reports that children and adolescents who attend these types of immersion programs have proficient listening and reading skills but lack accuracy in the linguistic production of both spoken and written language. In confirmation of this, Harley (1989) demonstrates that children in 6th grade (around 11 and 12 years of age) receiving specific

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training with French grammar in a French immersion program only showed better results than children in the same French immersion program without specific grammar training directly after the support program. However, 3 months after the grammar training, the grammatical performance of the two groups was again comparable. Other forms of bilingual preschool education in Canada aim at revitalizing and maintaining aboriginal languages. The focus of these programs, however, is mostly of a political and pragmatic nature and places less emphasis on the grammatical development of children. Preschools offering education in Native American languages as well as English have the goal of making children of indigenous heritage feel integrated and accepted, making them value their origins, and allowing them to carry out functional conversations in their native tongue. Positive outcomes of these programs have been reported, including the enthusiasm children showed for languages and their academic success in the L1 and L2 (Taylor and Wright 2003). However, no studies have been carried out on the grammatical development in the L1 and L2 of children attending indigenous language programs. Future research should therefore focus on these aspects too, which are of vital importance for keeping indigenous languages alive as well as for measuring the impact of language support programs. Finally, other forms of programs have also been developed in the Canadian context and are generally implemented from elementary school onward. One that specifically reports results on grammatical development is the Accelerated Integrative Method (Maxwell 2004). In this program, which is mostly used with French as a second language, the L2 is taught by using arts and literacy. For example, words as well as basic grammatical markers (gender, past tense) are learned kinesthetically by using movements to represent them. While this approach has been proven to be successful for language enthusiasm, vocabulary, and fluency, the study of Bourdages and Vignola (2009) reports no differences from other French learners who take regular French lessons regarding the level of grammatical errors produced. Since there are many language minorities in Canada, other types of programs have also been developed to help promote and maintain the heritage languages of children. These programs aim at increasing awareness of bilingual education for educators, families, and caregivers. For instance, the DVDs and booklets Your Home Language: Foundation for Success distributed in the Toronto district and available in 13 different languages aim at educating caregivers, parents, day care providers, and preschool educators on how to optimize their language input and on how to best support the acquisition of a child’s L1. There is, to our knowledge, very little evidence on the grammar development of children attending immersion programs in the Canadian context. Future research should not only further analyze the academic outcomes of preschoolers and pupils attending this kind of language support program, but also take into closer consideration formal aspects such as the grammatical development of the children.

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The USA Context In the USA, numerous studies have focused on the growing Hispanic communities, which represent a large minority group of the country, and their integration in the school system. L1 Spanish-speaking children of Latin-American heritage exhibit the so-called subtractive bilingualism, i.e., in this context, a generational shift of language use from Spanish to English (Winsler et al. 1999). Analyzing the preschool context, Keys Adair (2012) describes how often American monolingual teachers are unprepared when facing the challenge of teaching English to Latino children, who speak a different L1 at home: Teachers of children of Latino immigrants often struggle to address a child’s cultural, emotional and social development along with the academic [. . .]. When teachers do understand the needs and concerns of Latino immigrant parents, it can be difficult to be culturally responsive because of structural and political constraints.” (Keys Adair 2012, p. 164)

Furthermore, restrictive immigration policies may lead to discrimination against Latino families, resulting in a lower socioeconomic status. Because of these difficulties, children and young adults from the Latino communities often experience negative academic outcomes or higher school dropout rates (Barnett et al. 2007). Generally, it is known that socioeconomic status has a very strong impact on language development in children (Pace et al. 2017). In fact, children from families with high or low socioeconomic status have very different linguistic experiences in their home, differences in their school choice, and differences in their linguistic environment that dramatically shape their language development (Hoff-Ginsberg 1998). Much research has focused on low-income families, targeting the impact of bilingual education in preschools on the reception and production of the L1 and L2 (Rodríguez et al. 1995; Winsler et al. 1999). These studies demonstrate that a bilingual preschool education generally leads to bigger vocabularies, greater lexical accuracy in picture naming tasks, and better receptive skills (Hammer et al. 2003, 2007; Rodríguez et al. 1995; Winsler et al. 1999) in the L1 Spanish and L2 English. Furthermore, the children’s linguistic competence at preschool in the two languages is a predictor of reading competences in elementary school (Demie and Strand 2006; Strand et al. 2015). The implication of these studies is that the development of both languages should already be closely monitored in the preschool years in order to support not only L2 but also L1 development during elementary and secondary school, and to also ensure academic success for minority groups. Despite the positive reports of these studies, there has been criticism regarding the lack of attention that bilingual preschool programs pay to the accurate use of the L2. As in Europe and in Canada, the focus of these linguistic schooling measures is mainly on the functional and communicative usage of language and, to a lesser degree, on the “formal grammatical properties” (Dicks and Genesee 2017, p. 7) languages exhibit. It is therefore particularly difficult to evaluate the effects of language support programs on vulnerable areas of grammar in the USA context. A first problem is that little is known about the baseline of typical grammatical

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development in the Spanish-English communities. Given the socioeconomic and sociolinguistic nature of the studies focusing on Spanish-English minorities, only few reports have analyzed the natural grammatical development of the children. Among these reports, the extensive morphosyntactic studies of Gathercole (2002a, b, c, see also: Oller and Eilers 2002) offer an in-depth insight into the morphological development of children of this minority group and into the impact of English immersion and two-way Spanish-English immersion education. The studies of Gathercole (2002a, b, c) involve a total number of 300 children and focus in particular on elementary school children from the 2nd and 5th grades attending either an English immersion program or a Spanish-English two-way immersion education in comparison to a group of Spanish and English monolingual speakers. In three testing sessions, the author investigated the development of mass versus count nouns, gender comprehension, and that-trace structures in English and Spanish using a grammaticality judgment task. For the mass versus count noun distinction, “monolingual English participants [gave] more correct judgements than English Immersion participants, and English Immersion participants more correct judgments than Two-way participants. This held at 2nd grade, but by 5th grade, the English Immersion and Two-way children were no longer significantly different from each other” (Gathercole 2002a, pp. 192–193) in English testing sessions. Moving to the gender grammaticality judgments, which Gathercole (2002b) analyzed for Spanish, she found that 2nd grade bilingual children from two-way immersion programs, who only spoke Spanish at home, outperformed all other bilinguals in the judgment of grammatical sentences. In contrast, bilinguals of English immersion programs who spoke both English and Spanish at home still performed the worst among all the bilinguals in the identification of ungrammatical sentences by the 5th grade. Finally, the study of Gathercole (2002c) analyzing that-trace structures in Spanish and English revealed that there was a consistent correlation between the school-type and school-language, and the advantage in recognizing ungrammatical structures. In other words, children attending two-way immersion programs had an advantage in identifying ungrammatical sentences in Spanish in comparison to the English-immersion bilingual children, and English-immersion bilingual children had the same advantage in English. The opposite was also true: children from two-way immersion programs performed worse in English grammaticality judgments in comparison to those in English immersion, and English immersion program children performed worse in Spanish. Regardless of the immersion program attended, in all three experiments (Gathercole 2002a, b, c), bilingual children were always outperformed by their respective monolingual counterparts in terms of grammaticality judgments. Even though the language support programs show a positive impact on grammatical development, there still seems to be a gap between bilinguals and monolinguals. It is in fact particularly challenging to disentangle the influence of language support programs on the grammatical development of bilingual children from other factors such as cognition, socioeconomic status, and linguistic environment, which may account for this gap.

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In light of these results showing that grammatical accuracy represents a challenge for many bilingual children, some reports suggest methods to increase their awareness of the formal grammatical properties of language. According to Lyster (2007) for instance, the awareness of bilingual children for grammatical judgments can be improved by constant and systematic corrective feedback, aimed at improving not only the content but also the linguistic forms of their conversations. To sum up, only few studies analyze early grammatical development in bilingual children in Canada and in the USA (e.g., Bland-Stewart and Fitzgerald 2001; Conboy and Thal 2006; Kohnert et al. 2010; Marchman et al. 2004). Generally, these studies reveal deep associations between grammatical development and the vocabulary and grammatical growth.

Summary of the Impact of Language Support Programs Around the World The previous sections have made it possible to recognize how much more research is still needed to better understand the actual impact of language support programs on early language development. Table 1 allows a comparison of the different language support programs and their outcomes. As can be seen from Table 1, the results on the effectiveness of language support programs diverge greatly worldwide. Whereas research in Canada and the USA demonstrates positive effects of language support programs, European studies are more critical towards the positive outcome of these programs. One possible reason for this is that the studies use a great variety of methods, target different language groups, and evaluate the importance of grammar development differently when applying language support programs. It is therefore particularly difficult to draw comprehensive conclusions regarding the impact of preschool language intervention on bilingual grammatical development.

Critical Issues and Topics The lack of consistent empirical evidence on the positive impact of language support programs on grammatical development in preschoolers creates a need to deal with three critical issues: (1) Is there a need for a unified and coherent methodology to test grammatical development? (2) What are the variables to be considered when measuring grammatical development? (3) What linguistic support programs are beneficial for which target groups and grammatical domains? Regarding issue (1), a coherent methodology for the assessment and analysis of grammar in early language development is needed in order to compare populations with different languages and background factors. The creation of a common assessment instrument for different languages has proven to be successful for various linguistic domains, such as the lexicon and discourse organization (e.g., CrossLinguistic Lexical Tasks, Haman et al. 2017; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test for

Subject of research Effect of educatorbased vs. child-based support programs on lexical and grammatical abilities of preschoolers.

Effect of linguistic intervention programs on general linguistic abilities and language enthusiasm.

Author Gagarina et al. (2018)

Simon and Sachse (2013)

146 bilingual children between 3 and 5 years from different linguistic backgrounds and L2-German.

Participants 160 children (2–6 years) divided into 3 groups: educator-based support program group, childbased support program, no language support program.

Recordings of childcaregiver interactions and testing of linguistic abilities of lexis, grammar, comprehension, and measures of phonological and working memory from the SETK 3-5.

Method Longitudinal study with 4 test assessments in which the grammatical and lexical abilities were measured with standardized tests.

Table 1 Impact of language support programs on the grammatical development of bilingual children

Results Children who attended support programs attained a more advanced grammatical development than children without any language support programs. For the lexical development, the group receiving a child-based support program scored higher than the other two groups. No effect of linguistic intervention on language development. Significant effect of linguistic intervention on language enthusiasm of children.

No effect

Positive/negative/no effect of preschool education on grammar Positive

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Effect of language support programs on the linguistic abilities of children. Effect of intelligence, biological gender, and socioeconomic factors.

Effect of educator-based intervention vs. no intervention.

Roos et al. (2010)

Beller et al. (2009)

151 children between 4 and 5 years, of which 73 with educator-based intervention, 78 without intervention.

544 children in German preschools and schools.

“Heidelberger Sprachentwicklungstest” for testing the areas of lexis and grammar, “Raven” for cognitive development, school outcome in reading understanding and speed, correct orthography and math success. Specific linguistic training for the target group and general psychological and linguistic training for the control group, video recording of childcaregiver interactions, and pre- and posttests of linguistic, cognitive, and personality skills. No global effect of the intervention. Only significant development for 4- but not for 5-yearolds. Children with a German cultural and linguistic background scored significantly higher than their TurkishGerman peers in language and cognitive tasks. Personality traits of the child as well as his or her socioeconomic family background were shown to have an influence on this result.

No effect of language support in any of the tested areas.

(continued)

Mixed results (positive impact of language support program for 4but not for 5-year-olds)

No effect

4 Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and. . . 103

Gathercole (2002b)

Author Gathercole (2002a)

Subject of research Effect of Instructional Method in School (IMS), Socio-Economic Status (SES), and Language Spoken at Home (LSH) on morphological acquisition and development of mass vs. count nouns by monolingual and bilingual children. Effect of Instructional Method in School (IMS), Socio-Economic Status (SES), and Language Spoken at Home (LSH) on morphological acquisition and development of gender markings in Spanish by monolingual and bilingual children.

Table 1 (continued)

English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children participating in either a two-way immersion program (TWI) or an English immersion program (EI) from the 2nd and 5th grades.

Participants 294 bilingual and monolingual Englishspeaking children participating in either a two-way immersion program (TWI) or an English immersion program (EI) and 32 2nd and 5th grade monolinguals in Spanish. Grammaticality judgment task with gender marking.

Method Grammaticality judgment task with mass and count nouns in English.

Spanish monolingual children outperformed all bilingual groups. Bilingual children from two-way schools and who only spoke Spanish at home had an early advantage in learning gender markings. Bilingual children with the least amount of Spanish input – those in the English immersion schools who spoke both English and Spanish at home – took the longest to acquire these forms.

Results The children of the EI-program performed better in grammaticality judgments of mass and count nouns in English in the 2nd grade. The TWI-children made up the delay by the 5th grade.

Positive (TWI program supports grammaticality judgment task in Spanish better than EI)

Positive/negative/no effect of preschool education on grammar Positive (EI program offers more solid support for L2-English than TWI)

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Gathercole (2002c)

Effect of Instructional Method in School (IMS), Socio-Economic Status (SES), and Language Spoken at Home (LSH) on grammaticality judgments of that-trace in Spanish and English

294 bilingual and monolingual Englishspeaking children participating in either a two-way immersion program (TWI) or an English immersion program (EI) and 32 2nd and 5th grade monolinguals in Spanish. Grammaticality judgment task with and without that-structures

Monolingual English and monolingual Spanish participants outperformed bilinguals of both TWI and EI programs. Among the bilingual groups, the children from the EI program had an early advantage when judging grammatical sentences in English, whereas children from the TWI Spanish-English immersion program had the same advantage in Spanish. The SES of participants was also associated with their performance. Positive (EI programs support grammaticality judgments in English; TWI programs support grammaticality judgments in Spanish)

4 Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and. . . 105

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receptive vocabulary, Lloyd and Dunn 2007; Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, Gagarina et al. 2012). However, it seems to be a much more challenging task to “measure” grammar development and to identify similar patterns of change. A common testing tool for grammatical development would not only facilitate the evaluation of the individual language support programs but would also allow the comparison of different programs and the identification of those best suited to supporting vulnerable areas in grammar acquisition. This would give the research community the possibility to detect patterns of development and cultural differences, and, eventually, to adapt and modify the language support programs in such a way that they could operate even more effectively. Issue (2) deals with the complexity of the measurement of progress in grammatical development. Different studies put emphasis on various domains, for example, the mean length of utterance, the acquisition of morphological categories, the usage of specific syntactic rules, or the comprehension of sentences. However, if only one particular measure at a time is taken into account, one can hardly evaluate the development of grammar. Further complications are then caused by the way in which the measurements are carried out. Some studies rely on the information of parents, who report on the current state of grammatical performance of their children, while other studies deal with only perception or production, elicited via different types of experiments and tests. A combination of various testing methods should aim at identifying the most representative domains of grammatical development and at examining how preschool bilingual education impacts the development of each of these domains, targeting both production and comprehension. Finally, (3) represents a major point of improvement for the content and methods of bilingual support programs. In fact, there is the possibility that the lack of clear results might be caused by the composition of the participant groups, which are too heterogeneous. Children from different linguistic, socioeconomic, cultural, and educational backgrounds take part in the same language support programs (even if they have diverse language proficiencies). As a result, the outcomes of such studies show an ineffectiveness of language programs. Linguistic support programs should therefore more specifically identify their target groups and tailor their methods based on the children’s needs. The comprehensive analyses of linguistic competence should inform research about the domains which lag behind and need support. On the basis of the studies reviewed here, it is quite hard to draw general comparisons, as the types of linguistic programs are not only characterized by great diversity, but are subject to the impact of the attitudes towards bilingualism, the socioeconomic background of the children, and other factors which are remarkably disparate, but also influence grammatical development in children. Furthermore, a more unified methodology across studies would also help track the effects of different factors such as school programs, personality traits, socioeconomic status, and monolingual or bilingual status on the early grammatical development of bilingual children.

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Future Research Directions Future research directions for the impact of language support programs on early grammatical development are based on issues dealing with the inconsistencies in the findings and some pitfalls in the methodologies and analyses. This was already mentioned in the previous section on critical issues and topics. To sum up, research on grammatical development has great potential, given the gaps that future research should cover. The primary goal of this research area should be the identification of vulnerable domains in bilingual grammatical development, the establishment of the normal range of variation for the acquisition of different language combinations, and the application of intervention programs that specifically target the “weak” grammatical domains in bilingual children. A collection of studies in this area that would cover all domains of grammar, ranging from morphology to syntax, could therefore be of significant help in identifying the challenges children face in the acquisition of different grammatical systems. To successfully sustain children’s bilingual education in preschool, it is necessary to individuate and explore the factors that might be most responsive to a linguistic intervention. It is in fact not clear which age, linguistic, or socioeconomic group is more responsive to which type of linguistic support. In order to identify language domains which are more likely to demonstrate positive changes after language support programs, future research should address more homogeneously the groups of bilingual children with language assistance needs. In this way, it will be possible to reduce the variability in population samples and the determination of similar developmental patterns within certain population groups will be more probable. Consequently, the greater homogeneity of sampling would allow the adaptation, evolution, and expansion of the contents of intervention programs, which could more precisely address the specific grammatical difficulties of bilingual children. This, of course, is only possible if programs for teachers and caregivers in pre- and primary schools are also developed, and if these qualified employees receive adequate training that can support the children’s grammatical development.

Conclusions The overview given in this chapter broadly addresses studies dealing with early grammatical development within a context of early bilingual education. It then moves to a discussion of studies targeting the impact of language support programs on bilingual development of grammar in either L1 or L2, since the majority of studies target only one of the languages of bilingual preschoolers. The choice of the studies has been motivated by their quality as defined by the blind peer-review process and by the range of languages addressed in the studies. This chapter points to one of the major difficulties when comparing different studies – finding corresponding units of measurement and evaluation that can be directly compared or contrasted. Therefore, a desideratum is to create an analogous testing

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methodology in preschools. In fact, this would allow the research community to have more comparable results across various studies. Especially in the North American area, where little is known about the effectiveness of linguistic programs in early grammatical development, a unified assessment instrument would allow investigations to go beyond one domain – be it grammar or lexicon. In this context, it would also be interesting to test not only the productive grammatical abilities of young children after a language intervention but to also explore judgment perception, that is, how bilingual children perceive grammatical and ungrammatical rules and sentences. Few studies conducted so far have focused on the perception of grammatical rules in the L1 and L2, although this might be an interesting area to investigate, since perception typically precedes production (Rothweiler 2015). In conclusion, the recent studies evaluating the impact of language support programs on early grammatical development show the lines along which this research area might develop in the future in order to better understand the typical bilingual development of grammar and the ways to support it.

Cross-References ▶ A Critical Overview of Research Methods Used in Studies on Early Foreign Language Education in Preschools ▶ Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Vocabulary and Grammar Development in Young Learners of English as an Additional Language ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education Miriam Minkov and Liubov Baladzhaeva

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergent Literacy and Biliteracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metalinguistic Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socio-Linguistic Contexts and Educational Settings of Emergent Biliteracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Literacy Policies and Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metalinguistic Awareness and Transfer of Literacy Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individual and Environmental Factors Affecting Emergent Biliteracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translanguaging in Preschool Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emergent Biliteracy and Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The aim of the present chapter is to describe the link between different preschool educational settings and the development of literacy in two languages in preschool children, with a focus on different language minorities, including immigrants and heritage and indigenous speakers. The following issues will be outlined: literacy practices, management and policies, metalinguistic awareness, emergent literacy in first and second languages, heritage language, bilingualism, M. Minkov Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel L. Baladzhaeva (*) University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_5

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and biliteracy. An overview of different studies conducted in a variety of sociolinguistic contexts is provided: heritage and immigrant families (e.g., Spanishspeaking immigrants in the USA, Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel), indigenous language communities (e.g., Maori community in New Zealand), and communities in the countries with two or more official languages (e.g., French speakers in Canada, Swedish speakers in Finland). The chapter discusses such settings as different types of formal bilingual preschool education, after-school settings, and family and community initiatives. The chapter is divided into five parts. The first part discusses the theoretical concepts and terminology. The second part outlines critical issues and topics, focusing on the main research directions in the field of emergent biliteracy. The third part describes different socio-linguistic contexts and educational settings in which emergent biliteracy develops. The fourth part discusses new research projects focusing on the emergent biliteracy development. The last part addresses the future research directions. Keywords

Biliteracy · Emergent literacy · Preschool · Bilingualism · Metalinguistic awareness

Introduction In this chapter, we aim to provide a comprehensive picture of emergent biliteracy development in preschool settings. Literacy acquisition is one of the most important factors affecting language development and enrichment and academic success later in life. While literacy practices at home are extremely important, nowadays, young children often spend most of their day in a preschool setting where a significant portion of their language development takes place. Integrating two languages into literacy practices can be complicated and preschool teachers require special training based on up-to-date research of emergent biliteracy. Developing emergent biliteracy in a preschool setting ideally requires not only the presence of proficient speakers of both languages as teachers but also a plethora of resources, including books, games, toys, and various props in two (or more) languages required to provide a literacy-rich environment. The chapter starts with outlining the main theoretical concepts of emergent biliteracy and metalinguistic awareness as one of the most crucial factors in biliteracy development. We continue by addressing the major research contributions in the field, outlining the models of relationships between first and second language emergent biliteracy by Bialystok (2002), Cummins (1980, 2008), Genesee (1989, 2015), and Hornberger (1989, 1992, 2000). We then provide an overview of studies on emergent biliteracy and metalinguistic awareness in preschool settings and specific factors affecting them, such as different sociolinguistic contexts, preschool literacy policies and practices, and individual and environmental factors. We

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continue by outlining two new promising directions in emergent biliteracy research focusing on translanguaging practices and implementing new technologies in preschools to promote biliteracy. The chapter ends with a number of suggestions for future research directions and conclusions.

Main Theoretical Concepts Two main components crucial for literacy development – emergent (bi)literacy and metalinguistic awareness – will be examined in the following section. Since the conceptualizing of emergent biliteracy is based on the understanding of what emergent literacy is, we will address this term first.

Emergent Literacy and Biliteracy According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology (VandenBos 2007), emergent literacy is “the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are presumed to be developmental precursors to conventional forms of reading and writing. Emergent literacy begins before the child receives formal instruction in reading and writing and occurs in environments that support these developments, as when, for example, the child is being read to.” Focusing on the “developmental precursors,” the National Early Literacy Panel (2008, p. 3) lists six variables representing emergent literacy skills: (1) alphabet knowledge, (2) phonological awareness, (3) rapid automatic naming (RAN) of letters or digits, (4) RAN of objects or colors, (5) writing or name writing, and (6) phonological memory. These variables “have medium to large predictive relationships with later measures of literacy development” and “maintain their predictive power even when the role of other variables, such as IQ or socioeconomic status (SES), were accounted for.” Five additional variables were characterized as “potentially important”: (1) concepts about print: knowledge of print conventions and concepts, (2) print knowledge, (3) reading readiness, (4) oral language, and (5) visual processing. According to the researchers (National Literacy Panel 2008), these 11 variables together consistently predicted later literacy achievement for both preschoolers and kindergartners and may be seen as the starting point for the consideration of the components of emergent literacy and biliteracy. The most general definition of biliteracy sees it as “literate competencies in two languages” (Dworin 2006). Taking this point of view to the linguistic milieu, we can see biliteracy as a level of acquisition of the literacy skills listed above but in two languages. However, from the sociolinguistic point of view, biliteracy is defined as “the acquisition and learning of the decoding and encoding of and around print using two linguistic and cultural systems in order to convey messages in a variety of contexts” (Pérez and Torres-Guzmán 1996; p. 54). This approach emphasizes the cultural-dependent aspect of biliteracy, which is beyond its linguistic components. Biliteracy can be conceptualized as a dichotomous or continuous ability. An ecological model of biliteracy as a continuous ability was proposed by Hornberger

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(1989). Emphasizing the complex interrelationships between bilingualism and literacy and the importance of the contexts, Hornberger proposed to see biliteracy as “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing” (Hornberger 1990 p. 213). In this model, the continua of biliteracy are seen through four different frames, or “nests” – development, content, media, and context. For example, one of the continua of the “Development” nest is between reception and production of the language: from the state of full or limited comprehension without production to the state of the fluent production. Similarly, in the nest of “Media” the continuum between divergent and convergent scripts is about the relative similarity of the written characters. For example, the child who acquired English script is likely to have an easier time acquiring literacy in French than in Japanese. In the further research, Hornberger (1992, 1998, 2000) argued that the ends of the continua are not symmetrical from the ideological and political points of view and that the “traditional power weighting of the continua” must be contested by students, teachers, researchers, and policy makers. More specifically, she called for the changes in the language policy at the macro- and microlevels, which would enable the minority students to draw on all points of the continua and to become fully biliterate. Hornberger’s model, first proposed for Hispanic learners of English, was successfully used in other social and linguistic contexts, such as Russian heritage speakers in the USA (Polinsky and Kagan 2007). Further research focused on the potential benefits of bilingualism, such as metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness, and, especially, phonological awareness as one of its components, is considered to be one of the most important abilities for literacy acquisition.

Metalinguistic Awareness De Houwer (2017; p. 83) referred to metalinguistic awareness as “the totality of metacognitive skills needed to allow reflecting on language as an object and the monitoring of one’s own language use and that of others.” Gombert (1992) distinguished six categories of metalinguistic awareness: metaphonological, metasyntactic, metalexical, metasemantic, metapragmatic, and metatextual. Thus, the metalinguistic awareness per se refers to a wide range of linguistic aptitudes, which might appear in both monolingual and bilingual settings, for both oral and written language. Such metalinguistic skills can include understanding that words consist of distinct phonemes and morphemes, that those words, phonemes, and morphemes can, in turn, be represented by symbols in a specific order on a piece of paper, and that those words signify objects (and actions, etc.) from the real world but are not identical to them. The focus of the present chapter is narrowed to the metalinguistic skills which (1) are related to emergent literacy, that is, to the development of written language during the preschool, and (2) are viewed through the prism of bilingualism. The present issue will address the studies asking which skills, and under what conditions, may be related across languages. One of the main topics of the field of early bilingualism is the potential advantage of bilingual children over their

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monolingual peers regarding the acquisition of literacy skills. A series of hypotheses put forward by Cummins have been most influential for the study of bilingualism and biliteracy. The two first hypotheses drew upon the results of the research by Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976), who investigated the language development of Finnish-speaking immigrant children in Sweden. The comparison was made between the children who immigrated to Sweden at the age of 10 when their L1 skills and knowledge, such as literacy and school-related vocabulary, were well developed, and the children who immigrated at the age of 7, whose L1 was less developed. Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) showed that the degree of the development of L1 at the onset of the acquisition of L2 influenced the further development of both languages and that this development could be impeded if L1 is not fully developed. Building on the data from this research and elaborating the conclusions, Cummins proposed two interrelated hypotheses. The first was the threshold hypothesis (Cummins 1978, 1979), which postulated that there is a threshold level of L1 competence that the child has to reach in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages and to benefit from bilingualism. Cummins (1979) proposed a two-threshold model: The attainment of a lower threshold level of bilingual competence would be sufficient to avoid any negative cognitive effects; but the attainment of a second, higher level of bilingual competence might be necessary to lead to accelerated cognitive growth. (p. 230)

Thus, the threshold hypothesis posits that only high proficiency in two languages has a positive effect on cognition and that the onset of the L2 before the acquisition of L1 threshold level may have a negative effect on cognition. Later, Koda (2005, 2008) proposed the Transfer Facilitation Model, according to which metalinguistic awareness, once developed in learners’ L1, can facilitate the development of L2 reading skills; however, the linguistic proximity between L1 and L2 influences this facilitation. The second was the developmental interdependence hypothesis, in which Cummins (1978, 1979) conceptualized the relationship between the L1 and L2: The developmental interdependence hypothesis proposes that the level of L2 competence that a bilingual child attains is partially a function of the type of competence the child has developed in Ll at the time when intensive exposure to L2 begins. (1979; p. 233)

In other words, the language proficiency acquired in L1 may be transferred to L2, given that the type and the level of L1 proficiency are fit for such transfer. Cummins also argued that put together, the two hypotheses imply that children whose conceptual and linguistic knowledge in L1 is not effective for developing L2 literacy skills should be primarily instructed through their L1, for example, in the scope of an immersion program. In his further work, Cummins (1980) argued that the transfer to a certain language occurs under the condition of adequate exposure and motivation to learn this language. Although the ideas of Cummins have been criticized by a number of authors (Genesee 1984; Wald 1984; Edelsky et al. 1983), they had a major influence on the further discussion of bilingual language proficiency and bilingual education.

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Ellen Bialystok, known for her groundbreaking research on bilingualism and bilingual advantages, also focused on the effect of bilingualism on emergent literacy development in several of her studies (Bialystok 1997, 2002). While the models proposed by Cummins were more general in their scope, Bialystok attempted to single out specific components that are at the core of emergent biliteracy, and their interacting in the process of its acquisition. She identified three major areas of development that affect the acquisition of literacy in both monolingual and bilingual children: oral competence with the literary forms of language (stories and books), conceptual knowledge about the print, and metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok 2002; Bialystok and Herman 1999). According to Bialystok, while for monolingual children, the main component of metalinguistic awareness is phonological awareness, bilingual children must develop other metalinguistic strategies and insights that would be languagespecific, such as grapheme-phoneme correspondence (Bialystok 2002). She proposed a model of relationships between first and second language literacy in bilingualism in which the skills in each language can be developed either in sequence or simultaneously and will certainly influence each other (Bialystok 2002).

According to this model, each of the three components in L1 may serve as a basis for the development of the parallel skill specific to L2. For example, the concept knowledge of a story structure in L1 can be transferred to L2: a child learns to anticipate the correct elements of the story in the correct order. L1 conceptual knowledge about the print, such as that words are represented symbolically on a page, can be transferred to L2-specific knowledge about graphemephoneme correspondence. The third transferrable component of literacy is the phonological knowledge in L1, for example, the idea that words consist of separate phonemes. According to Bialystok, the first component of the model, oral proficiency, is most beneficial when acquired through exposure to stories and books. Several narrative

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conventions are similar in different languages, and the familiarity with this type of discourse can be transferred from one language to another (e.g., the story begins with the presentation of the characters, time, and place; metaphors cannot be understood literally, etc.). This is quite useful as bilingual children are not necessarily exposed to this type of discourse in both of their languages. On the other hand, some story conventions, discourse demands, and nuances can be language- or culture-specific and must be learned individually in each of the child’s languages (Bialystok 2002). When talking about concepts of print, Bialystok (1997, 2002) focuses on the notion of general and specific symbolic principles. When learning concepts about print, children must first learn the general symbolic principle that written words symbolize meanings of spoken words and that one written word, such as “dog” cannot refer to two different objects such as “dog” and “cat.” At the same time, the relationship between the word and its referent is arbitrary and there is nothing dog-like about the word “dog.” The general symbolic principle is common for all writing systems. Bilinguals might have an advantage at understanding it if they have some literacy skills in one of their languages. However, each writing system also requires from its users the knowledge of specific symbolic principles. For example, in alphabetic languages, such specific symbolic principles would be the correspondence between letters and sounds and the fact that words with more sounds require more letters. In a character system like Chinese, the principle of letter-sound correspondence would be useless, and instead the specific symbolic principle is the morpheme-character correspondence, where children learning to read in Chinese do not demonstrate phonological awareness at the level of individual sounds (Bialystok 1997). According to Bialystok (1997, 2002), children acquiring radically different writing systems (such as English and Chinese) will likely experience initial confusion due to the fact that they require different language-specific skills and the understanding of different symbolic principles, but they eventually catch up both with monolinguals and bilinguals with two similar writing systems (such as English and French). To summarize, the early research traced the main areas of the study of emergent literacy: the conditions under which bilingual literacy may be achieved, its core components and their interaction, and the ecological context in which the emergent biliteracy develops. The subsequent research concentrated on the more detailed investigation of the process of acquiring emergent biliteracy in each of two languages along these lines of conditions, contexts, and interacting components.

Major Contributions Socio-Linguistic Contexts and Educational Settings of Emergent Biliteracy The number of bilingual children is constantly growing even in traditionally monolingual communities due to global migration. Broadly, bilingual children can be divided into several categories based on the type of the language minority to which they belong. First, a distinction can be made between “old” and “new” minorities (Kymlicka 1995), where “old” minorities are those that settled on their territory

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before it became a part of a larger country (such as Catalan people in Spain), whereas “new” minorities are recent immigrants and refugees who came after the establishment of the country’s current borders. Old minorities can be further split into “indigenous” and “national” minorities, where “national” minorities are characterized by sharing “collective political consciousness or the will to achieve an independent state” (Smith 1981, p. 72), while “indigenous” minorities are native people inhabiting a certain territory to which they are historically connected (Yitzhaki 2010). These distinctions often inform the governmental policies towards the minorities, where old minorities are seen as communities that should continue enjoying a certain linguistic independence and the new minorities are encouraged to integrate into the larger community and adopt its language and culture. However, national minorities can sometimes be seen as a threat to the country’s integrity which, in turn, can lead to restrictive language policies where children are forcibly educated in the majority’s language and are discouraged from using their L1. Most often, though, children from old minorities, especially from national ones that can wield a certain amount of power of the country’s government, receive the best provisions for maintaining their L1 and opportunities for a fully bilingual education. National minorities’ children are also likely to have bilingual parents and bilingual educators who can support their language and literacy development and a number of resources that would be beneficial to their literacy development such as books and games in both languages and bilingual signs on the streets. The visibility of their L1 in the community can demonstrate to the children the benefits of acquiring literacy in both the minority and the majority language. Children from indigenous minorities such as Sami in Scandinavia or Native Americans do not necessarily have the similar linguistic landscape as the national minorities with regard to how much of their L1 is visible in the community and how many resources are available. In addition, indigenous parents often opt for an educational framework with limited or no support of L1, if they believe that their children would benefit from more exposure to the majority language (Chew 2015). The bilingual preschool education for minority children can be broadly divided into three main models: transitional, maintenance, and enrichment (De Mejía 2002). Transitional programs aim to create conditions for the minority children in which they will eventually shift to the majority language. Often, it can mean offering some instruction in the native language to the children struggling to switch to L2 or to use their L1 to support the acquisition of L2. However, there is no goal to support the children’s L1 throughout their education. This type of bilingual education is most likely to be targeted at new minorities as a way to integrate and assimilate them. Maintenance programs look for maintaining and strengthening the L1 (Hornberger 1991). Children from minority language backgrounds can be educated predominantly in their L1 with some inclusion of the majority language. This type of bilingual preschool is most likely to exist in the context of old minorities and in large immigrant communities; however, in the case of immigrants, such preschools are often private enterprises of the members of the community. Another option is enrolling in preschools that attempt to give equal attention to both L1 and L2. Enrichment programs aim to go beyond maintaining the L1 and try

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to promote and develop it further. In addition, such programs can bring together children from different communities as a way to promote intercultural relations and awareness (Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). Sometimes, parents who are speakers of the majority language can also opt to educate their children as bilinguals. Such preschool programs, most likely private, work on giving children an educational advantage and are likely to be attended by children from higher SES backgrounds (De Mejía 2002). In addition to these three models, as it often happens in immigrant contexts, there can be complete L2 immersion with no instruction in L1. However, despite the fact that such preschools would have bilingual children, the system itself can hardly be called bilingual.

Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Perspectives Preschool emergent biliteracy in two languages can be seen in different perspectives: cross-sectional, asking what is the level of different literacy skills of bilingual preschoolers in comparison to the monolingual level, and longitudinal, asking what is the process of the acquisition of emergent literacy in both languages.

The Level of the Acquisition of Emergent Literacy Skills in Both Languages (Cross-Sectional Perspective) Several studies compared the level of literacy skills in preschool bilinguals with that of monolinguals, focusing on the acquisition of grammar, letter-identification, wordidentification, and vocabulary. At the level of morphology, bilingual preschoolers seem to acquire the grammatical domains in the same order as monolingual children; however, the bilingual acquisition is usually characterized by lower accuracy and slower pace. Paradis et al. (2011) compared the acquisition of the past tense in French and English by French-English speaking preschoolers. Bilinguals, like French and English monolinguals, were more accurate at producing regular than irregular verbs and tended to mark the irregular forms rather than to leave them unmarked. The level of accuracy of bilingual children was lower in comparison to that of monolinguals regarding regular and irregular verbs in English and irregular verbs in French. No differences appeared regarding the regular verbs in French. The researchers argued that bilinguals seem to be able to catch up with monolinguals in inflectional morphology in their dominant input language. Similarly, Bland-Stewart and Fitzgerald (2001) demonstrated that Spanish-speaking children learning English acquired the English grammatical morphemes in the same order as monolinguals. However, bilingual children showed lower accuracy: only a few grammatical structures were acquired as expected relative to children’s MLU. At the level of alphabet knowledge and word identification, different studies offered contradictory findings regarding the acquisition of these domains by bilingual children. In the large study by Páez et al. (2007), 319 bilingual children participated in Massachusetts and Maryland. The researchers found that SpanishEnglish bilinguals scored below the Spanish and English monolingual norms at the beginning of prekindergarten on Letter-Word Identification and Dictation subtests.

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These skills remained below the norm by the end of the year. The gap between the English and Spanish literacy skills increased in favor of English, partially due to their loss of skills in Spanish. Conversely, other studies reported that Hispanic children performed according to monolingual standard scores on English letter word identification and emergent literacy abilities in English after two years of English instruction at Head Start. However, the children’s Spanish letter-identification abilities were lower due to the lack of literacy instruction in Spanish (Hammer et al. 2007a, b). The studies on the vocabulary of bilingual children showed that it has several characteristics. First, it tends to be context-related, that is, bilingual children tend to know some words in both languages but other words in just one of their languages, usually depending on a particular context or topic. This pattern was called by Oller and Pearson (2002) the “distributed characteristic” of bilingual vocabulary knowledge and was demonstrated in their further research (Oller et al. 2007a). Second, there is a gap between the receptive and the expressive vocabulary of preschool bilinguals, which tends to be greater for their first language than for their second language (Oller et al. 2007b; Kan and Kohnert 2005; Gibson et al. 2012). Finally, the vocabulary size of the bilingual children in each of the languages tends to be smaller than those of their monolingual peers, albeit the number of vocabulary concepts in their two languages together may be the same size as in the monolinguals’ vocabularies (Junker and Stockman 2002; Marchman et al. 2010; Place and Hoff 2011; Vagh et al. 2009). In a major study by Bialystok et al. (2010), 1738 children between 3 and 10 years old participated, 966 of them bilingual speakers with different L1 backgrounds and 772 English monolingual speakers. The results demonstrated that the mean standard score on the PPVT was significantly lower for bilinguals than for monolinguals in each age group. No differences appeared between subgroups of bilinguals (Asian vs. non-Asian background) which was interpreted as making bilingualism per se the most likely reason for the vocabulary difference. An important finding of the study was the “distributed characteristic” of bilingual vocabulary since the differences between bilinguals and monolinguals were mostly confined to the home-related lexicon, while the school vocabulary for children in the two groups was more comparable. Golberg et al. (2008) showed that there is a possibility that preschool bilingual children catch up to monolingual norms regarding their L2 vocabulary. Fiveyear-old Dual Language Learners (DLL) Canadian children (n ¼ 19) from a variety of home language backgrounds showed normal standard scores on English receptive vocabulary after an average of 34 months of exposure to English. Overall, these studies showed that (1) the bilingual preschoolers show lower mean scores on morphology, letter-identification, word-identification, and vocabulary measures; (2) at least some bilingual children can catch up to their monolingual peers; and (3) the process of literacy skills development in two languages takes time. More research is needed to point out factors influencing this process (Hammer et al. 2014).

The Process of the Acquisition of Emergent Literacy in Both Languages (Longitudinal Perspective) The research on the development of reading and writing by bilingual preschool children is scarce, but the existing studies show several common tendencies

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alongside the variance regarding the trajectories and the outcomes. Tagoilelagi and her colleagues (Tagoilelagi-LeotaGlynn et al. 2005) traced the development of language and literacy skills of 23 Samoan and 26 Tongan children in their home languages and in English. The children were enrolled in Pasifika early childhood education centers which provided full immersion programs in their respective home languages. Their oral language and literacy skills were assessed twice over the six months prior to going to school and then in the very beginning and at the end of the first grade in the mainstream English school. Overall, the children showed fast development of their oral skills, the concepts about print, letter identification ability, and their word identification and writing skills in both languages. This development was parallel in two languages in the preschool program, but over the first grade, the English oral, reading, and writing skills were undergoing further development, while home language (Samoan or Tongan) skills were fossilizing or dropping. The children showed very different individual profiles of L1 and L2 proficiency at first grade entry: children arrived at school with a wide range of scores in their L1 literacy as well as their L2 literacy. In her doctoral dissertation, Ro (2010) traced the Korean-English language and literacy development of three siblings growing up in the family of Korean immigrants in America: Kevin, Mary, and Shelly. Two of the siblings were preschoolers during part of the period of the data collection. The family provided a rich home literacy environment for all children: the parents read books to them in Korean and English, taught them phonics, provided them with literacy toys, and encouraged children’s literacy activities. A Korean tutor taught the children Korean language and literacy twice a week. Their Korean-speaking grandmother came from Korea to America for annual visits. Nevertheless, the pace and the outcomes of the literacy development of two sisters (Mary, middle sister, and Shelly, the youngest sister) in the preschool period were different. Mary showed great interest in the acquisition of two languages. By the age of six, she was able to read Korean books at home and English books in kindergarten. Shelly showed a different trajectory. She was a less motivated Korean learner. By the age of six, she could read and write sentences in English, but only letters and words in Korean. Analyzing the differences between the two sisters’ literacy development, as well as the ultimate dominance of English in their oral and literacy skills, the researcher addressed several factors. The maintenance of Korean was supported by family involvement, heritage language school, relevant linguistic practices from annual visitors from Korea related to the family, and popular culture, including technology. On the other side, the massive exposure to English society, culture, language, and schooling determined the switch to English and the attrition of Korean language and literacy. This switch was facilitated by the fact that the eldest, Kevin, gradually stopped communicating in Korean with his sisters and began using English almost exclusively, while the youngest sister Shelly started school and became immersed in English. The self-identity, motivation, and individual aptitudes played a mediating role in this shift. Similar to the older sister in Ro’s (2010) study, Buckwalter and Lo (2002) described another case of successful development of emergent biliteracy. They

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followed the development of English and Chinese writing skills of a 5-year-old Taiwanese boy for 15 weeks. They found that the child was aware of the principles and concepts of word presentation in two languages and of the differences between them. He was also aware of the difference between pretend and conventional writing. His writing acquisition in two languages followed the same stages that were found for monolingual children. The stages of the literacy development were shown to be rather a complex, uneven motion, rather than a certain space occupied by the child’s writing in a given point of time. Yaden and Tsai (2012) investigated the development of writing in 11 Chinese-English bilinguals, nine of them preschoolers, during twice-a-week writing sessions in the period of three months. They found that a child can show different levels of the conceptualization of writing in both languages at the same time. To summarize, the studies point out (1) the possibility of the successful acquisition of emergent literacy in both languages, (2) the variability and unevenness of trajectories and the individual profiles of the acquisition, and (3) the tendency of attrition or fossilization of the L1 (home language) with the beginning of schooling in the L2 (societal language).

Literacy Policies and Practices Emergent literacy policies in preschool can be divided into state-wide or countrywide policies specified in the curriculum or policies that are specific to a certain preschool and are coming from the preschool management or the teachers. Countrywide policies for state-funded preschools can specify the languages in which the emergent literacy should be taught, establish a mandatory curriculum, and demand specific measurable literacy outcomes. School-specific policies may again specify which languages can be used in the classroom, which aspects of emergent literacy should be taught and encouraged, and what materials should be used in the classroom. Preschool teachers, in turn, often have a certain freedom in how they interpret and incorporate the policies received from above and can institute their own sets of rules and practices specific to their classrooms and the children they teach. As it has been established, early education is extremely important for future child development. In order to give children equal opportunities, many countries have started to provide universal preschool education or special programs for children at lower socioeconomic groups. Children who participate in public preschool programs can develop emergent literacy skills that are necessary for the later reading development even if they do not receive much literacy support at home. However, when a literacy curriculum is imposed from above, it does not necessarily mean that children will actually learn according to it or that the learning will amount to significant results. Teachers need training in implementing the curriculum and their actual teaching needs to be systematically evaluated. This does not always happen, and a study of 135 preschool classrooms in the USA found that while most of the teachers adhered to the prescribed curriculum, the quality of language and literacy

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instruction, measured by Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS: Pianta et al. 2008), was low (Justice et al. 2008). A variety of teaching practices and behaviors have been found beneficial to emergent literacy development, for example, explicitly connecting written and oral language, using names for the units of the language (e.g., “letter,” “sound,” “syllable”) and connecting the literacy activities to the broader purpose (e.g., “reading signs can help you not to get lost in the city”) (Justice et al. 2008). Adult-child shared storybook reading and literacy-enriched play settings are emergent literacy practices that have been extensively evaluated (Justice and Pullen 2003). Shared storybook reading on its own can already greatly benefit children’s literacy development but adults can incorporate certain techniques that enhance the reading experience, such as adding dialogic reading and print referencing (Justice and Pullen 2003). Dialogic reading “refers to adult use of evocative or interactive behaviors during storybook reading interactions with young children” (Justice and Pullen 2003, p. 107). Adults can ask open-ended questions that would require something more than a yes/no answer, expand on the children’s answers, and offer praise and feedback in order to encourage the children’s involvement in the reading process. Print referencing involves the adult referring to specific print concepts (e.g., page, line, cover, etc.) whether verbally or nonverbally (Justice and Pullen 2003). For example, an adult can ask “Where should I start reading on this page?” or “Do you recognize this letter?” or track the words with a finger when reading to point out the direction of the reading and to make children more aware of the fact that words on the paper can turn into spoken words. Children from low-income families with limited literacy opportunities at home were shown to develop print concepts at a much higher rate if they participated in shared-reading or dialogic reading interventions (Justice and Ezell 2000, 2002; Lonigan et al. 1999; Whitehurst et al. 1999). Both practices can easily incorporate an additional language. For example, teachers can show the difference between prints in different languages and point out that the direction of reading can differ or the fact that languages use different scripts. Even when two languages use the same script, there can be visual differences between them that are easy for nonreading children to spot, such as a double r in Spanish versus single r in English or ñ with a tilde in Spanish that does not exist in English (Reyes 2006). Bilingual dialogic reading can involve two teachers reading a bilingual book aloud or a translanguaging practice in which a book is read in one language but some of the questions and explanations are offered in another language (Pontier and Gort 2016). Literacy-enriched play settings incorporate print concepts into the regular play. For example, children can play house and use shopping lists, newspapers, or product labels as play props (Justice and Pullen 2003). A number of studies found that using such props both reflects the children’s emergent literacy and leads to further development of it (Morrow and Schickedanz 2006; Neuman and Roskos 1993; Roskos and Christie 2012). Preschools can incorporate such props into their play areas to facilitate their use during the play. There is evidence that children will start using such props even when they play on their own, without an adult. Incorporating literacy artifacts that correspond to all the languages spoken by the children in the same classroom can both facilitate the development of emergent biliteracy and make

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play more culturally relevant to the children. For example, if parents always write their shopping lists in Chinese, it would be more natural for a child to see the pretend shopping list in Chinese rather than in English.

Metalinguistic Awareness and Transfer of Literacy Skills The studies addressing the metalinguistic skills draw on three main kinds of evidence: correlation of the literacy skills acquired in L1 with literacy skills in L2, prediction of the literacy skills in L2 from literacy skills acquired in L1, and the effect of bilingualism on the performance based on the developmental skills related to literacy. Some of these studies used the model of the transfer of metalinguistic skills, while other studies focused on the predictiveness of L1 literacy skills for L2 literacy.

The Effect of “Fine-Grain” Skills on Emergent Biliteracy: Phonological and Morphological Awareness The main component of metalinguistic awareness that has been investigated in a bilingual preschool context is phonological awareness. The transfer of phonological awareness was found in various linguistic contexts. It can occur in not only proximate languages such as English and Spanish (Lindsey et al. 2003; Gottardo and Mueller 2009) or English and French (Wise et al. 2016), but also in languages belonging to different families, such as English and Turkish (Verhoeven 2007). Moreover, positive transmission of phonological awareness was also found among languages that do not share a Latin script system, such as English and Japanese (Kuo et al. 2016), Arabic and English (Saiegh-Haddad and Geva 2008), Chinese and English (Chow et al. 2005), or Russian and Hebrew (Leikin et al. 2005). In addition, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, and grammatical ability in English (L1) measured in the kindergarten were found to predict reading abilities in L2, including passage fluency, passage accuracy, and passage comprehension, in Grade 3 (Jared et al. 2011). To summarize, the possibility of the transfer of early phonological skills between languages seems to be well established. Morphological awareness was mostly investigated among bilingual elementary school students rather than preschoolers. We found only a few studies addressing the effects of morphological awareness in bilingual kindergartners. In the early study by Galambos and Goldin-Meadow (1990), Spanish-English speaking preschoolers were compared with English and Spanish monolinguals on a grammaticality judgment task. The researchers distinguished between three levels of performance: detection of the error, correction, and explanation. The bilingual children detected more grammatical errors than monolingual children from either language. They also made more grammar corrections but gave fewer explanations for the errors that were found than their monolingual peers. Schwartz and her colleges (Schwartz et al. 2016) compared the performance of bilingual (Hebrew-Arabic and Arabic-Hebrew)vs. monolingual (Hebrew or Arabic) kindergartners on morphological tasks. This study showed the transfer of some morphological skills only from Arabic to Hebrew.

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However, both groups of bilinguals performed better on morphological tasks than monolingual children.

The Effect of “Coarse-Grain” Skills on Emergent Biliteracy: Vocabulary, Grammar, and Syntax The predictive effect of the high-level skills has been less investigated. Davison et al. (2011) investigated the link between the growth of the children’s receptive vocabulary in English and Spanish and the reading outcomes in the first grade. The development of the receptive vocabulary of Spanish-English bilinguals was followed during two years in the Head Start program. The children were divided into two groups: those who were exposed to English at home before entering the Head Start (Home English Communication, HEC) and those who were not (School English Communication, SEC). The study showed that both groups developed English and Spanish vocabulary during the Head Start. The pace of the vocabulary growth was the same for the groups; however, the HEC group outperformed the SEC group regarding English vocabulary, while SEC outperformed HEC for Spanish vocabulary. The growth of the receptive vocabulary positively predicted children’s letter-word identification and passage comprehension within each language and across languages. Castilla et al. (2009) examined whether Spanish grammatical and semantic skills predicted the English measures of grammatical and semantic skills nine months after intensive exposure to English began in the preschool program. The participants were 49 Spanish-speaking prekindergartners who possessed no or nearly no English skills at the beginning of the study. The results showed that several Spanish semantic and grammatical measures strongly predicted the performance on the English morphosyntactic tests. In contrast, only one grammatical and one semantic measure in Spanish were predictors of English semantics. Another study showed that for young Spanish-English bilinguals, the L1 syntactic comprehension may be even a stronger predictor of L2 listening comprehension than the L2 syntactic comprehension (Gabriele et al. 2009). To summarize, the effect of “coarse-grain” skills on emergent biliteracy seems to be weaker in comparison to the effect of phonological and morphological awareness. The Limitations of the Cross-Linguistic Effect of the Literacy Skills It is important to note that the investigation of different factors, such as linguistic proximity and schooling effect, showed that the transfer of literacy-related skills is not always straightforward. The alphabetic knowledge in L1 seems to be able or unable to predict the reading in L2 depending on the proximity of scripts. Lindsey et al. (2003) tested the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking preschoolers. They found that variables showing cross-linguistic transfer were letter and word knowledge, print concepts, and sentence memory, since these skills correlated with English letter-word identification and passage comprehension one year later. Manis et al. (2004) showed that Spanish letter-name knowledge and Concepts About Print in kindergarten significantly correlated with English letter-word identification in Grade 2. However, no transfer of the decoding skills was found for English-Chinese 5- and 6-year-olds, nor for Chinese preschoolers learning English (Bialystok et al. 2005a).

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The effect of linguistic proximity was also shown in the study of Loizou and Stuart (2003). Four groups of preschool children participated: two groups of bilinguals (L1 English – L2 Greek and L1 Greek – L2 English) and two monolingual groups (English and Greek). The comparison of the level of children’s phonological awareness showed that while English-Greek bilinguals outperformed English monolinguals, the Greek-English bilinguals did not show an advantage over Greek monolinguals. English-Greek bilingual children also performed better than Greek-English bilinguals on tasks requiring phoneme awareness. The differences were attributed to the simpler phonological structure of Greek compared to English. The authors concluded that the enhancement effect in the transfer of phonological awareness occurs when the second language is phonologically simpler than the first language. To find out the impact of the orthographic system on the acquisition of emergent literacy by bilingual children, Bialystok and her colleagues (Bialystok et al. 2005b) compared the reading skills of four groups of first-grade children, three of them bilingual and one monolingual (English). Each bilingual group represented a different combination of language and writing system. The mother tongues of the bilingual children were Spanish, Hebrew, or Cantonese (one of the Chinese languages), while the second language of all the bilingual children was English. Of the three languages, Spanish is the nearest to English, since it is also an Indo-European language that shares the Latin alphabet. Hebrew is less similar to English than Spanish since it is a Semitic language that uses a consonants-based alphabet. The Cantonese language is very far from English as it is a Sino-Tibetan language that uses the nonalphabetic Chinese writing system. Researchers found that the progress in English reading acquisition was higher among the groups of bilingual children who learned to read in alphabetic languages (Spanish and Hebrew). For CantoneseEnglish speaking bilinguals, there was a certain advantage on the decoding task compared to monolingual children. However, the performance of these children on phonological tasks was similar to that of English monolingual children and significantly lower than in the other two groups of bilingual children who spoke Hebrew or Spanish. The researchers concluded that the effect of bilingualism on emergent reading depends on the relationship between the two languages and the writing systems, and it will be stronger in the case of relatively close writing systems. Schwartz and her colleagues (Schwartz et al. 2008) aimed to tell apart the effect of biliteracy and the effect of an early start in alphabetic code acquisition on the acquisition of literacy in Hebrew in the first grade. The researchers compared the literacy skills of Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals and Hebrew-speaking monolinguals when all the children began to learn to read before they entered school. The study demonstrated that at the end of Grade 1, the biliterate bilinguals showed better results in the accuracy of word identification and of pseudoword reading, that is, literacy skills based on phonological awareness. There were no significant differences between the groups regarding the fluency of word and pseudoword reading, fluency and accuracy of the text reading, nor spelling accuracy, that is, an early start in alphabetic code acquisition per se may account for the development of these skills. Overall, these studies show that bilingualism can offer a certain advantage in acquiring emergent literacy. The transfer of phonological awareness between two

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languages has received the greatest attention of researchers and was found in various linguistic contexts. However, in the case of structurally distant languages such as English and Chinese, the transfer of phonological awareness was not always clear. The facilitation effect of the letter knowledge was evident across languages sharing the same alphabet. Further research is needed to examine the possible effect of the morphological and semantic skills in preschool bilinguals.

Individual and Environmental Factors Affecting Emergent Biliteracy Several factors can influence emergent biliteracy, such as parental language management and attitudes, availability of resources in their environment, socioeconomic status of the family, and a child’s individual abilities and motivation. Children in the programs with an emphasis on L2 will especially depend on the L1 support at home. While preschools can do quite a lot for literacy development, a literacy-rich environment at home is still a very important factor. A study by Logan et al. (2019) looked at the number of words children are exposed to at home when they are read to by their parents. Reading one picture book a day amounted to about 78,000 words per year. As a result, children whose parents regularly read to them (in addition to the literacy activities in preschool) may enter school with an advantage of more than a million additional word exposures compared to the children whose parents do not read to them (Logan et al. 2019). If parents of bilingual children read to them only in one language, this will put children at a disadvantage when it comes to the other language. Emergent literacy may be delayed in children with developmental difficulties or with a family history of reading disabilities (Boudreau and Hedberg 1999; SaintLaurent et al. 1998). Children from lower SES are also at risk of delayed development of literacy (Lonigan et al. 1998) and this is especially relevant to the development of biliteracy, as language minority children are more likely to belong to a lower SES (Castro 2014; Matthews and Ewen 2010). Immigrant parents, especially those with limited mastery of the majority language, might not be aware of available bilingual preschool programs or lack the means to access them, if those programs are private or require navigation of the bureaucratic system. In addition, as stated earlier, minority parents might prefer to put emphasis on the development of L2 as a way to give their children better opportunities in the future which, in turn, may lead to limited literacy in L1. According to Whitehurst and Lonigan (1998), print motivation, that is, a “child’s interest in reading and writing activities,” is an important factor affecting the development of literacy. Print motivation can be measured in several ways, for example, asking parents or teachers to report how often a child requests to be read to or checking how much time a child spends in a literacy-related activity compared to other activities. Print-motivated children are more likely to initiate shared book readings and to ask questions about signs and letters they notice around them (Whitehurst and Lonigan 1998). Eventually, that interest may also translate into spending more time reading on their own. Bilingual children may be motivated to

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compare between the signs in different languages or imitate their parents and the adults in their environment by participating in literacy activities in both of their languages.

New Projects Translanguaging in Preschool Settings The new research on emergent biliteracy emphasizes the importance of drawing on the children’s full linguistic repertoire. From this point of view, the concept of translanguaging received special attention. Firstly introduced by García (García 2009a, b; García and Wei 2014), translanguaging was defined as “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds” (García 2009a, p. 45). However, Mary and Young (2017) argued that translanguaging may be performed by a teacher who is not bilingual and proposed to understand the classroom translanguaging as “the flexible, unplanned use of young learners’ home languages as a complement to the language of schooling by the class teacher at school in order to reassure the child and his/her family and to foster meaning-making” (p. 110). Translanguaging practices were found fruitful for the support of preschool literacy in different linguistic and educational contexts: Spanish in the USA (Gort and Sembiante 2015), Finnish in Sweden (Straszer 2017), and Turkish in France (Mary and Young 2017). Bilingual emergent writing is another field which has received more attention in recent years. The aforementioned studies by Yaden and Tsai (2012) and Buckwalter and Lo (2002) began to fill the gap for the Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers using qualitative analysis. In their recent quantitative study, Soltero-González and Butvilofsky (2016) analyzed the conceptualization of writing of 28 Spanish-English simultaneous bilingual preschoolers. The study found that the simultaneous bilingual children went through the same stages of writing conceptualization as the monolingual children; however, the syllable stage (representation of a syllable by one letter) was not observed in the bilingual sample. The participants in the ongoing project of Minkov and colleagues (2021) were 61 Hebrew-Russian preschool children. Being the focus of the research, the mediation of writing provided by mothers to their children is seen as a part of Family Language Policy. The researchers performed quantitative analysis of the bilinguals’ emergent literacy skills in two languages, establishing the link between them and the parental language ideology, management, and practices in Hebrew and Russian.

Emergent Biliteracy and Technology Many new research projects focus on using technology in developing emergent literacy skills, especially ebooks. Ebooks provide many possibilities that print books lack – interactivity, embedded audio, focus on specific words, options for

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translations, and more. Ebooks even allow preliterate children to engage in independent literacy activities where they will not be limited to just looking at the pages but can turn on audio and listen to the book in the absence of an adult who could read to them (Korat et al. 2011). Nowadays, children are exposed to touchscreen phones and tablets from a very early age as many households have such devices. Compared to traditional computers, touch screen devices are more accessible to preliterate children, offering an intuitive interface (McManis and Gunnewig 2012). Children also learn to associate the letters and words they encounter on the devices with specific meanings, such as “N” for Netflix. Multiple studies suggest that ebook reading via regular computers has positive effects on emergent literacy (e.g., Bus and Neuman 2009; Korat et al. 2011; Salmon 2014). However, the use of touch screen tablets is still understudied (Neumann and Neumann 2014). Neumann and Neumann (2014) emphasize that books and apps for the development of emergent literacy have to include many important features such as a clear link to the preschool curriculum, have a high level of interactivity, and encourage creativity and problem-solving. However, many ebooks and apps are essentially a text on the screen with an addition of audio or video. Roskos et al. (2011) conducted a pilot study of using ebooks to promote L1 and L2 emergent literacy in several preschools in the USA. They focused on the use of tablets in preschools and observed a teacher-led shared reading activity in which children interacted with the ebook through tracing the print with their fingers, pointing to words and page turning. Potentially, synchronized tablets can allow a group of children to interact with the book simultaneously while the teacher is reading the story, which is not quite possible with a print book. In large preschool groups, tablets with ebooks may also allow a more individualized approach to every child, adapting the level of the story to their level of language development. For preschool teachers who do not know the L1 of their students, bilingual ebooks can help incorporate that L1 and offer literacy support for it. Another possible application of electronic devices is developing emergent writing. In a study by Rowe and Miller (2016), children in the USA composed multimodal and multilingual books as a literacy project in their preschool. The books contained photos, audio recordings, drawings, and writing. This way bilingual children were able to create texts that were culturally relevant to them and to express themselves in their L1s. The activity allowed them to support their writing development in both English (the language of the preschool) and their L1s (e.g., Spanish, Arabic, Nepali).

Critical Issues and Topics In this part, we will briefly address the main critical issues in the field of preschool biliteracy research. First, the existing research of emergent biliteracy mostly concentrates on phonological awareness, as this is also the most prevalent teaching strategy in biliteracy instruction (Ducuara and Rozo 2018). Literacy skills like morphological awareness, alphabet knowledge, word identification, and writing

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among bilingual preschoolers receive less attention. This gap may be seen as natural, since phonological awareness is present in very young children and can be detected and tested even before the beginning of any formal schooling. Another asymmetry is the dominance of the studies of pairs of languages where one of the languages is English. Due to intensive research in the USA, young bilinguals whose L1 or L2 is English constitute the majority of the participants in studies on early biliteracy and a large proportion of those participants are Spanish speakers (Williams and Lowrance-Faulhaber 2018). Other language pairs, especially pairs in which both languages are not European, receive significantly less attention. The next issue is major differences in the preschool curricula concerning literacy instruction (e.g., Jenkins et al. 2018). There is general agreement that by the end of the first grade, a child should learn the basics of reading and writing, but that is not the case when it comes to preschools, where the curricula are strikingly diverse. For example, a bilingual child may find herself in a monolingual or bilingual preschool with either little or intensive literacy instruction, putting aside the methodological differences. Thus, studies with large samples cannot investigate biliteracy outcomes without taking into account this diversity of preschool curricula and environments. Final issue is a lack of standardized and validated tools for evaluating emergent biliteracy (García and Kleifgen 2018). Due to differences in writing systems, it is rarely possible to have identical or at least directly comparable tools in two languages, unless those languages are closely related. However, it is important to strive to create tools that would allow researchers to obtain comparable estimates of literacy outcomes in different languages and validate those tools and the comparisons between them in empirical studies.

Future Research Directions It seems that the future research of emergent literacy among bilinguals should reach a wider range of circumstances, as currently most studies focus on a limited number of languages and do not often compare different bilingual populations. Outcomes of different studies about children’s literacy, teaching strategies, or preschool programs can be hard to compare directly because different measures and tools are used in evaluations. There is also a need for more systematic comparisons between various bilingual preschool programs and for longitudinal studies that would evaluate implementations of preschool curriculum over time. Often, bilingual children’s emergent literacy is measured only in the majority language. There is a need for studies which should take into account both of the child’s languages to evaluate his or her level of proficiency. There is a lack of tools for evaluating emergent literacy in understudied languages. Children’s abilities in their native language need to be evaluated as well in order to be able to see their potential influence on L2 literacy acquisition. More than that, the studies can naturally evaluate the post factum outcomes of the given policy; there is a need for research which should try to predict a better policy for children with a given linguistic profile.

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Conclusion The research of emergent literacy among bilinguals is an important, fast growing field. Many studies shed light on the processes and outcomes of the acquisition of literacy skills in two languages and on the different factors, strategies, and policies that influence them. The existing studies show that it is possible for bilingual children to acquire emergent literacy in both of their languages but the process and final results of acquisition might differ between the languages. Multiple studies reveal that there is a risk for attrition or fossilization of the L1 because it is often not supported in the formal schooling system. However, the development of literacy in both languages might offer some advantages for bilingual children, for instance, in such areas as phonological awareness and letter knowledge. This advantage is more evident when there is a certain degree of similarity between the languages. Future research is needed to improve the comparability of different studies. It should also add to the knowledge on understudied fields such as evaluating morphological and semantic skills in preschool bilinguals, providing culturally relevant literacy materials. It is also important for biliteracy studies to focus on developing tools to better assess the whole linguistic profile and competencies of a bilingual child.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Early Language Education in Singapore ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Early Language Education and Language Socialization Asta Cekaite

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Socialization in Early Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socialization into Second Language Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dynamic and Bidirectional Character of Language Socialization into L2 Use . . . . . . . . . . . . Peer Language Socialization and L2 Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodological Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Ecologies in Early Childhood Education: A Role of Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Ideologies and Local Language Practices in Early Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Peer Interactions and Structuring of Linguistic Hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The chapter describes language socialization research conducted in early childhood education settings with a focus on immigrant children and multilingual peer groups. It outlines the main theoretical concepts: socialization through and to language and culture, conceptualization of socialization as a dynamic, bidirectional process where both adults and young children influence each other’s actions. The chapter describes findings from empirical studies conducted in a variety of sociocultural contexts (European countries, North America, and Asia). They A. Cekaite (*) Child Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_6

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show how children can actively reshape the institutional language ideologies or adhere to these ideologies without showing resistance. The chapter describes major topics, such as children’s agentive participation in using language for socializing processes; monolingual/bilingual language ideologies and language socialization; and teachers’ socializing strategies, their linguistic and cultural implications for language and cultural socialization. Future research directions are discussed in terms of broadening the scope of studies to include a holistic investigation of young children’s multilingual language socialization practices in peer groups, and in families. Concluding, the chapter discusses the importance of children’s peer group and its social norms in shaping the opportunities for second language learning, and the impact of children’s interactions on the establishment of multilingual or monolingual norms, language use and learning, and teachers’ ways to establish rich language and sociocultural ecologies in early education. Keywords

Early language education · Language socialization · Language policies, Children’s interactions · Bilingualism · Multilingualism · Language ideologies · Social interaction

Introduction This main focus of the chapter is language socialization research conducted in early childhood education settings with a focus on immigrant children and bi_/multilingual peer groups. One of the ways to approach children’s second language learning and their daily concerns in social settings where various languages are used is to examine their participation in situated language practices of that social context. Children’s daily language use and cultural aspects of communicative participation in characteristic practices of the community have been the focus of language socialization approach, where language learning is examined by linking language use to sociocultural processes of the community (Ochs 1988; Duranti et al. 2012; Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012). This chapter outlines main theoretical concepts: socialization through and to language and culture, conceptualization of socialization as a dynamic, bidirectional process where adults, and young children influence each other’s actions, language ecologies, and related communities of practice. The chapter describes current and prior research findings and points out future research directions.

Main Theoretical Concepts The next section introduces and exemplifies main theoretical concepts within the language socialization paradigm: socialization, in and through language, semiotic mediation, language ecologies, communities of practice, etc.

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Language Socialization in Early Childhood Language socialization approach foregrounds the interconnection between language and culture, broadly viewed as the culture of local community, institutions, such as early childhood education, schools, or workplaces, and the wider society. It is a branch of linguistic anthropology that has developed since the 1980s. The process of language socialization is conceptualized as socialization to use language and, through the use of language, socialization into culture (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Main questions asked are how children are socialized into society through the use of language and how they at the same time are socialized to use language in appropriate ways. Language socialization adopts a sociohistorical theory of human development, and directs the attention of research to social, discursively accomplished, activities as a critical site for the development of cognitive and linguistic skills. Knowledge – social, linguistic, and cognitive – and social practices are viewed as intertwined. Here Vygotsky’s notion of language as “semiotic mediation” (1978) of thought locates language acquisition in participation in social activities and specifically, various kinds of social interaction. The approach is also inspired by neo-vygotskian sociocultural theory (Rogoff 2003) that accounts for various – linguistic and observational – participatory practices and for various participant constellations (both children and adults) as relevant in considering the processes and outcomes of becoming a speaker of a culture. It shares underlying principles with other socially oriented theories, namely, it is characterized by strong commitment to a deeply ecological perspective of learning in context (Kramsch and Steffensen 2008). According to the ecological perspective, language learning and socialization are inextricably linked together. They are shaped by wider societal conditions, social roles, and communicative practices. The main assumption is that novices, such as children, acquire linguistic and sociocultural knowledge as they assume various communicative and social roles in language activities (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Ochs 1988).

Socialization into Second Language Use In contrast to cognitive approaches to L2 learning that, for instance, aim to examine primarily linguistic development, as the development of discrete grammatical features such as inflections or syntax, language socialization approach necessarily involves attention to social, and cultural, knowledge, that is learned “in and through language” (Ochs 1996). In this sense, social knowledge, social and gender roles, normative expectations concerning, for instance, hierarchical stratification of specific language varieties, moral and affective stances, and knowledge (epistemics) can be routinely conceptualized and explored as significant for the processes and outcomes of language socialization and learning. Language socialization research usually attends to and explores both micro- and macro-contexts for language learning and use. In other words, studies examine both the local social interactional practices and connect them to the wider societal views

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on social roles, norms, and values, as, for instance, language ideologies and state/ national language policy (Kulick 1997; Spolsky 2004). Language socialization is a linguistic anthropologic perspective that examines how one is socialized in becoming and acting as a competent member of a community of practice (defined as a collection of people who participate in a common endeavor and who play a significant role in forming the members’ participation, skills, and identities; Lave and Wenger 1998). A competent member masters linguistic features of the main (“target”) community, and the cultural and social meanings of linguistic features and discursive structures. In this way, language socialization contrasts the cognitivist second language acquisition studies. Attention of its investigation is directed at the local social, political, and cultural contexts, and “the cultural content of linguistic structures and practices” (Duff and Talmy 2010: 96), such as social meanings of particular language forms or discursive structures. The connection between the available forms of language practices and cultural knowledge is examined by exploring and conceptualizing ideologies, e.g., world views, notions about language, language learning, language proficiency, social identities (as adult or child, female or male, native or nonnative speaker, student–teacher), and language practices. Studies of L2 socialization constitute a specific field within language socialization research in that second language learners, including children, have a somewhat different task of learning and socialization compared to young children acquiring language and culture in their native community (as it is the case in many initial studies on language socialization, e.g., Ochs 1988; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Novices second language learners may negotiate, refuse, transform, or appropriate the socialization messages. This becomes particularly visible because L2 speakers and learners may experience different kind of access to the community practices compared with native language speakers (Cekaite and Evaldsson 2017). They may also be variously motivated or invested in becoming members of “L2-mediated worlds” (Duff and Talmy 2010). It is therefore not to be assumed that children L2 novices will show a straightforward learning progress and follow a uniform socialization trajectory (e.g., Bernstein 2016; Cekaite 2007; Schwartz and Deeb 2018). Rather, children are shown to be able to appropriate, resist or negotiate linguistic and cultural norms they are exposed to, and to refuse to follow adults’ plans and instructions (Paugh 2012). The sociocultural character of language socialization processes necessitates an investigation of how and which social interactions with more proficient members/ language experts of a particular community work as significant interactional templates. These interactional templates mediate, afford, or constrain the learners’ development of communicative competence and their knowledge about values, practices, identities, ideologies, as well as affective, epistemic, and moral stances of the community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1998; Jaffe 2009). It is therefore strongly argued that longitudinal perspectives are important in order to achieve a deeper and more nuanced understanding learners’ trajectories. Notably, being an L2 speaker can be characterized by a lower status within the new community, and the experience of access or the lack of it. For young children, early childhood educational institutions frequently constitute the main social arena

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where they meet native language speakers. Because of the segregation that immigrants experience, good educational quality is of crucial importance for achieving social equity and improving young L2 speakers’ well-being. Various degrees of motivation can impact on how and what kind of L2 knowledge is acquired. Even for young children, motivational factors can impact on the achievement of full membership in the new community, or incomplete or partial appropriation of communicative competence and in L2. As demonstrated by research reviewed in this chapter, young children’s willingness and openness toward a new language is a complex matter that is not limited to the child’s personal characteristics, but that is highly affected by the language policies, social relations, and learning ecologies of the educational institutions. It is also important to highlight that language is considered as primarily situated in social practices and not as a neutral transmitter of information. Therefore, empirically, language socialization studies examine discursive practices such as “interactional routines” (Kanagy 1999), that is, recurrent and routinized discursive practices. In early childhood classrooms (e.g., immersion classrooms), they are represented by greeting or attendance routines, circle time, various kinds of lessons, or, for younger children, play routines. Attention is not directed to the discrete linguistic items level, but to children’s contextualized discursive practices and children’s communicative repertoires that are learned through observation, participation, and performance in the everyday activities of communities.

Dynamic and Bidirectional Character of Language Socialization into L2 Use Recently criticism has been directed at earlier language socialization studies; it was argued that focus on socialization foregrounds cultural reproduction in that it primarily focuses on adults as the main actors in the transmission of linguistic and cultural knowledge. Such empirical focus is likely to constrain or neglect the issues of children’s agency, defined as their active meaning making and participation in cultural processes, so-called children’s interpretive (re-) production of culture (Corsaro 2017). The concept of socialization was broadened to highlight the dynamic and bidirectional (rather than unidirectional, top–down adult–child) character of socialization. Thus, socialization necessarily involves both adults and children, who, through their actions, influence the actions and language use of each other. The bidirectionality of socialization is acknowledged in terms of learners’ agency, i.e., children’s bilingual agency, and their emergent rather than continuously progressing learning trajectories. Children’s bilingual agency is defined as “. . .as the socio-culturally mediated capacity of . . . to act, as it is reflected in the child’s communicative acts” (Bergroth and Palviainen 2017: 4). The bidirectional character is also acknowledged by the fact that it is not only teachers and caregivers who socialize learners, but also vice versa: by being and acting as a particular kind of learners, children socialize adults, caregivers, and teachers into taking on and enacting particular kinds of social identities and engaging

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in particular kinds of teaching practices. The dynamic character of L2 socialization is also characterized by multiple and at times, divergent language and other ideologies, hybrid norms and values, and multilayered discursive and sociocultural practices, where both newcomers/novices and experts/teachers socialize each other by attending to each other’s communicative needs, experiences, and the wider societal ideologies. These processes are described in the section on peer language socialization and L2 learning.

Peer Language Socialization and L2 Learning Peer language socialization is initially foregrounded in research that deals with children’s first language peer groups (Goodwin 1990; Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012). The concept has been successfully applied in research on young children’s language socialization in early childhood education. Notably, children’s peer groups are considered to be a significant factor in second language socialization, especially in educational L2 learning settings. Attention to the children’s peer group as a strong and influential socialization factor is based on the fact that in a broad range of societies, in and out of educational settings, children spend extensive periods of time in each other’s company, even if adults are co-present. As mentioned earlier, compared to L2 cognitive approaches, language socialization studies usually are more interested in the social, discursive and language-based processes, i.e., the interactional and linguistic processes of socialization rather than the systematic study of didactic procedures or teaching outcomes. Focus is on a community and a set of communal practices and characteristic set of participant constellations, e.g., teacher–student or children’s peer group interactions. Early education settings are characterized by extensive amount of peer interaction, and, for young children, peer cultures involve common cultural activities such as play, verbal genres, as well as the use of material artefacts as shared affordances for engagement (Goodwin 1990; Corsaro 2017). In that one of the main points of departure for language socialization is that children’s language development is a socioculturally, spatially and temporally situated process, the child is considered not as an isolated individual, but as a part of a communicative community, i.e., a community of practice where particular language use patterns are established (Lave and Wenger 1998). Research, that foregrounds children’s peer groups, builds on Blum-Kulka’s theoretical view of peer talk as a “double-opportunity space” (Blum-Kulka and Snow 2004; Cekaite et al. 2014). As a double-opportunity space, it serves both as a site for children’s collaborative engagement in their social world and peer cultures (linguistic genres, and discursive structures) in social interaction in early education settings (preschools or kindergartens). Simultaneously, through the engagement in these characteristic interactional practices (including interactional routines), children can develop their communicative competences and pragmatic skills in L2. Researchers on children of various ages have shown that children’s peer group activities contribute to their socialization in ways that add to adult–child interactions.

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Methodological Considerations Notably, language socialization, including socialization in L2 contexts, preferably deploys longitudinal ethnographic study design, observations, and audio–video recordings of a broad range of communicative practices, utilize interviews, and collect relevant artifacts. Researchers openly approach and try to identify the activity affordances of the learning setting (such as the range of communicative activities that children take part in). Data can also involve literacy related semiotic resources such as books, writing sheets, and other physical artifacts. A focal social practice may be selected so comparisons can be made over time and specific interactional routines, linguistic elements, or other features characteristic of communicative (or interactional) competence may be examined. Data is analyzed by using discourse analytic, conversation analytic, and other interactional and linguistic methods.

Major Contributions Major contributions within language socialization research can be divided into several areas: research that examines both young children’s everyday language use in families, and research that examines language socialization in early childhood institutions. Research presented here covers various cultural and geographical areas, such as European countries, North America, and Asia. Research on young children was traditionally located in families. Here, it deals with children’s bilingual development, or it conducts examination of family language policies (Lanza 1997; King and Lanza 2017). There are also numerous studies of children and language socialization in primary schools (e.g., Cekaite 2007, 2017; Willet 1995). In contrast to formal schooling, early education settings vary significantly between different countries in terms of educational goals and policies, the character of daily activities (ranging from extensive peer play to prevalence of educational activities, such as formal circle time and literacy activities). However, generally, educational features in early education are less prominent compared to institutional school settings, and, therefore, early childhood education constitutes a particular case of important social interactional environment for children’s second language socialization and language learning. There is, however, a growing number of studies that specifically examines children’s second language socialization and their participation in a rich plethora of institutional activities. Empirical studies are conducted in a variety of sociocultural contexts (European countries, North America and Asia). Some of the initial studies have examined the social roles and classroom participation affordances, i.e., language learning ecologies available for young children, and ways in which they shape children’s language use and cultural socialization (Pallotti 1996, 2001; Kanagy 1999). Later studies have focused on the establishment of a language-conducive context in early childhood education in L2. A language-conducive context is defined as an educational context that involves intentional strategies and activities implementation that will be conducive to language production and are provided by the teachers as proactive agents (see Schwartz 2018; Schwartz and Deeb 2018).

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Research highlights the crucial role teachers have in early childhood bilingualism. For instance, teachers’ socializing strategies, their linguistic and cultural implications for language, and cultural socialization were explored by Kanagy (1999) in a Japanese immersion kindergarten classroom. One of the goals was to examine how children who were already proficient in their first language acquired second language communicate skills. The study directed its attention to recurrent communicative activities that were socioculturally significant for children’s participation in the classroom as a community of practice, namely, interactional routines of teacherinitiated greeting, taking attendance, and personal introduction. Changes in children participation through time (during an academic year) were documented – showing transformation in the content and participant structure of interactional routines. Kanagy argued that classroom interactional routines became a framework for socialization into cultural and linguistic participation: after some time of predictably structured participation, children were able to incorporate fragments of routines in a novel discourse and in this way constructed a framework for their L2 competence and creative interactions in L2 (although their L2 linguistic competence remained basically at the word-level throughout the school year). These interactional routines provided a positive opportunity for children to respond to meaningful discursive actions verbally and they presented situations where immediate feedback was available, both in terms of hearing others’ and producing one’s own contribution. Kanagy shows that children themselves could perform these routines in the peer group; they could apply scripts from familiar routines in other contexts and used peer scaffolding. By examining both teacher-initiated discursive activities and peer group interactions, this early study highlighted the importance of attending to the broader linguistic context of the classroom as a rich linguistic ecology (Wong Fillmore 1991: 35, on the routines as “relatively stable linguistic combinations used as part of everyday social interaction, covering a range of social functions and having an identifiable communicative function”). Children’s participation in the interactional practices of a classroom community also involves crucible learning how to handle the interactional conditions, e.g., competition in a multiparty setting. How communicative characteristics of an Italian kindergarten classroom shaped the communicative repertoires of a 5-year-old Moroccan girl was explored by Pallotti in a number of studies (1996, 2001) based on longitudinally collected recordings. Pallotti shows that the communicative practices of the classroom, or classroom microculture, influence the content of language socialization. These studies foreground an important aspect concerning language learning in a multiparty institutional setting: the turn-taking competitiveness of such setting influenced the novice’s interactional repertoires. For instance, the novice learner acquired Italian affective suffixes that allowed her to achieve a participatory role because they were part of child-role-specific interactional repertoire. Furthermore, linguistic information available in the interactional setting during multiparty unstructured conversational activities was systematically employed by this novice as a conversational strategy to get access to the ongoing interaction. Thus, the novice employed other repetitions from the ongoing conversations to launch her own conversational initiatives (as “sentence-producing tactics”). The developmental

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trajectory of her communicative participation was initially characterized by the repetitions of others’ contributions and by little of her own words: she participated in classroom choral activities by repeating or simplifying others’ sentences, “machine-gunning” of particular words that could serve as topic candidates and would attract attention in an ongoing multiparty conversation. Later on, the novice participated in co-constructed courses of action and joined ongoing conversations by appropriating one or two items from previous discourse and adding significant contributions of her own (Pallotti 2001: 324). This detailed longitudinal study highlighted the importance of examining the microlevel sociocultural interactional conditions and ways in which they shape the affordances for children’s interactional participation, more specifically, how they socialize L2 novices into acquiring and using a particular kind of interactional repertoires. Similar findings are demonstrated in a longitudinal study of children in an immersion class (Cekaite 2007; see also Cekaite 2017) that shows how the communicative ecology of educational setting makes it relevant to develop interactional competences of being able to effectively use turn-taking skills, that in their turn are inextricably intertwined with the novice’s increasing pragmatic and linguistic knowledge in L2. The study shows that the language novice only gradually developed abilities to produce thematically relevant verbal contributions that were appropriate for the classroom discourse and that were acknowledged by the teacher. A language novice’s use of repetition as a way of achieving a participant status in the kindergarten peer group play was explored by Karrebæk (2011) who has examined a Somali boy’s play trajectories in a Danish monolingual kindergarten. Repetition in play was a useful discursive strategy and was used demonstrate alignment and establish intersubjectivity (see also Björk-Willén 2008 on children’s repetitions as “shadowing” in play). However, the peers also treated the novice’s repetitions as a sign of limited understanding, in this way socializing the young child into an identity as an L2 speaker. The study importantly points out that the language learner’s use of same discursive strategies can be discarded, and that not all children’s participation rights receive social recognition in the hierarchically organized group. Similar tendencies have been pointed out in early studies on peer group interactions; native-speaking peers can simply ignore the novices due to their limited communicative skills (see Tabors 1997). Systematic attention to children’s peer group role in L2 novices’ language socialization and learning in a monolingual kindergarten setting was directed by BlumKulka and Gorbatt (2014) who have explored communicative activities that Hebrew novice children engaged into with their peers, primarily native Hebrew language speakers, and with their teachers. Researchers followed 32 children from immigrant populations aged 3–7 years, entering preschool or kindergarten in Israel for the first time. Notably, this study argued that to become full members in their new communities of practice, immigrant children need to find ways to interact with their native peers. Peer talk therefore becomes a major resource for learning (Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt 2014). The children’s progress in acquiring Hebrew as L2 and gaining participation in the social and academic activities was described to follow several phases; starting with children novices’ monolingual chat, then, upon realization that others do not

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understand their L2, silence and no communication followed (see also Tabors 1997). As children’s L2 was starting to emerge, children mainly communicated with adults, and were clearly dependent on adult scaffolding and use of multiple nonverbal resources. Notably, early communication attempts were deployed toward teachers in highly structured, didactic contexts. As L2 novices increased their participation, native and competent bilingual speakers were more prone to engage in conversations with them and scaffolded novices’ talk in various language activities. The children’s peer interactions were characterized by their humorous sociability (even when children had limited proficiency in the target language). Peers acted both as playmates and lay-teachers or lay experts. Importantly, the facilitating role of peer interaction had an important time constraint: it was available only when L2 learners mastered and used some – rudimentary – modes of communication in the new language (see also BlumKulka and Snow 2004; Tabors 1997). The process of language socialization was concurrently overlaid with children’s negotiation of social positions and cultural identities in their social interactions with their peers. This longitudinal study shows that in early childhood education, peer interactions were characterized by a relatively egalitarian participation structure (e.g., Piaget 1995) that is generally unavailable in adult-child discourse, and it allowed for particular types of peer collaboration and use of peer discursive genres (e.g., language play). When teachers interacted with children, they tended to initiate and sustain interaction, repair meaning making breakdowns, and provide scaffolding through interactional routines. The study points out that children’s interactions with peers, as opposed to children’s talk with adults, might require different ways of organizing talk and discursive practices in L2. In all, early studies have outlined several important characteristics on children’s L2 socialization, i.e., how participant status is achieved, how interactional routines provide resources to enable initial participation, and how different communicative activities shape children’s language learning. Notably, these findings provide a solid ground for further research that is discussed in the next section.

New Projects In this section, current research projects on early childhood education and bilingualism will be described. More specifically, this section reports studies that examine language ecologies and their affordances for children’s language learning, and studies that explore how language and educational ideologies impact children’s bilingualism in educational settings.

Language Ecologies in Early Childhood Education: A Role of Context Current work on early education and L2 learning develops and deepens various language socialization areas. One significant focus constitutes teacher educational socialization strategies, with a particular interest in how they feed into the

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socialization of cultural messages and how these discursive activities contribute to the ecology of children’s linguistic experiences in early education. For instance, the ways bilingual classroom activities, or in other words, ecology of language learning, i.e., communicative practices available for the learner (van Lier 2006) can provide a language-conducive environment organized by teachers are explored by Schwartz and Deeb (2018) in a study of the bilingual Hebrew–Arabic-speaking preschool classroom in Israel. The researchers used mixed-method design in examining several 3-year-old children, L1 Arabic-speakers and L1 Hebrew-speakers’ participation in various classroom activities and during one academic year used quantitative and qualitative ethnographic observational data, and weekly semi-structured interviews with the teachers about the children’s progress. The richly supported analysis shows that various discursive structures (characteristic for specific classroom activities and interactions) create distinct affordances for children’s interactional participation and also their progress in L2 (see also Blum-Kulka and Gorbatt 2014; Bernstein 2016; Cekaite and Evaldsson 2017). For instance, teacher-led activities positioned children as listeners of teacher talk and increased children’s receptive bilingual knowledge, but in these structured activities, the children had more limited opportunities to use L2 in novel ways Rather, the children could achieve participant status by using L2 in “telegraphic” formulaic manner. In contrast, it was in peer talk and unstructured peer interactions that children initiated productive L2 use. These findings suggest that children can get quite different language socialization experiences in various participant constellations and activities (e.g., classroom structured activities versus free play). The study also raises attention toward how children’s participation in various activities may impact on their becoming a full member of the (classroom) community, their L2 socialization, and its relation to L2 knowledge. Other studies on children’s discursive participation, participant status, and its relation to L2 knowledge show that there is not an easy one-to-one relation between active participant status and highly proficient language knowledge. As demonstrated in a study of 11 Nepali- and Turkish-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds learning English in their first year of school in the United States (in an English medium pre-kindergarten) (Bernstein 2018), children who achieved a central position in the classroom community were acquiring different, more complex ways of interacting. However, the examination of children’s authentic talk modifies a simplistic understanding that central participant position in classroom interaction will undoubtedly lead to greater opportunities to learn and that these opportunities will then translate into language gains. Notably, some of the children’s interactional performance did not correspond with the greater language growth in relation to complexity of their vocabulary and syntax (Bernstein 2018). These findings suggest that children’s peripheral positions can provide fruitful opportunities for observation and that basic participation in classroom interactional routines can offer affordances for language socialization and language learning. Notably then, children’s becoming socialized into acting actively in various discursive practices does not necessarily lead to becoming skilled in the use of L2. Similarly, Cekaite (2007, 2017) shows that being regarded and acting as a good language learner in a Swedish immersion classroom does not translate into advanced competences in L2.

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Several other studies have, however, different results. For instance, Schwartz and Deeb (2018) have demonstrated that children’s personality was related to their productive language use. Children who were highly motivated to gain a central social position and were characterized by talkativeness, outgoingness, and gregariousness and showed considerably better progress in language learning. These contrasting findings (Bernstein 2016; Schwartz and Deeb 2018) may be a result of methodological differences between the studies. Moreover, it is important to consider what interactional strategies are used by children to maintain their active social position. As demonstrated by Rymes and Pash (2001) in an early study of a Spanish speaking second language learner in a mainstream second grade classroom in the USA, the second language learner repeatedly used routinized communicative strategies (“me too”; “I have also done that”) that highlighted his academic progress. These linguistically simple strategies allowed him to “pass” as knowing and to show his active participation in the classroom. Whereas the student was able to display an academic identity of an active student, he did so at the expense of an understanding of classroom lessons. The bidirectional character of language socialization and, more specifically, children’s socialization of teachers is also an aspect which can be traced by attending to, for instance, young children’s participation and transformation of classroom language teaching routines. As demonstrated by Björk-Willén (2008) in her early study of 3–4-year-old children’s bilingual Spanish–Swedish learning practices, teachers performed Spanish language teaching in a routinized way and children were closely adapted to this educational routine. Teacher deviations from routine performance resulted in children correcting teachers’ discursive actions and language knowledge and acting as language experts toward the teachers’ lack of foreign language expertise (Björk-Willén 2008). Yet another significant feature of teachers’ discursive practices in early education concerns socialization into various views toward languages, e.g., linguistic purism (adherence to a monolingual norm for language use) versus translanguaging (appreciation of creative use of multiple language varieties). The ways teachers organize language instruction and orient to the availability of multiple, majority and minority, languages in the educational setting have rich socializing potentials toward general cultural views and norms for language use and hierarchical stratification between languages. For instance, teachers’ ways of using several languages – translanguaging and codes-switching – during classroom instructions (in a dual language setting, a bilingual Arabic–Hebrew kindergarten in Israel, Schwartz and Asli 2014) blur the established societal boundaries between the languages and language teaching and learning ideologies that foreground traditional instruction using language separation. The translanguaging strategies encouraged children’s social participation and interactive involvement in the bilingual kindergarten, enabling their learning of Arabic, a minority language in Israel. Such language practices can be seen to foster and socialize the participants of the kindergarten to deflect the ideologies of linguistic purism and linguistic hierarchies. Early childhood language education and socialization also play out in various mundane but usually neglected discursive practices that do not specifically deal with

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language instructions, but constitute recurrent and significant sites for language and cultural socialization in the communicative ecology of the institution. For instance, Björk-Willén (2016) in her study of parent–child–teacher interactions in preschool’s transition hall during drop off and pick up time (at the Swedish preschool with immigrant children) shows that these daily encounters had multiple language and cultural socializing features. Here, young children could develop sociolinguistic understanding of when, with whom and which languages are used (Swedish vs. home language), discover about parental language skills and bilingualism and learn to manage switch between their home (minority) language, and the language of educational setting (majority language Swedish). Teacher–parent–child interactions constituted sites for managing language and cultural switch during linguistic and cultural transitions between home and preschool and worked as socializing sites for both social categories of adults, parents, as well as preschool teachers, who interacted in routinized ways communicating about children, their needs and experiences. Mealtimes are other routine activities that have been shown to provide conducive conditions and support young bilingual children’s participation and their language development through participation in daily communicative practices. Kultti (2014) in Scandinavian context has examined video-recorded multiethnic preschool mealtimes and the opportunities they offered for children’s communication. Her study shows that mealtimes in early childhood education, similarly to family mealtimes in Israel and USA (Blum-Kulka 1997), constituted spaces where extended and sustained conversational activities were possible. Here, sustained conversational topics could be developed, and children’s knowledge of common and shared topics enhanced their possibilities and abilities to gain participation in such conversations. Notably, mealtime conversations with teachers and peers provided affordances for employing interactional routines, teacher-scaffolded dialogue, and for creative language use that extend beyond repetition of formulaic expressions. Becoming and acting as a competent member of the local community also involves learning what is considered to be polite and appropriate conduct. Such conduct is a matter of socialization into the use of affective stance, gender, and other social norms and values. In several studies of children’s language and cultural socialization in a regular Japanese preschool for 3–5-year-olds where native Japanese and Japanese second language speakers were integrated, Burdelski (2020) shows that children were socialized into the use of particular linguistic and embodied gendered conduct, apologies, and conflict resolution (see also Burdelski 2010; Burdelski and Mitsuhashi 2010). Children were taught (and in their peer group used) Japanese lexical gender characterizations (adjectives “kawaii”) in assessing cute objects and feminine behavior. As a part of teachers’ responses to children’s conflicts, the teachers used prompting routines to inculcate children’s knowledge of formulaic expressions (“Say: can I borrow this”; “say: it’s mine”) and to discern social situations when these formulaic expressions were appropriate. The study provides a fascinating illustration of explicit teaching/socialization into the cultural norms and values through the use of teacher-led approach. Studies from Swedish early childhood settings (immersion kindergarten class, and multilingual preschool) show that children were socialized into different

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discursive ways of peer conflict resolution. They were encouraged to be active agents in solving the problematic events. Even young (3–4-year old) children were requested to provide elaborate responses to teachers’ morally charged questions, articulate, and elaborate their versions of problematic events, and engage in mutual perspective taking as a part of culturally and societally expected ways of acting as morally accountable social actors (see Cekaite 2012, 2020). In sum, studies on language ecology of early education and its socializing potentials show that adult–child conversations provide specific sites for children’s language socialization and learning to use language in culturally specific ways. Adults use instructions and offer conversational support, providing guidelines for socioculturally appropriate conversational performance and adherence to sociocultural norms. However, adult instructions and conversational assistance may also have a constraining effect: by taking a lot of conversational space and making the communicative task easier for the children, adults may also constrain children’s participation. For instance, the interactional ecology that children experience in their daily encounters with adults in educational settings is characterized by marked asymmetry regarding the amount and character of adult and children’s talk (BlumKulka and Snow 2004). Teacher-led activities may reduce time available for free play and for spontaneous peer interactions. By way of contrast, peers may provide less support for conversations than adults do, and in multiparty peer talk, children may need to exert considerable conversational attempts to get and keep their turns and speaker roles.

Language Ideologies and Local Language Practices in Early Education As common to language socialization approach, language practices, including the choice of language, code-switching, and language alternation are related to wider societal and local language ideologies (e.g., language education policies) about what constitutes appropriate language use and hierarchical stratification between various languages. Monolingual or bi /multilingual norms can be imposed or collaboratively co-constructed in the bi- or multilingual early educational settings. Monolingual norms foreground the importance of using a single, usually, the majority societal language. Bilingual/multilingual norms allow and at times propagate the use of multiple languages and code-switching. Therefore, the exploration of what and how specific language ideologies, policies, and language norms are established in early education (including children’s peer groups) are relevant for understanding language identity related issues. The exploration of how the linguistic norms and ideologies affect the possibilities for children to use their minority (heritage) languages can reveal how linguistic ideologies influence socialization, and learning opportunities. Micropolitics of classroom and the socializing potentials of various available activities are of course dependent on and located within the wider societal notions about language learning specifically, as well as children’s well-being and learning

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goals set by the institution. For instance, the guidelines of National or local Curriculum can foreground specific practices as conducive of children’s learning and assign them a central position in language learning ecologies. Children can adhere to these ideologies without showing resistance, but they can also actively reshape the institutional language ideologies or use and exploit them for their own social purposes, engaging in interpretive (re-)production of sociocultural norms and values. There can be a crucial discrepancy between institutional language policy and how it plays out in concrete teacher–child and children’s peer interactions. To illustrate, a study of Swedish preschool, attended primarily by immigrant children who had very different language backgrounds (Kurdish, Arabic, SerboCroatian, Somali, and others) shows that the curriculum emphasis on children’s play as an omnipotent social site for language learning (and its implementation in the local preschool practices by the teachers) was in fact detrimental for several immigrant children’s L2 learning (Cekaite and Evaldsson 2017). Predominant focus on play as a versatile learning activity led to the lack of teacher-guided conversational educational activities with language novices. As demonstrated, there was not an easy one-to-one match between the peer play and children’s progress in L2 communication and learning. Analysis of an immigrant child’s, a 3-year-old Somali girl’s, preschool interactions with peers and teachers (Cekaite and Evaldsson 2017) show that in play, the peers were reproducing the majority society’s monolingual ideologies. In consequence, the educational ideologies that foregrounded the use of play for learning had a negative influence on the novice’s language learning opportunities. Children’s access to full participant roles in play activities might be hampered by their low status in the peer group, and it can jeopardize their access to social interaction with peers. Thus, ethnographic observations and video recordings show that due to the novice’s marginal social position and her basic, rudimentary knowledge of Swedish (children’s peer group’s lingua franca), the girl was precluded from gaining access to shared peer play activities (Cekaite and Evaldsson 2017). These findings highlight the importance for teachers to openly approach the potentials and drawbacks of children’s peer group participation and learning, especially because social interactions with teachers have special importance at the initial phase of L2 learning. Teachers have a considerable role in arranging a welcoming social and linguistic environment for language novices by, for instance, preparing students to take on the role of assistants and helpers (Philp and Duchesne 2008). Teachers’ role in establishing specific norms for bilingual or monolingual language use is brought forward by Puskas and Björk-Willén (2017). Their study of a Swedish monolingual preschool classroom that was attended by several immigrant/ nonnative speaker populations (Romani, Arabic speaking children) shows that teachers’ organization of classroom activities scaffolded children’s language choices. In multilingual and multiethnic groups, children created separate heritage language islands that did not intersect with lingua franca (the majority language) users. When no clear language policies were stipulated by the teachers, who, because of the child-centeredness, did not work on children’s playmates choice, the prospective language of schooling clearly became marginalized in peer group play. Children consistently selected peers with same heritage language as their playmates. Notably,

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children themselves (with adults’ passive support) constructed monolingual language practices. In such way, children’s possibilities for becoming competent speakers of the official language of the educational institution (and future primary school), became limited. As demonstrated, relations between local language practices, language socialization patterns, and local and national language education ideologies are complex and non-linear. Both teachers and children influence language choice in classroom settings.

Children’s Peer Interactions and Structuring of Linguistic Hierarchies For children, becoming full-fledged members of society (in which teacher–child and peer group interactions constitute a daily feature of life) necessarily entails engaging with a variety of interlocutors, taking on a wide range of communicative roles, and developing competences in a variety of conversational and discursive genres. It is because peer groups and their communicative practices (such as play, disputes and arguments, language play, story-telling, and explanations) constitute talk-based childhood cultures (Blum-Kulka et al. 2004; Cekaite et al. 2014) that becoming and acting as a member of a peer group is linked to the process of becoming and acting as a competent member of these particular communities. In preschools, where adult–child interactions may be relatively short and infrequent, peers may provide crucial forms of hearing and using L2 and opportunities for language practice. Studies of children’s bilingual and second language encounters in early education settings reveal that peer group interactions can present various socialization and learning affordances, but also limitations. Young children’s discursive activities are related to and conditioned by the level of their linguistic-pragmatic development that is related to their age, L2 proficiency, or their status of L2 learners. In this sense, the benefits and constraints of peer discourse depend on multiple contextual factors, including children’s age, gender, social class, and ethnicity. Peer discourse involves the children’s ongoing work on social positions and identities, including their orientation to monolingual or multilingual ideologies and value-laden stratification of various languages. Language socialization studies on young children’s L2 socialization in formal and informal settings have convincingly demonstrated the impact of peer interactions on heritage language maintenance or language shift (Paugh 2012, 2019; de Leon 2019). As demonstrated by Paugh (2012, 2019) in her long-term language socialization study conducted in rural Dominica, children showed their resistant linguistic agency in choosing to speak a low status domestic language Patwa (a French-lexicon creole) that was forbidden for them to use by adults who favored children’s use of English (the official language used in schooling and other institutions). Adults’ language ideologies and value-laden stratification of language varieties were contradicted in children’s peer interactions, where they created adult-free spaces for engaging and using Patwa for playful purposes. The study shows children’s sensitivity to the linguistic norms and suggests that the examination of children’s social worlds

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(even when away from adults and educational institutions) can give insights into how and which languages are used and how adults’ language ideologies can be reshaped. Peer talk in bilingual and multilingual education settings also constitutes a significant locus for children’s learning about language varieties, new languages, as well as children’s exploration of societal, educational, and local language ideologies. One of significant findings documented by studies on preschool-aged children is that children can display a strong orientation toward the majority language and devaluate others who are not proficient enough. Children’s peer group strategies to welcome or to exclude language novices and cultural newcomers are documented in a number of studies on early childhood educational settings. For instance, Bernstein (2016) shows that in preschool intercultural interactions between Nepali- and Turkish-speaking children novices and a native English-speaking child in the USA, misunderstandings were used strategically. The English-speaking children exploited the gap in language abilities and pretended to not to understand L2 novices’ talk, and, by using fake misunderstandings, accomplished his own social aims. Such social situations show that misunderstandings are not necessarily “givens that with enough effort and learning on the parts of participants might be repaired or even avoided” (2016; p. 1) but that they can be used to highlight the asymmetry between native and nonnative speakers. Orientation toward the monolingual norm and the hierarchical positioning of a “good” and proficient use of the majority language is also documented in young children’s multilingual and multiethnic groups. Due to immigration patterns, segregation, and complexities of education systems in the globalized world, children from various linguistic and ethnic backgrounds frequently meet in educational groups. In such groups, across a wide range of settings – including early childhood and primary school classrooms – the substantial majority of students can represent a wide mix of minority language backgrounds and language learners frequently serve as each other’s social and interactional partners. To illustrate, young children’s adherence and appreciation of the monolingual, majority language norm is demonstrated in a number of studies on preschools in multiethnic neighborhoods in Sweden (Cekaite and Björk Willén 2013; Puskas and Björk-Willén 2017; Cekaite and Evaldsson 2019). In multilingual groups of immigrant children, numerous languages, target language proficiencies, and variants may be represented, creating ground for children’s attention to correct/incorrect language use and their language awareness. Children can use corrective actions to evaluate and criticize each other’s use of the majority language by initiating so called language-related social situations (Cekaite and Björk Willén 2013). Such situations were multifaceted in that the children, by attending to and criticizing the others’ erroneous majority language production, co-constructed local norms for conduct, and language use, namely, the importance of using correct Swedish. Much like Blum-Kulka’s view of double opportunity space, peer interactions served as a site for language learning, peer group relations, ascription of social identity, and socialization into local norms for language use. The purist norm regarding the proficient use of Swedish in the preschool’s peer group was interactionally achieved by correcting the others’ talk in an outright, unmitigated

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manner or by resolving word searches in non-cooperative manner. The study, confirms the findings of research on slightly older children in primary schools in other cultural contexts (see Karrebæk 2013 on a primary school in Denmark). It suggests that for young children, expertise in the majority language can be a significant factor in organizing social relations. Monolingual norms can be used for the purposes of the hierarchical stratification of the peer group (but see adolescents’ multilingual language practices that can instead enact hybrid language norms and embrace multilingual competences, Rampton 2006; Madsen 2015). Children’s language ideologies can be realized as metalingual reasoning, visible in language-focused talk. Metalingual talk provides important insights into children’s knowledge about different languages and their varieties and children’s motivational factors for bilingualism and majority or minority language learning. A study of children’s spontaneously occurring meta-linguistic talk (Schwartz and Gorbatt 2016) in a dual language (Arabic–Hebrew) preschool in Israel shows that children in these situations socialized each other to linguistic norms concerning language choice. Children pointed out to each other which language to speak with whom and when, focused on language form, or expressed difficulties in understanding talk in L2. Children’s metalingual talk oriented to the wider societal language ideologies (macro-level issues) related to the significant differences between the societal status of minority majority languages. Children were aware of and discussed the asymmetry of the input and possibilities to hear and practice L2 (Hebrew vs. Arabic) on daily basis. In addition to language-focused episodes, code-switching and language alternation may be used as interactional resources to organize the social order of the peer group. It allows for the exploration and/or subversion, as well as cultural (re) production, of adult-based societal language ideologies and norms. Several language socialization studies of bilingual English–Spanish preschools in California show that children oriented to societal and educational notions of English-only educational climate in California and attended to polarizing discourses about national belonging (Kyratzis 2010, 2014). The examination of code-switching in the Spanish peer group shows that it was used to organize peer play interaction in ways that portrayed the tension between their languages, English and Spanish, and reproduced hierarchical and gendered rankings of the languages inscribed in monolingual discourses of the dominant US society. For instance, the Spanish-speaking girls used English for depictions of schooling and Spanish for enactments of the domestic gendered sphere. Only sometimes, in their linguistically hybrid talk, such as when they code-switched within single utterances, they blurred boundaries across play acts and groups of players and enacted linguistically and culturally hybrid identities of the members of the bilingual peer group (Kyratzis 2010). Children also used code-switching to frame pretend play scenes which extended over time and place and socialized each other into decontextualized language use (Kyratzis 2014). Code-switching and peer assistance in dual education programs (e.g., EnglishSpanish or Hebrew-Arabic) can also be implemented as a way of engaging children into sharing their pool of language knowledge and bilingual expertise, and in such way, not only socialize children into using several languages, but also into appreciation of both majority and minority languages. It is shown that young children have

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abilities to attend to their peers’ language skills and, if willing, they can adjust their own language use in order to enhance the others’ understanding. As demonstrated in a dual language classroom a group of kindergarteners in the USA, when teachers organized opportunities for children to act as language mediators (Olmedo 2003), children were able to monitor each other’s comprehension and language use, and, when needed, scaffolded peers and enhanced their comprehension and talk with them. These findings suggest that the hierarchical characteristics of children’s social relations (based on their varying language competences) are not to be taken for granted, and that teachers’ efforts in organizing an open linguistic landscape can pay off with regard to children’s active role in each other’s bilingual development. Children can provide necessary help and assistance for language novices.

Critical Issues and Topics L2 socialization studies have been thus far largely focused on family settings (Ochs and Schieffelin 2012), and research on L2 socialization in early childhood education is much less prominent in the field of linguistic anthropology that specifically aims to connect language and discursive forms and culture of a society. Current research has largely attended to the local communicative culture of classrooms and examined how participation in language learning communities of the classroom may influence children’s L2 learning. Research attention to the wider societal notions is necessary in order to pursue a full-fledged investigation of language socialization into a second language. It is important to demonstrate how society-specific cultural values (e.g., child-centeredness, different understandings of moral accountability, gender, religion, etc.) are dependent on and mediated in the sociocultural context. Cross-cultural studies can build a necessary ground to address these topics and support the development of educational guidelines for teachers. There is a substantial need to learn how teachers in various cultural contexts can assist children L2 speakers in their process of learning about the norms and values of the L1 community.

Future Research Directions Future research can be fruitfully developed by broadening the scope of studies to include a holistic investigation of young children’s multilingual language socialization practices in early childhood education and in families. Further, research can exploit the potentials of longitudinal ethnographic audio–video recordings by engaging in more in-depth analysis of young children’s language skills as they emerge through time and a wider range of target languages and language practices can be explored. There is also considerable need to investigate how multiple modalities (books, writing sheets, computers, and other digital media) and embodied features of conduct are interweaved with language use. It is also pertinent to address the social and cultural socialization in bilingual and multilingual settings, not limiting research focus to specific L2 learning related

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practices. We need to find and systematize ways to research multilingual early education settings (an important characteristic of globalized world). The potentials and drawbacks in terms of children’s interethnic relations, friendships, inclusion, or exclusion, and the potentials of language socialization not only in relation to the majority language community, but also to the community of interethnic relations and multilingual landscapes are promising areas of exploration. Some of the relevant directions for further exploration concern socialization of children into culturally specific patterns of social conduct, such as ways of resolving conflicts, learning to use forms indexing politeness, making friends, and engaging in appropriate classroom conduct. These studies can direct attention to teachers’ socialization strategies and extend beyond the examination of the linguistic features of language instructional input. Cross-cultural comparisons of L2 socialization can provide insights into commonalities and context-dependent specificities of child language socialization. Traditionally, language socialization relies heavily on detailed longitudinal ethnography that collects observations, audio or video recordings of naturally occurring communicative practices and interviews. Although time consuming, the longitudinal character of data is crucial for being able to identify culturally relevant language socialization patterns and their impact on the learners’ communicative repertoires. Furthermore, young children’s perspectives on bilingualism/multilingualism can be fruitfully examined by using novel methodologies, such as visual narratives or technological resources (digital applications, games, etc.).

Conclusions The chapter has described studies on early education and language socialization in bilingual and multilingual settings – preschools and kindergartens – in various cultural contexts worldwide. By conceptualizing language use as social action, socialization to use language is fruitfully conceptualized as socialization into a particular community. Such perspective is rather new in research on young children in bilingual or multilingual life conditions, and it presents a promising path in elaborating our understanding concerning children’s social identities, interactional skills, and participation in the new and complex communities. A deep view on the processes of early language socialization and children’s participation can provide us with insights and possibilities to show to the educationalists and policy makers that children’s language learning is laborious and not effortless process. Social activities and language learning ecologies are highly influenced by educators’ and teachers’ daily organization of communicative activities.

Cross-References ▶ Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education

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Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education ˚ sa Palviainen and Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen A

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Northern European Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The UK Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analyses of ECE Language Policy Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ECE Language Policy Agents and Power: An Ecological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the importance of different types of early language education in the public system according to national policy in two geopolitical contexts: Continental Northern Europe and the UK. We define early language education policy as the language policies in early childhood education (ECE) including planning, practices, and ideologies related to the teaching and learning of languages. We present a variety of theoretical approaches and discuss their applicability to the field of early language education research. These approaches include traditional top-down policy implementation models as well as more dynamic and ecological theoretical approaches. Following that, we look at Å. Palviainen (*) Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: asa.palviainen@jyu.fi X. L. Curdt-Christiansen Department of Education, University of Bath, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_7

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major contributions in the field, presenting empirical studies from Northern Europe and the UK following two lines of research: critical readings of ECE policy documents, and ecological approaches identifying ECE language policy agents and power. Based on our review of the empirical studies, we point out critical issues and topics that need to be addressed, such as prevailing monolingual native speaker norms; how children, communities, and languages are made (in)visible in policy texts; conflicting policy paradigms and ideologies; practical challenges in the implementation of official policy; and also how national policy documents open spaces for multilingual education in ECE. Lastly, we present some new projects in the two sociopolitical contexts and suggest directions for future research based on the idea of ecological systems, in which the roles of different policy actors and agents are examined as a function of the setting and conditions under which they operate. Keywords

Early language education policy · Early Childhood Education (ECE) · Northern Europe · UK · Critical discourse analysis · Ecological approaches · Multilingual children · Monolingual norm

Introduction Early childhood education (ECE) is an important stage in children’s education, with long-term effects on children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. Researchers have long recognized that the study of language education policies in ECE can facilitate our understanding of the connections between, on the one hand, individual children and their spaces for development, and on the other hand, societal planning. Liddicoat (2013, p. 1) points out that “language policies for education play an important role in the ways in which a society articulates and plans for the futures of its members.” The critical transition from home to preschool and on to primary education has forced policy makers and educators to provide clear curriculum guidelines, quality teacher training programs, and a rich language and literacy environment. This chapter focuses on ECE policy research in Northern Europe and UK. The Northern European context is here represented by Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Denmark (including the Faroe Islands and Greenland) and Iceland also belong to Northern Europe but have been left out for reasons of space. The UK context covers four nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The Northern European Context Northern Europe has experienced migration over many decades, and it has been estimated that 150–300 languages are now spoken there (Dewilde and Kulbrandstad

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2016; Honko and Latomaa 2016). Today, nearly 25% of the children enrolled in Swedish ECE have an immigrant background, and the figures are 17% in Norwegian ECE and 9% in Finnish ECE (Björk-Willén 2018; Statistics Norway 2018a; THL 2017). The majority language in Sweden is Swedish, and there are five officially recognized national minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Sámi, Romani, and Yiddish; in Norway, Norwegian is the majority language, with Sámi, Kven, Romani, and Romanes as national minority languages; and Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, with Sámi, Romani, and Karelian as officially recognized minority languages. Finland has two entire, parallel educational systems – from ECE to higher education – one in Finnish and one in Swedish. The rights of sign language users are protected by law in all three countries. As for education policies, speakers of the national minority languages have certain rights with regard to receiving their education in these languages, but the rights vary depending on, for example, the official status of the languages in different regions, and the different ways of implementing language education rights. In all three countries, there are ECE units run partly or entirely in other languages as well (such as English, Russian, or French), mostly in urban areas. In Finland, there are a number of language immersion ECE institutions and schools, primarily in Swedish for Finnish-speaking children (see Björklund et al. 2014, ▶ Chap. 13, “Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland”). Although the Nordic countries exhibit differences in terms of their geographic, cultural, and political history, their ECE systems and policies share a number of features which are sometimes referred to as The Nordic ECE Model (Hännikäinen 2016). These include ECE services; well-educated staff; a holistic view of care, play, lifelong learning; and the development of social, linguistic, and academic skills (Einarsdottir et al. 2015). The Nordic model combines education, instruction, and care for all children aged 0–5 years. In this way, the Nordic model has a different character from elsewhere in Europe, where 0–2-year-olds are enrolled in childcare institutions and 3–5-year-olds usually go to school-like institutions based on more formal teaching (Eurydice 2009). ECE in Sweden, Norway, and Finland is targeted at all children under school age, and the authorities are obliged to arrange it for those who need it. In 2017, 91.3% of children aged 1–5 years in Norway, 84% in Sweden, and 70.7% in Finland attended ECE (Eurydice 2019; National Institute for Health and Welfare 2017; Statistics Norway 2018b). Fees are moderate and are adjusted according to parents’ income, and ECE service providers can be either public (the municipality) or private. The provision of ECE is governed and regulated under one ministry, and steering documents include government acts and decrees on ECE, national curricula, and frameworks (Hännikäinen 2016, p. 1002). A number of studies have analyzed the Nordic ECE Model and have compared, for example, ECE teacher education (Einarsdottir 2013), emergent literacy (Hofslundsengen et al. 2018), and how Nordic ECE guidelines treat content and quality (Vallberg Roth 2014) and the youngest children (1–3 years of age) (Hännikäinen 2016). However, ECE language education policy and practice have rarely been the subject of comparative cross-national analysis (but see Alstad and Sopanen 2020).

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In Norway and Sweden, compulsory primary education begins at the age of 6. In Finland, 6-year-olds participate in mandatory preprimary education until school formally starts at age 7. Mother tongue instruction (MTI) is a right for children with a migrant or minority/heritage language background attending mainstream schooling in Sweden and Finland, throughout all the stages of compulsory schooling (6–15 years of age). It is arranged as a separately taught subject, but the practical arrangements differ in the school and national levels. In contrast, in Norway, students with a migrant background are only entitled to MTI during a transitory period, until they know Norwegian well enough to follow instruction in the mainstream school (Sickinghe 2013, p. 92). Importantly, ECE is not obliged to arrange MTI in any of the three countries (Puskás 2018). However, all three ECE curricula acknowledge the responsibility of ECE to support multilingual development.

The UK Context The four nations of the UK have witnessed considerable demographic changes in recent years. There are now more than 1.5 million pupils in UK schools who between them speak more than 360 languages other than English at home. They are labeled as learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL). EAL learners represent over 21% of the primary school population and nearly 17% of the secondary school population in England. The numbers of learners with EAL are lower in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but they have grown rapidly in the last 10 years. In 2019, 9.2% of pupils in publicly funded schools in Scotland (School Census, Scotland 2018), about 15% of pupils in Wales (School Census, Wales 2019), and 5.7% of primary school pupils in Northern Ireland were EAL learners (The Bell Foundation 2017). These statistics illustrate the increasing linguistic diversity of the UK. The current situation is further complicated by the language history and political ideology in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, for example, Scottish Gaelic and Scots are two long-established languages that have had political dominance and vernacular importance for centuries (Hancock 2014; Sebba 2018). Similarly, Irish (Gaeilge) has been used in Ireland for hundreds of years, despite its low status during the British rule (Dillon 2016; McKendry 2017). In recent years, the government has implemented various policies in schools and the public domains to revitalize Gaeilge, in an effort to increase its cultural and political status (see also ▶ Chap. 12, “Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland”). Nevertheless, despite being an official language, Gaeilge is only spoken by 6% of Ireland’s population (NISRA 2011). In Wales, Welsh was historically used as the only language of the country, but it declined during the twentieth century (Williams 2008). According to the 2011 census, only 19% of Welsh people speak Welsh. In 2018, a survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS, UK) showed that 29.3% of the population of Wales were able to speak Welsh, an increase of more than 10% points. With regard to ECE in the UK, there is neither universal nor obligatory child care education for children under the age of three. However,

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publicly funded part-time childcare programs are available for the most disadvantaged (lower SES) 2–3-year-olds under programs such as Sure Start Services or Flying Start. In all four nations, publicly funded preschool education is available for all 3–4-year-old children, though only on a part-time basis. In England, the free provision is 15 h per week, or 30 h for children with working parents. In the other nations, the free provision ranges from 10 h a week in Wales and 12.5 in Northern Ireland to 15.5 in Scotland. In general, preschool education is provided in nursery schools or in nursery classes incorporated in primary schools. Most children start primary schooling at the age of four in a reception class (age 4–6), which forms part of the foundation stage. Primary school education continues for children until the age of 11 (Eurydice 2017). Despite its linguistic rich heritage and diversity, ECE in the UK provides little minority-language-medium education. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the respective official languages are offered as the medium of education to a limited number of pupils, and in Wales, the Welsh language is offered to all pupils (CCEA 2016), but otherwise, most preschools in the UK use English as the medium of education. Ethnic minority children have little access to preschool education in their heritage language (Hancock 2014; McKendry 2017). In sum, the differences and similarities between Northern Europe and the UK with regard to sociolinguistic contexts and historical sociopolitical development in preschools indicate that in both cases there has been systematic investment in early childhood education. Both contexts show an increasing number of migrant children, but the language-in-educational policies for these children are different. In Northern Europe, mother tongue instruction (MTI) is a right for all migrant children in school and arranged in ECE where possible, whereas in the UK, only the official minority language instruction is available for children with or without migrant background. What particularly needs to be explored now is what types of language education policies are implemented in these countries, and in what ways these policies provide equal access to language education for children with minority language backgrounds and of low socio-economic status, and support rather than undermine multilingualism.

Main Theoretical Concepts In this section, we discuss briefly the core central theoretical concepts related to the study of early language education policy from ecological and critical discourse analysis perspectives. Language policy and language planning are closely related concepts – and are often used as synonyms – but what their relationship and their meanings are depends on the theoretical stance. Some people argue that language planning is a preparatory activity that leads to the formulation of a language policy: a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure, or acquisition of languages within a speech community (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997). Others see language policy as the overarching concept, and as including language planning. Spolsky (2004), for example, identifies three interrelated components under language policy: language practices (the ways

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language(s) are used in a community), language beliefs or ideology (the beliefs the community has about languages and their use), and language management (the efforts to modify or influence language practices). Language management is similar to the notion of language planning in language policy and planning (LPP). In Spolsky’s model, policy comprises practices both intentional and unintentional, ideologies, and management. In this chapter, we use the term language education policies to include planning as well as practices and the ideologies connected with them in relation to the teaching and learning of languages and language policies in ECE. Rather than seeing a unidirectional, top-down process, this concept acknowledges the complexity of processes and dimensions involved in policymaking and implementation. In 1996, Ricento and Hornberger introduced the language policy and planning (LPP) onion metaphor, in which LPP processes were seen to interact across layers – such as national, institutional, and interpersonal – with the classroom teacher at the very center of the onion. The researcher’s task is then to peel the onion layer by layer and examine how “agents, levels, and processes of LPP – permeate and interact with each other in multiple and complex ways” (Ricento and Hornberger 1996, p. 419). Hornberger and Johnson (2007) developed the onion metaphor further and argued the need for slicing the onion through the layers to reveal how micro-level interaction relates to the macrolevels of social organization. García and Menken (2010) later argued for stirring the onion, to shift the emphasis from official education policies to how educators themselves act in classrooms and interact with sociopsychological possibilities, constraints, and other factors; in other words, how teachers “cook” the onion. The importance of teacher agency for language policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation has been the focus of many studies during the last decade, increasingly also in the ECE context (e.g., Schwartz 2018). Language policy as a concept has gradually replaced language planning, as it more clearly encompasses dynamic and multidirectional processes, and the identification of different roles, agents, contexts, and factors in these (Johnson and Ricento 2015). In addition to agency, ideology is a key concept in postmodern approaches to language policy (Hélot and Ó Laoire 2011). Language ideologies can be held by individuals as well as by communities and states. Official language policy documents manifest what is valued in a society and articulate the beliefs and attitudes of the society about (certain) languages and their uses (Liddicoat 2013, p. 1). Policy is created by agents who are influenced by their environment, and it is therefore dialogical and situated in time and space. In the European context, some countries have encouraged curricular reforms in response to the social changes, societal needs, linguistic diversity, and multilingualism caused by the national and transnational movements of recent decades. In order to unpack the policy layers, identify agents and ideologies, and understand the processes, ecological and discourse analytical approaches are commonly applied. Ecological approaches have in common that they strive to understand the interactions within and between certain ecosystems. Hence, language ecological approaches examine the interactions between language(s) and its/their (social) environments (Creese et al. 2008). In the ecological systems theory developed by

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the psychologist Bronfenbrenner (1979), a child is seen as part of complex social ecosystems made up of multiple and interacting environments. Building on his ideas of interrelated micro-, exo-, and macrolevels (or systems), the contextual leadership model (see Fig. 1) sees ECE leadership as a joint enterprise of families and ECE staff and as being affected by regulations, societal and community values, and institutional structures (Nivala 2002; Hujala 2004, pp. 54–55). In the contextual leadership model, the micro system consists of the staff at the childcare unit, its director, and the families. The interaction and cooperation between these micro levels are referred to as the meso system. On the macro level, societal values and institutional structures define the leadership, whereas the exo level between the micro- and macrolevels has an indirect effect on the leadership. At the core of leadership – illustrated by an arrow that crosses all layers in the model – is the substance or mission of the ECE itself, such as the curriculum. Leadership in this sense is regarded as “interactions between the substance of ECE, the actors in the process, and the structures of an organisational environment” (Hujala 2004, p. 55). The contextual leadership model shares important features with the concept of educational partnership (Epstein 2011), in which teachers, families, and communities share overlapping responsibilities for the child’s growth. Despite their great analytical

Fig. 1 The contextual leadership model (Adapted from Nivala 2002, p. 16, and Hujala 2004, p. 54), reused with permission of the authors and the publisher

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potential, the contextual leadership and the educational partnership models have rarely been employed to describe language education policy processes in ECE (see, however, section “ECE Language Policy Agents and Power: An Ecological Perspective”). In discourse analytical approaches to language policy, the researcher can reveal “ways in which language defines and sets limits on what is said and understood in the policy context by discursively organising the categories for thinking about and acting on language” (Liddicoat 2013, p. 11). By applying critical discourse analysis (CDA, e.g., Wodak and Meyer 2009), policy discourse as an instrument of power and control and as a reproducer of ideological systems can be brought into focus. Document analysis of official policies can reveal ideological discourses embedded in and as text and problematize how language is used to reproduce or transform culture, society, and power relations. In nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), policy discourses on different micro and macro scales can be related and connected. The focus of analysis is policy as social action (such as a phenomenon or a practice) and can be researched with the help of interviews, observations, text/media analysis, surveys, photography, and/or video-/audio recordings. Nexus analysis has proved to be a powerful tool for understanding a policy action because it identifies the intersections of the historical body of the individuals involved, the discourses in place, i.e., the material and conceptual context in which the action takes place, and the interaction order, i.e., the relations among the actors involved (Hult 2015). In the following, we provide a review of major contributions to the field of language education policy in ECE in the context of the Northern European countries and the UK.

Major Contributions The research to be reviewed falls into two types: analyses of ECE policy documents and empirical studies on ECE language education policy from an ecological perpective. The former is informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA), whereas the second, relying on ecological and ethnographic approaches, centers on how language education policies are implemented, interpreted, and challenged by different policy agents.

Analyses of ECE Language Policy Documents Northern Europe The first line of research, particularly relevant in the Norwegian and Swedish contexts and increasingly so in Finland, is the critical examination of national steering documents from the point of view of whether they enable or restrict access to multilingual education in ECE (Johnson and Ricento 2015, pp. 41–42). Some of the studies in this group examine official language policy trajectories over time and as a function of the temporal, sociopolitical, and ideological context in which they operated. By way of example, Gruber and Puskás (2013) examined how ethnic and linguistic diversity was constructed in official reports of the Swedish Government

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and in national steering documents for ECE since the 1970s. They described a trajectory since the 1970s and through the 1980s, when language policies were based on ideas of integration (rather than assimilation) and on a strong political belief in the importance of providing ECE in immigrant children’s mother tongue (see Arnberg 1996; Hyltenstam and Tuomela 1996 for a comprehensive and critical account of the so-called home language reform). This was followed in the early 1990s by a period of economic recession in Sweden, when discourses of bilingualism were replaced with discourses of (multi-) culture. Culture was constructed as something fixed and a property of immigrants only (not of the majority speakers of Swedish); it was at the same time an exotic and exciting as well as a problematic and challenging element that could be brought into ECE work (Gruber and Puskás 2013). More recent analyses have shown this tendency to persist: in the newest Swedish ECE curriculum, implemented in 2019, multicultural identity is ascribed only to children of the national minorities and children with a foreign background (Rosén and Straszer 2018). Kulbrandstad (2017) analyzed white papers on Norwegian immigration policy between 1980 and 2016. She was able to identify a notable switch in official language educational policy toward the end of the 1990s: from bilingualism as a long-term educational goal, to seeing the mother tongue primarily as a transitional tool to develop Norwegian. ECE was then given as an important task the development of all children’s literacy in Norwegian and of their Norwegian language skills, with the goal of preparing children for mainstream school. Several scholars (e.g., Alstad 2013; Bubikova-Moan 2017; Otterstad and Andersen 2012; Pesch 2017) have pointed out the goals of the ECE staff focus strongly on developing children’s Norwegian as an L2 rather than supporting children’s multilingualism. The Nordic ECE model is first and foremost based on play rather than instruction which places the staff in a demanding situation. Similar complexities and challenges in implementing official language policies have been noted in the Swedish context: on the one hand, it is in practice difficult to give equal support to all of the languages children speak (Puskás and Björk-Willén 2017), and on the other hand, little concrete advice is given in the steering documents as to how to support the development of Swedish as an L2 (Björk-Willén 2018; Gruber and Puskás 2013). Important contributions to the LPP field are also studies that have analyzed Nordic ECE language policy texts as discourse and have explored what the labeling of children and languages tells about power, status, and ideologies (Liddicoat 2013). As to how these children have been labeled in official documents over time in a Swedish context, Gruber and Puskás (2013) show that they have been referred to as foreigner, immigrant, bilingual, and multicultural, and in more recent policy texts, from 2000 onward, as multilingual, having another mother tongue than Swedish or having a foreign/migrant background (see also Rosén and Straszer 2018). The policy term multilingual children was introduced to refer to children who themselves or whose parents had migrated to Sweden, and the label was applied irrespective of whether the child actually identified with, knew, or used more than one language (György Ullholm 2010). Conversely, children of Swedish background were by default seen as monolingual speakers of Swedish.

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In Norway, Sickinghe (2013) found that multilinguals are constructed as someone whose mother tongue is not Norwegian, and as “an outgroup member of the . . . school population” (2013, p. 102). The most commonly applied term in Norwegian policy discourse for children whose mother tongue is not Norwegian, Sámi, Swedish, Danish, or English is, however, minority language children (Statistics Norway). Strange as it may appear, as Bubikova-Moan (2017) explains, children with one of the three last-mentioned languages are included in the majority as it is assumed that children speaking these languages will have sufficient skills to communicate with the ECE staff (Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are Scandinavian languages, to some or a high extent mutually comprehensible; English is taught in Norwegian schools and the level of competence is generally high). The term newly arrived is used in Sweden and Norway, but not in Finland (Honko and Latomaa 2016), and particularly refers to those who arrived during the so-called migration crisis in the autumn of 2015, when Europe experienced the largest migration waves since the Second World War (Axelsson and Juvonen 2016). The term connotes to individuals who were born somewhere else and have only recently entered into the host country. In the first Finnish ECE curriculum, from 2003, children with a non-mainstream (not Finnish or Swedish) background were referred to as with an immigrant background, with a different language and cultural background, or with their roots in Sámi or Roma culture; whereas in the most recent one, from 2016, they are referred to as multilingual or children with a foreign language as mother tongue. In the current curriculum, children who are speakers of national minority languages are defined by their cultural and parental heritage, not in terms of language: Sámi and Roma children. Taken together, the labeling of children in official discourse in these three national contexts shows that there is an implicit norm of children who are native speakers of the majority language, and whose parents were both born into the society in question and have no recent history of immigration. Children who do not meet these criteria are defined and positioned in terms of the languages they do or do not speak, the cultures they are associated with, and importantly, their parents’ heritage, regardless of how they identify themselves. The analysis of changes in the labeling of speakers and their language(s) over time also makes visible ideologies and attitudes toward languages as rooted in the prevailing historical-societal context. Sometimes, explicit attempts to change conceptualizations have been done. One example of this is prestige planning, i.e., language planning activities carried out in relation to the ways in which particular language varieties are perceived and valued, including promotional activities (cf. Liddicoat 2013, p. 2). An illustrative case was when the term home language was officially replaced by mother tongue in Sweden in the mid-1990s. This replacement was done as “home language” was regarded as derogatory, suggesting that the language spoken at home was somehow of lower status than the languages spoken outside the home (Hyltenstam and Tuomela 1996). In current Nordic policy discourse, mother tongue is thus the term used rather than home language. Notably, individuals are assumed to have only one mother tongue (Palviainen and Bergroth

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2018; Rosén and Straszer 2018). The 2016 Finnish ECE curriculum, however, opens up for new conceptualizations as it explicitly mentions that a child may have more than one mother tongue (Mård-Miettinen et al. 2018; Sopanen 2018), and the most recent Finnish curriculum for primary and secondary education explicitly spells out that every student is multilingual (Tarnanen and Palviainen 2018). The new discourses that have emerged in the newest Finnish curricula can thus be seen as another type of prestige planning, empowering all children with multilingual competences.

The UK In the UK context, ECE language policies have also been under critical scrutiny. Although official language policies exist in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland for indigenous languages, such as Gaelic, Welsh, and the Scots (also known as minoritized languages); language education policies for ethnic immigrant minorities have rarely been featured in curriculum documents. In England, language education policies are mainly concerned with learning modern foreign languages (MFL) (e.g., Hancock 2014; Lanvers and Coleman 2017) and developing ethnic minority learners’ English skills. The ECE curriculum emphasizes 17 learning goals, none of which relates to modern languages or home language learning. The goals related to language learning cover basic literacy skills in English only (DfE 2014). An analysis of the few relevant, and limited, language education policies/curricula indicates that ethnic languages have received scant policy attention (Cohen et al. 2018; Faulkner and Coates 2013; McKendry 2017; Safford and Drury 2013). Analyzing The Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (DfE and DoH 2011; DfEE 1996; DfES 2007) over the past 20 years, Faulkner and Coates (2013) point out that home language and literacy skills have not been given adequate recognition in children’s overall social and academic development. Indeed, the 2017 Statutory Framework (DfE 2017, p. 9) reiterates the importance of English language skills for school readiness, as illustrated below: For children whose home language is not English, providers must take reasonable steps to provide opportunities for children to develop and use their home language in play and learning, supporting their language development at home. Providers must also ensure that children have sufficient opportunities to learn and reach a good standard in English language during the EYFS: ensuring children are ready to benefit from the opportunities available to them when they begin Year 1. When assessing communication language and literacy skills, practitioners must assess children’s skills in English, if a child does not have a strong grasp of the English language, practitioners must explore the child’s skills in the home language with parents and/or carers, to establish whether there is cause for concern about language delay.

While the policy gives some recognition to home languages, the emphasis is clearly on English language skills. Especially when it comes to assessment, home languages do not appear to matter much (Tsimpli 2017) unless there is “cause of concern about language delay” (DfE 2017, p. 9).

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It should be noted that in policy documents and public discourse, children with home languages other than English have been labeled as learners of English as additional language (EAL). A large number of curriculum documents have been published, and the number of studies related to EAL has been gradually growing in recent years (Leung 2016; Flynn and Curdt-Christiansen 2018). Constant Leung (2016) carried out a comprehensive review of the changes in EAL policy by focusing on provisions and conceptualizations of EAL in the past 30 years. He critically highlighted the notion of “equality in education” as the underpinning ideology that influenced the “mainstreaming EAL” approach to teaching EAL pupils. While the ideological argument for equality seemed to make sense, pedagogical approaches to teaching have not taken into consideration the linguistic needs of EAL pupils. Flynn and Curdt-Christiansen’s (2018) examination of the policy documents also indicated that bilingualism and diversity have been portrayed more as a barrier to developing English skills than as an opportunity to develop multilingual skills. More studies related to the critical analysis of ECE language education policies have been conducted in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland than in England, probably because of their historical linguistic heritages. In Northern Ireland, research into language education policies has centered on the revitalization of Irish, and Irish/ English bilingual policies (Collen et al. 2017; Dillon 2016; McKendry 2007, 2017). McKendry (2017), for example, examined Northern Ireland’s primary school curricula for the past 30 years. He found that the discourse about learning Irish has been controversial since political bodies such as the Northern Ireland state and the Unionist community are negatively disposed to the Irish language. As a consequence, Irish was placed together with French, Spanish, and German as part of primary languages (CCEA 2007) and was not a mandatory subject in primary schools. The most recently revised curriculum (CCEA 2016) has given statutory force to “Education for Mutual Understanding” (EMU), which makes it possible to integrate the teaching of Irish language into the teaching of citizenship and cultural heritage. While Irish as the indigenous language has, to a certain extent, gained political recognition in education, these authors argued that despite the new arrivals from Europe and elsewhere, language diversity has barely been mentioned in policy documents. Similarly, scholars in Scotland have looked into language education policies toward regional languages (Gaelic and Scots), MFL, and migrants’ languages in Scotland (Hancock 2014; Sebba 2018; Walsh and McLeod 2008). Highlighting the rich Scottish linguistic culture, Hancock (2014) points out that Gaelic revitalization has been steady in education because of the strong political movement of nationalism and substantial investment in the provision of Gaelic-medium education in both primary schools and nurseries. While the government is concerned about the educational achievement of the Gaelic-medium programs, effective pedagogical guidelines still need to be provided. Policy-making debates should move away from “a rhetoric of linguistic survival and cultural enrichment” (Hancock 2014, p. 171) to a broader framework that promotes bilingualism and multilingualism and includes ethnic minority languages in education programs. Wales has a long history of Welsh teaching in preschools. Although the ideologies underpinning Wales’ language education policy are similar to those that prevail in

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Scotland and Northern Ireland, the revitalization of Welsh has been more effective than that of Gaelic and Irish (Hancock 2014). This is because Welsh is not only taught in Welsh-medium primary and preschools, but it is also a compulsory subject in the National Curriculum for all pupils from 3 to 16 years of age (Jones and MartinJones 2004). In analyzing the current curriculum for Welsh-medium and bilingual Welsh/English schools, Williams (2008) underlines the fact that bilingual education has been mainstreamed in Wales, and Welsh teaching is given to all pupils, regardless of their linguistic background as a Welsh L1 or L2 speaker. This sends the important message that Welsh belongs to everyone, not just to a small number of minority speakers. While the curriculum puts a strong emphasis on “developing children’s understanding of the cultural identity unique to Wales across all Areas of Learning through an integrated approach” (Curriculum for Wales 2015), the home languages of non-Welsh heritage speakers are not apparent in the policy. With regard to the terminologies used about languages other than English or minoritized regional languages such as Gaelic or Scots, Flynn and Curdt-Christiansen (2018) found that home language and community language have been used in official documents. About minority language-speaking pupils, EAL pupils or learners is the most frequently used term in the UK, but new arrivals, newcomers, and isolated learners have also been used in various curriculum documents (Conteh 2013). Other terms used in the official discourse include bilingual, multilingual, inclusion, diversity, and ethnicity (Flynn and Curdt-Christiansen 2018). These terms labeling migrant children have a strong ideological connotation for policy makers. They indicate the political and ideological position of the government.

ECE Language Policy Agents and Power: An Ecological Perspective Northern Europe A second research trend is the examination of ECE language policy agents and power, and how agency and power are distributed and employed across educational institutions and contexts as a multilayered language policy activity (cf. Johnson and Ricento 2015). In the recent research project Language conceptions and practices in bilingual early childhood (Academy of Finland, 2013–2017) which focused on bilingual Finnish/Swedish-speaking children enrolled in minority Swedish-language ECE in Finland, policy and agency were examined from several different angles. Spolsky’s (2004) model of language policy, as consisting of language practices, language beliefs and ideologies, and language management, was used as a general point of departure, and nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) was applied as an analytical tool to unpack layers of policy discourse. The ECE units focused on in the project were situated in three different regions – two bilingual cities and one Finnish unilingual city – with different linguistic demographics and different obligations toward the Finnish- and Swedish-speaking populations. These varying meso and macro conditions (cf. the contextual leadership model in Fig. 1) turned out to provide different constraints on the daily ECE work. While the ECE principals in the two bilingual cities had good structural and peer

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support for carrying out their work, the principal in the Finnish unilingual city had to put much effort into advocating for Swedish ECE among her superiors, who had little understanding of minority language rights (Palviainen and Bergroth 2016). In examining the notion of ECE partnership (Epstein 2011) for bilingual development, Bergroth and Palviainen (2016) observed that parents, teachers, and the principals all had a generally positive and friction-free picture of bilingualism: language mixing practices between all stakeholders, including the children, were allowed. However, the parents and the staff were also in strong agreement that the extensive use of Finnish with children was undesirable and that supporting Swedish was the highest priority, in order to secure the linguistic rights of Swedish speakers and to prepare individual children for school in that language. In another study in the same project, Bergroth and Palviainen (2017) examined the complex relationships between declared, perceived, and practiced policies (Bonacina-Pugh 2012) at the ECE units and how these interrelated with individual (child) agency and (institutional) practice structures. In this case, there were two declared national policies in effect with potentially conflicting aims: on the one hand, the monolingual language policy for ECE which sought to guarantee the linguistic rights of Swedish speakers, and on the other hand, the policy of promoting each child’s personal well-being along with the child’s right to act and develop his/her own unique person (STAKES 2005). The examination of perceived and practiced policies of and among bilingual children and the staff in the three ECE units showed that the education policy focusing on individual linguistic needs seemed to take precedence over the monolingual language policy. Moreover, the linguistic exo environment in which the ECE unit was situated had an impact on the policies: the more the minority language was used in the surrounding community, the less problematic the dominance of the majority language (Finnish) and bilingualism was experienced to be. Taking the findings of the project together, they showed the intricate ecologies and complexities that exist among policies, layers, actors, and factors, and also that the center of the LPP onion is not necessarily the teacher but the child and his/her agency and policy understandings. A special issue, edited by Boyd and Huss (2017), particularly focused on children as policymakers in mainstream Swedish ECE, as well as English-, Finnish-, and Spanish-language preschools in Sweden. The Swedish preschools varied with regard to language backgrounds of the children and how language policies were implemented. In one mainstream ECE classroom, the explicitly expressed policy was to support all the languages spoken by the children. There was, however, no special arrangements in place to accomplish this. In another classroom, two teachers of languages other than Swedish came in for a couple of hours every day to support children with another mother tongue than Swedish. In yet another classroom, staff were speaking another language than Swedish consistently during most of the day. Children served as policy-makers in these different contexts in that they discussed and evaluated their own and other children’s language practices, and they supported each other linguistically but could also exclude others by means of language. The studies presented in this special issue as a whole show that official policies in Sweden promote and support multilingual development, but the ways in which

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they are implemented vary widely involving many agents and with different degrees of success. Pesch (2017) carried out a qualitative ethnographic case study of the discursive conditions for linguistic practice in two ECE units, one in Norway and one in Germany. Drawing on Bakhtinian concepts and nexus analysis, she could see that the Norwegian ECE first and foremost viewed multilingualism from a dualistic point of view (a mother tongue + Norwegian); whereas the German ECE unit had a more dynamic view of multilingualism. An analysis of the linguistic landscapes in the two units showed, however, intriguing patterns: although the staff in the Norwegian ECE upheld a primarily monolingual (Norwegian) oral discourse, the visual linguistic landscapes reflected multilingualism. The German ECE, in contrast, made use of multilingual oral practices, but the linguistic landscapes were dominated by German. Pesch found also that staff and parents had different understandings of multilingualism. Important implications of the study are, methodologically, the need to include multiple types of data to mirror different (potentially conflicting) voices and, theoretically, the need to understand ECE language ideologies, practices, and management as inherently complex.

The UK In the UK, policy agent engagement in ECE policy has begun to receive some research attention. In England, studies tend to focus on parents’ involvement in their children’s heritage and English language development. Curdt-Christiansen and LaMorgia (2018) conducted a study in England that looked at how parents manage heritage language development in three communities: Chinese, Italian, and Pakistani. Using a questionnaire and interviews, they found that parents’ language management efforts were motivated by their aspirations to enrich their children’s language repertoire which included the home language. The family language input indicated, however, that sociocultural and sociopolitical realities present difficulties and constraints that prevent families from developing literacy in the home language. In all three communities, parents had an active role in providing resources for developing English language skills. Also looking at the parental role in minority language maintenance and revitalization, Edwards and Newcombe (2005) conducted a study in Wales to understand how health professionals work with parents to raise awareness of the social, cultural, cognitive, and economic benefits of bilingualism. As Welsh language has been in decline for over a century, initiatives to reverse language shift have been implemented in (pre)schools. While Welsh-medium schools have played a pivotal role in slowing language shift, there is mounting evidence of overreliance on education. The paper reported a project involving parents, health workers, and professionals. Through observations of health workers and interviews with parents and other agents, the project showed that statutory policy alone would not be able to achieve the goal of reversing language shift (Fishman 1991); what was also needed was building strong alliances and involving policy agents such as professional groups and organizations (nurses, therapists, and preschool teachers) that work with families with young children.

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Looking at teachers as policy agents, Flynn and Curdt-Christiansen (2018) explored how teachers at different levels interpret the recent EAL policy in England. Using a questionnaire as their tool of enquiry, the researchers sought to find out what policy had been implemented and from where or from whom teachers sought support for their EAL teaching. While the teachers found it difficult to understand the new assessment policy for English as additional language (EAL) learners (DfE 2017), they took on an agentive role when turning to senior colleagues for help when encountering teaching difficulties. It has long been acknowledged that young children bring to school a variety of skills and knowledge that they have acquired at home and in other contexts (Conteh 2012; Conteh and Brock 2011; Gregory 2008; Kelly 2010). Such an acknowledgment views young children as active and powerful agents in their own learning. Their teachers, however, may play a vital role in shaping the school experiences of their bilingual pupils. Conteh and Brock (2011) employed ethnographic methods and an ecological approach to studying how teachers can create “safe spaces” in schools for young bilingual children to use their linguistic and cultural knowledge. They found that multilayered policies and practices can either create or constrain safe multilingual spaces, through teachers’ words, such as “well done” or “be silent” in minority languages and their arrangement of learning settings, such as providing bilingual corners where pupils can experience a sense of belonging. With regard to revitalizing minoritized official languages, Hickey, Lewis, and Baker (2014) conducted a study on policy and practice in Welsh-medium preschools. Employing mixed methods, the researchers observed four cylchoedd (Welshmedium play groups) and interviewed the principals. The observation and interview data served as the basis for developing a question protocol for a focus group and a large survey for principals. Survey data were collected from 162 principals in areas attended by a mix of L1 and L2 Welsh-speaking children. The findings indicated that the principals made different decisions on whether Welsh was used in their cylchoedd depending on the children’s L1. The decisions reflect the principals’ individual agency in interpreting language policy, adhering either to a strong immersion policy of speaking only Welsh or to a policy based on individual children’s language background. In sum, ecological approaches to language education policies in the context of Northern Europe and the UK have illustrated the critical aspects of not only creating multilingual spaces for young children but also of acknowledging children as multilingual policy agents themselves. Such approaches recognize the different amount of knowledge and power brought to young multilingual children’s learning processes by all the different policy actors and agents. The above illustrative cases also show (see also ▶ Chap. 21, “Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts”) the importance of educational partnerships (Epstein 2011): parents’ engagement in their children’s learning, either through activities, language use, or expectations, can provide their children with rich linguistic and cultural environments as well as offer opportunities to promote their children’s learning.

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Critical Issues and Topics Although multilingualism is celebrated in the Northern Europe policy discourse, the critical readings of the steering documents showed that native (and monolingual) speakers of the majority ((pre)school) language are presented as the norm and default. If bi-/multilingualism or cultural heritage is mentioned, they are primarily ascribed to children with a background other than the norm, and therefore serve to define these as different and potentially in need of support (cf. Bubikova-Moan 2017). The most recent Finnish curricula differ in this respect as they present the individual as inherently multilingual and recognize that a child can have more than one mother tongue. As for the Nordic ECE model, certain contradictory elements and practical challenges can be identified. First, as pointed out by Runfors (2013), according to the model, ECE should promote both cultural diversity and cultural unity (i.e., the majority culture). Second, multilingualism should be endorsed while at the same time ECE should prepare every child for school by promoting literacy in the majority language. (This is particularly evident in the Norwegian context.) Third, although the idea of Nordic ECE is based on play and informal learning, there is an increasing expectation that ECE will teach academic and language skills and prepare the child for school (Runfors 2013). As ECE is optional and families decide whether or not to use it, there is also a risk that children will not all be in the same position when compulsory school starts. To overcome some of these problems, it is of the utmost importance that steering documents that express well-meaning ideologies and intentions are complemented with concrete guidelines as to how to implement the intentions and deal in practice with ECE’s complex missions. This is particularly true in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, in order to secure the rights of children who speak other languages than the majority language. Within the UK context, home, schools, and communities need to come together to discuss how language education policies can be formulated and applied to ensure that children’s social and academic needs are met. From an ecological perspective, several points deserve more attention. First, “conflicting policy paradigms” (Safford 2003, p. 8) should be eliminated. The conflicts are reflected in policy statements which advocate the celebration of ethnic and linguistic diversity but in reality require the “universal” model of language. As Conteh (2012) noted, “the celebration of ethnic and linguistic diversity” should be reflected in curriculum documents and assessment policies to allow minority languages to be taught and assessed in mainstream settings. Otherwise, children, their families, and their teachers will continue to be caught in the conflicts affecting the social and academic lives of these multilingual children. Second, in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the relationship between nationalism and language education needs to be reevaluated. The emphasis on nationalism and language education has excluded other minority language pupils from having an equal language right to study either the national language or their mother tongue. Third, attention should be paid to the imbalance in the power relationship between policy agents and actors. While parents, ECE principals, teachers, and children can exert their agentive roles in policy practices,

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policy makers should take these actors’ views into consideration when policy documents are produced. While there is strong government support for teaching English to newcomers, there is little formal policy in relation to ethnic community languages. Although these languages are relevant for intercultural and academic development as well as for social cohesion, they are often not valued or accredited in the formal educational context (Ayres-Bennett and Caruthers 2018).

New Projects Recent transnational movements have not only intensified the encounters of different traditions, sociocultural values, and political positions, but also enriched the societal linguistic repertories, contributing to the “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007) of postmodern society. The following ongoing or recently concluded projects in the Nordic countries and the UK all serve to respond to these linguistic and demographic changes. Of the Nordic countries in focus of this book chapter, only Finland is currently active in running projects about language policy and multilingualism in the ECE context. These projects all have a clear language education perspective and are based on language ideologies apparent in current official policies (such as the newest ECE and school curricula). Based on the conclusions and recommendations in the national language strategy (Tallroth 2012) and Pyykkö’s (2017) report on the national language resources, the Finnish government and the National Agency for Education in Finland give financial support to early-start language immersion and teaching (2017–2020) (https://www.oph.fi/fi/koulutus-ja-tutkinnot/kielteno petuksen-kehittaminen; in Finnish only). The aim is to develop forms for innovative language teaching and stimulate language awareness in ECE and school. The Finnish 2016 ECE curriculum, which makes more and clearer provisions than before for multilingual pedagogies, has made it possible to launch research projects such as maps and compasses for innovative language education (2018–2021) (https://www. jyu.fi/edupsy/fi/tutkimus/hankkeet-projects/iki/in-english-1), the aim of which is to provide a platform for good language teaching practices all the way through from ECE to secondary schools, and ECE teacher training modules such as Language pearl (2018–2020) (https://www.abo.fi/centret-for-livslangt-larande/sprakparla; in Swedish only), in which ECE teachers elaborate on their multilingual and language awareness teaching practices under the guidance of researchers. Founded in Helsinki in relation to Finland’s 100-year anniversary celebrations in 2015, HundrED.Org is a not-for-profit organization which seeks and shares inspiring innovations in K12 education all over the world, such as how to carry out a bilingual pedagogy in ECE (https://hundred.org/en/innovations/billingual-pedagogy-in-early-childhoodeducation). In the UK, there are a number of research projects examining language policy and practice. These do not focus on ECE as such but take a broader perspective. The project Foreign, indigenous and community languages in the devolved regions of the UK: policy and practice for growth (2017–2020) (http://www.modernlanguages

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leadershipfellow.com) focuses on policy in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and searches for the successful components of existing strategies for indigenous, minoritized languages and community languages. The project Audit of Complementary Schools in Scotland (2014–2017) (https://www.ceres.education.ed.ac.uk/research-2/research) gathered information about complementary schools and community language schools across Scotland, with a particular focus on the ways in which these schools help to support the Scottish Government’s 1 + 2 language strategy. Multilingualism: Empowering individuals, transforming societies (2016–2020) (http://www.meits.org) focuses on attitudes toward multilingualism and language policy among both the general public and key stakeholders, and has a particular focus on foreign language learning. Other projects with focus on different types of community contexts and language policy and practices include: Family Language Policy: A Multi-Level Investigation of Multilingual Practices in Transnational Families (2017–2020) (https://familylanguagepoli.wixsite.com/ familylanguagepolicy), which looks into the types of family language policy (FLP) that exist in the UK by involving three communities – Chinese, Polish, and Somalian. Here to Stay? Identity, citizenship and belonging among settled Eastern European migrant children and young people in the UK (2016–2019) (http://www. migrantyouth.org) is another project that explores the lives of young people (12– 18 years old) who arrived as migrant children from Eastern and Central European countries. In sum, these national council-funded projects described here illustrate that languages and diversity are fundamental components of modern societies, and that the educational systems in these societies are important objects of study. In both contexts, the different ECE programs and research projects not only promote critical awareness of cultural and language diversity, but also address the practical challenges and opportunities that language diversity brings.

Future Research Directions Alstad and Sopanen (2020) claim that ECE language education policy is an empty space, and therefore is under-researched. One reason for this, they suggest, is that ECE is not regarded as formal schooling in Northern Europe. Thus language policy in that context is probably seen as less significant than in formal school contexts despite the role of early language learning in developing children’s identity, values, empathy, and respect (European Commission 2011). More critical discourse analytical-oriented ECE policy document analyses are needed to give a more complete picture, including different contexts across the globe. Another area for future research is the processes behind official policy-making and the actions of policy designers and policy makers and others who are involved in the decision-making processes. Official national policies, curricula, and government reports, which are authoritative and may have a big impact, are not produced in a vacuum but are written by individuals or groups of individuals who are members of a certain society. Bergroth (2016) produced an insightful study on how a chapter on bilingual education in the current Finnish core curriculum came about. As she was

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part of the working group, she had access to the minutes of meetings and could reveal the discourses that emerged, were negotiated, and eventually were included or dismissed in the final version. The process of policy-making – on any level – could well be examined from ecological or nexus analytical perspectives to discern how actors, factors, and ideologies interrelate. Also, the effects of major curriculum reforms deserve careful attention, not only in terms of how they affect classroom practices, but also in terms of how individual teacher beliefs and ideologies are changed as a consequence of the reforms (Bergroth and Hansell 2020; Sopanen 2019; Tarnanen and Palviainen 2018). A growing body of studies has looked at the preschool child as an active language policymaker (see section “ECE Language Policy Agents and Power:”). Studies should also explore educational partnerships (Epstein 2011) and how families and ECE can and do interact for the benefit of the child and his/her personal growth and multilingual development (Schwartz 2018). In the research area of distributed leadership (e.g., Spillane 2006), leadership is seen as a joint enterprise undertaken by several stakeholders – teachers, parents, and children – working to achieve common educational goals. This type of ecological research perspective opens up opportunities for cross-disciplinary approaches and the beneficial synergy that they generate. As for agents, there is one key actor who is surprisingly often overlooked in research (Ascenzi-Moreno et al. 2016) despite his/her role as a language policy gatekeeper: the ECE principal. The roles and complex tasks of the principal (see Fig. 1.1) have only recently emerged as an area of interest within the research field of ECE (Rodd 2013; Schwartz 2013), and so far, very little attention has been paid to his/her role in navigating and mediating across micro-, exo-, and macrolanguage policies. The contextual leadership model illustrated in Fig. 1 provides both a conceptual and practical understanding of the important role of the principal.

Conclusions This chapter has provided an overview of current theories and research on language education policies in early childhood education and concluded that language policy in its essence is complex with many layers of agents, ideologies, and context which interact with each other. This means that, to come back to the LPP onion metaphor presented in section “Main Theoretical Concepts” the LPP onion can hardly be said to have layers that can be neatly peeled back, one by one. A more appropriate metaphor is probably a rather chaotic pile of overlapping, sliced onion rings lying on a chopping board: it is our job as researchers to see the structures and patterns hidden in that pile of onion rings. Consequently, we have focused on critical discourse analytical and ecological approaches in order to unpack and understand these complexities and to reveal power relations and language ideologies embedded in policy-making. Based on our review of the empirical studies, we have pointed out critical issues and topics that need to be addressed, such as prevailing monolingual native speaker norms; how children, communities, and languages are made (in) visible in policy texts; conflicting policy paradigms and ideologies; practical

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challenges in the implementation of official policy; and also how national policy documents open spaces for multilingual education in ECE. Although the chapter took Northern Europe and the UK as the point of departure, the reasonings and findings can be generalized to, contrasted with, or related to many other national and ECE contexts around the globe. We are, however, also aware that we have touched upon only a small part of the complexities in the national contexts we have examined and that there are many research questions that remain unanswered.

Cross-References ▶ Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland ▶ Early Language Education in Australia ▶ Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland

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Ethical Issues in Research with Young Children in Early Second Language Education Ma´ire Mhic Mhathu´na and No´irín Hayes

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Language Learning Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociocultural Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Situated Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Symmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Roles in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roles of Adults in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Guidelines and Regulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consent, Assent, and Dissent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ongoing Consent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Confidentiality and Anonymity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Access to Research Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Expectations About Consent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Values and Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ownership of Ideas, Practices, and Academic Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Languages in Fieldwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language of Publication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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M. Mhic Mhathúna (*) School of Languages, Law and Social Sciences, Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] N. Hayes School of Education, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_8

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Power Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Positionality: Insider Versus Outsider Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time and Familiarization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Analysis and Report Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Issues and Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key Points for Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

There is a growing field of second language research in early childhood education and a corresponding need to consider the ethical questions that arise in conducting research with young second language children in a variety of contexts. These contexts include children learning major languages such as English as an additional language and minority or heritage languages such as the Irish language or Galician. Relevant theoretical concepts such as theories of second language learning, children’s rights, and ethical research praxis will be considered and contributions from major researchers on adults’ and children’s roles in research, relationships, and research principles will be reviewed. New projects that foreground respect for diverse communities will be described. Critical issues such as power and positionality, choice of languages in data collection and publications, and the need for time for familiarization in the field will be discussed. Ethical dilemmas will be used to illustrate the tensions that can arise in the course of research with young children and the limited nature of the discussion of these issues to date will be highlighted. Finally, future research directions will be identified and greater research cooperation between the disciplines of applied linguistics and early childhood education will be proposed to represent the views and experiences of young children learning second languages in the early years. Keywords

Early childhood education · Research ethics · Second language learning · Children’s rights · Ethical dilemmas

Introduction Early Language Learning Research The focus in this chapter will be on research on second language learning by children between birth and six in a range of language learning contexts such as preschools and early years settings. The age bracket for early childhood education differs across countries but in general ranges from birth to six or birth to eight. Children could, for example, be attending immersion education programmes (where the target language is

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used for all communication, teaching, and learning) or learning two or more languages in the home or community. Children can be active participants in the research as in more recent research or can be the object of research, a more common feature of earlier applied linguistics research. The languages involved can be major languages, English in particular or endangered languages, heritage languages, or indigenous languages. There appears to have been a major shift in research with young children since the early 2000s, with the publication of articles featuring child perspectives in the broader Early Childhood Education field (Theobald et al. 2015; Sandberg et al. 2017; Giannakaki et al. 2019). Research on children’s language learning is wide-ranging (Pinter 2015), but a search of major textbooks and journals in the applied linguistics field showed that children’s perspectives are rarely taken into consideration explicitly and that the question of ethics as they apply to children is treated in depth only occasionally (Pinter 2014; Thomas 2008). Two lenses have typically been applied to more recent research with young children according to Clark (2005), namely the influence of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereafter UNCRC) (1989) and understandings from the sociology of childhood (Christensen and Prout 2002). Bourke, Loveridge, O’Neill, Erueti, and Jamieson (2017) stated that the field has now entered a more critical and reflective phase after an initial period of uncritical enthusiasm for research involving children and young people. An extensive literature review of early second language learning revealed that transparency in discussing or resolving ethical issues continues to be under-reported as noted by Loveridge in 2010 and resolutions to problems can remain opaque.

Chapter Overview This chapter will outline the main theoretical concepts involved in ethical research with young second language learners using “second language” as an umbrella term for all additional languages and also describe the contributions of important researchers in the field. The discussion of research ethics in relevant research projects will be reviewed and critical issues identified. One of the questions considered is whether there are substantial differences between the ethics of conducting research with early language learners and research in other disciplines, early childhood education, for example? Key questions for the future direction of ethical research with young second language learners will be posed and finally, conclusions from reflection on the issues in this chapter will be drawn up.

Main Theoretical Concepts Sociocultural Theory This chapter adopts a broad sociocultural approach to language learning, that is to say that language learning is both internal and social and children’s early language learning arises from processes of meaning-making in collaborative activity with other members

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of a given culture (Lantolf and Thorne 2006; Mitchell et al. 2019; Vygotsky 1978). Language is a tool for meaning making, shaped by the culture in which it is situated and by the experiences of the language users. The young second language learner has opportunities as an active agent to create more tools and new ways of meaning in collaboration with learners and speakers of the target language (Mitchell et al. 2019). Children’s culture will include the learning context, the actors within it, and the norms of acceptable behavior in classrooms, for example (Cekaite 2017). Researchers engaging with young language learners are themselves shaped by their own language experiences and may share some or part of the culture to which the children belong. Communication barriers may exist however when the children are at the early stages of second language learning and may not share a common language with the researcher. Researching itself is a cultural event and may or may not be aligned with children’s current or previous experiences (Bourke et al. 2017). To guard against a monocultural approach to analysis, Bourke et al. (2017) adopted Rogoff’s lenses of analysis: cultural-institutional, interpersonal, and personal to study the impact of their research on the enactment of ethical protocols and procedures, especially in the context of family and community norms. This means that due consideration must be given to the notion of ethical praxis, the philosophical basis of the protocols and procedures.

Ethical Praxis Palaiologou (2014) states that ethics should be the fundamental basis of research with young children. She discussed the notion of ethical praxis and states that this means going beyond conducting the research to include reflecting on the reasons, consequences, and implications of the research actions. More specifically, Palaiologou argued that the debate on child participation must move beyond the methods to the higher level plane. She stated that “On this basis, ethical praxis is concerned with the exercise of logic, moral judgment and sensitivity to the contexts of children’s lives, involving the latter’s culture, religion, social values and economic and political situation” (2014, p. 694). She posited that principles of ethical praxis should be used to understand the nature of the project and methods. These principles included adoption of appropriate methods to suit the children, responses to the children’s reactions, reflection on the influence of adults’ actions on the children, and how children’s different points of view can be acknowledged and accommodated (ibid., p. 698).

Situated Ethics Sinha (2017) takes a wider concept of ethics, which she calls paradigmatic or situated ethics. This view goes beyond prescribed ethics in academia and draws on the politics and histories of a place, and the fundamental narratives that define its individuals, systems, and ethical codes. This view recognizes the ecological nature

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of cultural and historical contexts, researchers, and those who are participating in research. Sinha holds that paradigmatic ethics must be taken into consideration in participatory research reflecting concerns of respect and acknowledgement of human differences. Ethics are manifested in practice and situated ethics refers to the code of ethics evidenced in a particular project in a specific socio-political context (Schulte 2019; Sinha 2017). Sinha’s own research concerned a group of indigenous children in India and she focused on obtaining the insider perspectives of parents and children on education, rather than importing or imposing the views of mainstream society. One interesting example of situated ethics Sinha gave is that of consent and the alternative approach she adopted to respect the oral nature of the culture rather than imposing a written culture on them.

Ethical Symmetry Christensen and Prout (2002, p. 481) stated that a researcher’s image of the child has important implications for research practice. They maintain that this view impacts analysis and interpretation of data as well as ethical practice. They proposed that researchers adopt the view that the same fundamental ethical principles apply in research with adults and children in regard to principles of confidentiality, anonymity, and consent. They coined the term “ethical symmetry” to describe this notion of applying the same ethical principles in research with adults and children, but adapting the methods to suit the concrete situation of the particular group of children, rather than making assumptions in advance. Any adaptations that have to be made when working with children should be based on children’s experiences, interests, values, and everyday routines. Christensen and Prout also stated that researchers should be aware of and engage with the local cultures of communication among children, bearing in mind their use of language and the meanings they put into words, notions, and actions. The principle of ethical symmetry can therefore provide guidance in dealing with ethical dilemmas as they arise (Christensen and Prout 2002). In particular, children’s emotions, interests, and considerations must be included in the research process. (ibid., 2002). To recap, sociocultural theory offers a way of recognizing the many influences on children’s lives and their language learning. Researchers too are influenced by their own language experiences and research with young second language learners requires reflexivity and sensitivity on the part of the researcher to the myriad influences that could impact on the research as a whole. Ethical praxis means thinking beyond methods and reflecting on the reasons for the research, the influence of adults’ actions on the children, and how children’s perspectives can be portrayed. The cultural, political, and historical milieu must be taken into consideration and contextual or situated ethics considered. Situated ethics may differ in different cultural and community contexts and the researcher must be open to recognizing and respecting these differences. The principles of ethical symmetry, that is, adopting fundamental ethical principles in work with young children, mean recognizing situated ethics and meaningful engagement within the norms of local communities.

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Major Contributions What are the ethical implications when we are researching with a child whose spoken language in the early childhood setting is different to that spoken at home? To address this question, we first need to reflect on the wider issues that arise in researching with young children. Major contributions by eminent researchers will be discussed under a number of thematic headings that synthesize their work.

Children’s Roles in Research Children come to Early Childhood and Care (ECEC) settings with a variety of different experiences, which good educators build on rather than ignore. The ethical principle here is to recognize that the diversity in life also exists in the early childhood setting. To adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to early childhood practice or research is unethical as it runs the risk of inadvertently reproducing any existing inequality that may be occurring (Hayes et al. 2017). The roles available to children in research have changed considerably over the past twenty years. Children were previously seen as objects of earlier applied linguistic research but now, following a shift in mindset, are often seen not only as subjects of research but as participatory actors in some cases (Enochsson and Löfdahl Hultman 2019). The participation can range from simple expression of views to advising or leading on parts of the research design in the case of older children. A prevailing argument in favor of listening to children is that they have expert knowledge and an insider’s understanding of their own environments (James et al. 1998; Leitch et al. 2005). However, in regard to children’s roles in research, Palaiologou (2014) narrows down the field of a child’s expertise to that of their own role in the research process. The rise of the field of sociology of childhood (Corsaro 2005; James et al. 1998) and the almost universal ratification of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989) has drawn attention to the reality that children are not passive objects but rather should be viewed as competent and active agents in their learning and development. In the 1990s, a key impact of the UNCRC was the attention given to Article 12 often characterized as the “voice of the child.” Lundy (2007) has suggested that the abbreviated meaning conveyed as “voice of the child” represents a limited understanding of children’s right to express themselves in matters that concern them. She has argued that the tokenistic participation that can result from this limited understanding is both disrespectful to children and counter-productive, as it can give children a false sense of having been consulted or having participated in a meaningful way. Lundy urges researchers to focus on the richness of Article 12 as providing children with an assurance of their rights. She calls on the research community to demonstrate, through practice, its active commitment to involving children in research, not just as “an option, which is the gift of adults, but a legal imperative which is the right of the child” (Lundy 2007, p. 931). This more nuanced understanding of what participation in researching with young children can mean and how powerful it can be requires significant engagement with young children

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across the whole research process and a flexible and responsive approach to ethical research. In this regard, an essential element of meaningful engagement is a commitment to “authentic listening” which is realized only through “acknowledgement and response to the views expressed and suggestions made by . . . participants” (Flynn 2014, p.166). Such an approach would require reflexivity and self-awareness on the part of the researcher and/or research team and a flexible and respectful response to ethical dilemmas that might arise throughout the research process. Enochsson and Löfdahl Hultman (2019) state in their survey of research relating to children under eight that there are different perceptions among researchers about participatory research with children, citing doubt among some researchers about children’s cognitive ability to make decisions or to contribute to research in other ways. Pinter (2014) proposed that second language researchers adopt as least some elements of including children as social actors or co-researchers, that is, methodological plurality, so that context and authenticity could be considered as well. This could include older children reviewing questionnaires for their peers or offering advice on their suitability (Lundy et al. 2011). It may be more appropriate to employ other methods such as the mosaic approach (Clark 2005) with younger children, with constant sensitivity to what yields good data and the effect that the methods have on the children (Skånfors 2009; Einarsdóttir 2007). This can include sensitivity to children’s engagement with the research, their lack of engagement as shown perhaps through their introduction of other topics outside the research focus, or their renewed interest in the project at a later stage. Children have different concerns to the adults who teach them or who conduct research about their learning. They have the potential to provide valuable insights into contexts such as bilingual and multilingual classrooms, on what constitutes engaging learning activities, attractive materials, and good teaching (Pinter et al. 2013; Pinter 2014). Children’s agentic behavior was closely observed by Schwartz, Kirsch, and Mortini (2020a) and Schwartz, Deeb, and Hijazy (2020b). Peer relations provided very important language learning affordances for children in these studies and they were enabled to use their full linguistic resources in multilingual classrooms that facilitated translanguaging. In an effort to address the complexities that arise in researching with children, some researchers now include a Children’s Research Advisory Group or CRAG at different stages in the research process (Flynn 2013; Giannakaki et al. 2019; Lundy et al. 2011). Giannakaki et al. (2019) identified the value of working with this type of group as two-fold. It includes children as co-researchers in shaping the research questions, the methods used, and the interpretation of findings while at the same time it raises children’s awareness of their rights and entitlements in the research process.

Roles of Adults in Research Researchers such as Spyrou (2011) problematize the role of the adult in childhood research, arguing that adult status influences the process of data collection and that this status should be reduced to minimize the influence on children’s voices. A

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number of authors have made attempts to reduce adult authority in participant observation in order to better access children’s worlds. Mandell (1988) coined the term “the least adult role” and Corsaro (2003) adopted the role of a “friend” (Spyrou 2011). Almér (2015) took on an “auntie role” whereby she maintained her adult status but did not take on the responsibilities of a parent or teacher. Mayall (2000) positioned herself as an adult who lacked the knowledge that children have about childhood and who wanted to learn from them. In her research, Flynn (2013) highlighted the danger of research with children where a wholly adult interpretation can lead to an “adulteration” of the findings. Spyrou (2011) argued that adults can never become natives in children’s worlds because of their privileged adult status no matter which role they adopt and advises that researchers should adopt a reflexive self-awareness to counteract their own influence. The roles of adults and children in research are undoubtedly closely intertwined and researchers are therefore advised to adopt strategies that facilitate children’s agency and minimize adult influence on the research process, in order to access the views and voices of the children.

Relationships Research with children involves not only the children but others with whom they have a close relationship such as parents, educators, teachers, or other responsible adults (Bourke et al. 2017; Flewitt and Ang 2020; Palaiologou 2014). Researchers will therefore have to build relationships with the key players in a child’s life, but it is this relationship that will shape the nature and quality of data collected (Flewitt 2005). Pinter (2015) acknowledged that working with children as social actors or coresearchers means that ethical and methodological dilemmas intensify. Working through children’s second language intensifies these dilemmas further. Pinter holds that relationship building between adult researcher and child becomes crucially important and that time and effort are required for rapport building and revisiting agreements, understandings and shared ideas. Based on a respectful and trusting relationship with the adult researcher, children should feel free to express their opinions without fear of negative consequences, a process which Barley and Bath (2014) acknowledge takes time and effort. Reflexivity in terms of checking the researcher’s and children’s interpretation of the research process is essential. Other considerations in second language situations are language attitudes and ideologies and the choice of language for discussion with relevant adults will be based on these factors. Questions such as whether the adults share a common language, the adults’ competency in the target language, and their views on the use of the target language in research will form part of the research relationship. To illustrate, Dalli and Stephenson (2010) reported initial reluctance of the local teachers to the use of English in their Samoan and Tonga immersion setting as part of an evaluation of a literacy programs, as the immersion teachers were reluctant to facilitate the use of the majority language in their minority language setting. However, approval was given when it was explained that both national languages were to be assessed by fluent speakers of both languages. These issues form part of the

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development of an authentic relationship between the researcher and the setting and should be clarified before data collection begins. The researcher’s relationship with the child/children is a key part of the relationship and sufficient time should be built into the timescale to foster a respectful rapport with the key players.

Ethical Guidelines and Regulations Compliance with external rules and regulations is the ethics of justice, while “the real hallmark of ethical agency is viewed as a continuous and competent reflective practice” according to Mortari and Harcourt 2012, p. 236). Academic institutions, regulatory bodies, and agencies work according to the ethics of justice and issue their own guidelines for research in general, covering broad areas such as consent, confidentiality, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. For instance, researchers working directly with children should have relevant police clearance for child safeguarding according to national systems. Surprisingly, many academic institutions do not specifically refer to research with children, which is a major omission. In general, regulations specify procedures for obtaining informed consent and methods for guaranteeing confidentiality, anonymity, and safeguarding the research participants or researchers from any harm. Institutional ethical regulations also protect the institution from reputational damage or adverse outcomes (Harcourt and Quennerstedt 2014). Research conducted in these institutions must receive formal ethical approval before any research can take place. In practice this means that ethical approval must be sought long in advance of the commencement of the project as the scheduling of approval committee meetings may not coincide with research timelines. The time involved may not allow for research approaches that involve consulting with children before finalizing the research approach (Loveridge 2010). Dalli and Stephenson (2010) noted that gaining access to work directly with children has become increasingly complicated due to the number of checks and constraints that must be undertaken prior to working with children. Johnston-Molloy et al. (2012) reported that the ethical constraints placed on their study of preschool children’s food preferences impacted on both its design and its methodology. Ethical issues arise at all stages in research from the design phase onwards and ethical research methods should be collaborative, questioning, and acknowledge that there is no single approach to fit all eventualities; all of which poses a challenge to the current codified ethical climate. While recognizing fundamental principles of information, consent, confidentiality, and use of data, Pring (2003) has argued that it is insufficient to limit research ethics to a set of ethical principles outlined by law or ethics committees. It is also necessary to appreciate, and allow for, the researchers’ personal principles in research and this is about the individual researcher’s ethical and moral position and conduct. He writes: There is no escaping moral deliberations – the complex judgements required for seeing, first, the relevance of particular principles or codes to this or that situation; second, the priority to be given to this or that principle when it is conflicting another. (ibid., p. 54)

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Some professional bodies such as British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) (2016) have drawn up ethical guidelines for their members which include basic guidelines as above but with a brief discussion of the application of the guidelines to children. More detailed guidelines in regard to research with children were provided by the Irish Department of Children and Youth Affairs (2012) to ensure that children are treated with respect, that appropriate people provide informed consent and assent, and that confidentiality and anonymity are observed (DCYA 2012). They advise that additional issues need to be addressed in regard to research with children, that child protection principles must be observed, legal obligations and policy commitments in regard to children are fully adhered to, and that researchers adopt a child-centered inclusive approach to research with children. In other words, regulatory requirements must be met but the situational issues must also be dealt with by researchers in ways that draw on their personal moral and ethical principles.

Consent, Assent, and Dissent Larsson et al. (2019) argue that the ethical complexities of researching with children must be embedded within the research aims and the research designed so that the child clearly understands what the research is about. A similar point was made by Dockett et al. (2012), who discussed how to ensure children fully understand what kind of data would be collected and how that data would be used and shared. However, alongside a growing pattern of including children in research from the design phase, Harcourt and Conroy (2009) cautioned that searching for children’s consent to participate may bring new challenges. This is because it may provide children with the opportunity to understand and question the research purpose while also bringing attention to their right to comment on their involvement and its subsequent consequences. One of the major topics in research with children is informed consent (Samanhudi 2018). Depending on the age of the child/children, different approaches are needed. Clearly parental/guardian and gatekeeper consent is needed prior to approaching the children and then the project and role of the child must be explained in an ageappropriate way (BAAL 2016). It can be difficult to do this in the children’s first language, let alone their second. Strategies used by researchers included demonstrations of recording equipment and digital cameras accompanied by paralinguistic cues, playing back recordings of the children, or showing photographs on the camera and miming writing (Skaremyr 2019; Dalli and Stephenson 2010). When communication in the children’s second language has not been successful, researchers may have to use the children’s first language or to translanguage, using key words in the children’s first language to facilitate understanding. Skånfors (2009) goes further and questions whether or not young children can understand what it means to have their activities analyzed. She holds it is more pragmatic to explain to children that the researcher is interested in what they as children do and that children’s informed consent involves allowing or not allowing the researcher to get access to their activities in the here-and-now. Dockett et al. (2009) argued that the legalities of gaining consent for children’s involvement in research must be observed but that did not diminish the need to also

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gain assent from children even when children are very young. Loveridge (2010, p. 257) goes on to say that assent implies that the researcher has a responsibility for ongoing monitoring of interactions with the child for evidence of agreement throughout the research process. Assent is represented within the relationships between the researcher and the child, by the trust within that relationship and acceptance of the researcher’s presence. The child’s stage of being is accepted and does not call for adult type attributes such as maturity, competence, and completeness. Flewitt’s (2005, p. 553) term “provisional consent” could be adapted to “provisional assent” in the case of young children, as the end result of an exploratory study cannot be predetermined. Dissent may be difficult to recognize in very young children, but Schwartz et al. (2020b) and Lewis (2010) observed how children could turn away from the researcher, remain silent, or refuse to use the target language in any way, thus indicating their unwillingness to participate. Advice and consultation with those who know the children well may clarify the children’s intentions (Loveridge 2010; Lewis 2010).

Ongoing Consent Lundy and McEvoy (2009) found a strategic way of managing ongoing assent by giving the children special badges as “active researchers.” Children could choose to wear the badge if they wished to participate and take it off when they moved on. Skånfors (2009) challenged early childhood educators and researchers to be critically reflective in their research practice so that they can be truly responsive to children. She highlights situations where children may withdraw their initial consent and demonstrate unwillingness to being observed, sometimes clearly and sometimes in more subtle ways, while later signaling a desire to participate once again (ibid., 2009). She advises that to really respect young children’s participation, researchers should be “attentive to their actions and responses, by using our ‘ethical radar’, in order to distinguish children’s ways of expressing acceptance and withdrawal” (highlighted in the original) (2009, p. 18). This is all the more important in second language contexts where children may be at the emergent bilingualism stage. The concept of an “ethical radar” assists in navigating the balance between the child’s right to participation and the right to protection. The ethical radar approach recognizes the child’s need for guidance and support from the caring adult, safeguarding the child’s well-being throughout the research process. It requires the researcher to reflect in-action, underpinned by knowledge of child development and to value the maturing process from inter-dependency towards independence as natural.

Confidentiality and Anonymity Confidentiality implies that the views or actions of research participants should not be identifiable or traceable, without the explicit consent of all participants. The only exception is in relation to child protection issues (DCYA 2012; Einarsdóttir 2007). As with other types of research, verbatim transcripts should be carefully screened to

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ensure that no identifiable data emerges. Children and other participants should be made aware of the fact that pseudonyms will be used in transcripts to provide anonymity and some researchers invite the children to choose their own pseudonyms. Problems do emerge when children write their own names on drawings and while names can be technically removed, this needs to be considered or other means of ownership found. Consent to reuse data for other purposes must be obtained in advance and carefully monitored. This applies to systems such as the CHILDES database, publications, and use in teaching and other research projects. Many lecturers in universities and other third-level institutions will have met the ethical dilemma of possessing wonderful child language data from their research and yet being unable to use it in their lectures as permission was not requested at time of collection. Finally raw data must be stored securely and destroyed/archived within the time period specified in the project. Due care should also be taken to guard against any situation that could lead to false allegations against the researcher. Potential problems could arise if the researcher is alone with a child in a room away from other adults. Bearing in mind that the process of transcribing recordings of activities that take place in noisy classroom situations is challenging, it is nevertheless advisable that the child and researcher are in the sight of another adult at all times (DCYA 2012) and that children know they can leave at any time. No identifying photographs or videos should be used in research reports, but technically adjusted means can be used to blur images of children (Flewitt and Ang 2020).

Access to Research Participation Powell and Smith (2009) identified a number of factors that influence research participation by children, including the handpicking of participants by teachers or other adults in positions of authority in educational settings. Enochsson and Löfdahl Hultman (2019) thought that teacher influence could inhibit a plurality of views or perhaps only children proficient in the target language could be chosen. The criteria used for selecting children to participate should be clearly stated in the research report to avoid unwarranted assumptions being made about language learning. Dalli and Stephenson (2010, p. 17) remarked that the existence of a prior relationship between the researcher and an early childhood education setting could either ease or hinder access to the setting. Educators may be more willing to give access to people they know and trust but if there have been difficulties in the prior relationship, they may be unwilling to allow the research to be conducted in their setting. Within the setting, Flewitt (2005) noted that researchers could risk exploiting the relationship between the gatekeeper and the participant. Parents, for example, may feel under an obligation to participate in case their lack of participation may damage their relationship with the staff or the services their child receives. They may also pressurize their children to participate for the same reasons. To avoid this dilemma, Flewitt (2005) asked parents to discuss the research with the child away from the setting, to minimize the influence of the education setting.

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Thomas (2008) argues that there are powerful ethical consequences in the choice of what population one studies as being representative of L2 learners and how research findings are made available to educators and policy makers. Researchers need to guard against over-researching certain groups of children or adults to whom they have easy access, for example, early childhood education work placement settings. On the opposite side of the equation, children or their parents may query why their child was not chosen for a particular research study. Some of the children in a study by Harcourt and Conroy (2005) challenged the student researchers as to why their permission was not needed or why their work was not being collected. A parent in Mhic Mhathúna’s 2008 study queried why her child was not considered to be “good enough” for the research project. Wider sampling might have avoided these issues from arising. To summarize, children’s views and perspectives are often included in more recent research as their agency and competency are acknowledged and their right to be consulted recognized. Adults’ roles are problematized and efforts made to diminish their influence on children. Relationships between all involved in the research are therefore key and require time and effort to build. Institutional ethical regulations and guidelines offer generalized guidance on ethical research practice but do not always offer direction for the ethical dilemmas that arise. Issues such as ongoing consent and nonverbal manifestations of disengagement by children need to be on the researchers’ “ethical radar.” Criteria for selecting children as research participants need to be stated and prior relationships between researchers and settings noted.

New Projects Critical Reflexivity New and recent projects studying young children learning or acquiring second languages reflect a more diverse view of cultures and societies. They give rise to ethical considerations that new projects could consider. This can be seen in studies conducted in Global South societies where Euro-Western research ethics are deemed to be problematic and could run counter to indigenous norms. Ethical dilemmas are bound to arise, in situations not envisaged by those drawing up institutional research guidelines. In their critique of the dominance of what they call a Global North paradigm in research with children, Asselin and Doiron (2016) identified the influence of the UNCRC and found that the ambition of universalist principles of ethical research was problematic when researching with children from different ethnic and cultural background. To address the challenge of overcoming this powerful dominant influence, they propose that researchers develop “critical reflexivity,” a sensitivity, and responsiveness to context and cultural norms. This necessitates that researchers develop new approaches to research with children. Chapters in Loveridge’s 2010 seminal report on involving children and young people in research in educational settings in New Zealand give the background to the wishes of the Māori people regarding research. Various frameworks have now been

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developed for ethical research practices with Māori children with a view to providing flexible culturally responsive systems and processes that are acceptable to the community. Academic institutions and agencies will need to review their own practices to allow facilitation of Māori and other indigenous frameworks (Te Maro 2010, p. 59). Language was also an issue for Sinha (2017) as she found that the local language she expected to find was not in fact in regular use by the children in the indigenous community she was working with and she had to change to another language variety, which happily matched one of the languages she herself had acquired (Sinha 2017). She also had to learn paralinguistic features of greetings for adults and children as they were an important part of communication. This discussion exemplifies how dealing with language issues must be part of the research process.

Cultural Expectations About Consent Several authors (Bourke et al. 2017; Conroy and Harcourt 2009; Dalli and Stephenson 2010; Loveridge 2010; Sinha 2017) note that many cultures with differing traditions and values require that researchers address cultural expectations about research processes, about consent in particular, in addition to established institutional processes. Cultures such as those of Māori, Pasifika, Indian, and Asian peoples take a collective perspective on the individual in relation to the family and “adequate consultation with community members is seen as part of developing protocols to ensure appropriate cultural procedures inform the research” states Loveridge (2010, p. 8). This means negotiating the appropriate balance between child and parent consent for different cultural groups in ways that respect children’s rights and cultural values. At times this may mean going beyond established ethical procedures in order to abide by local community cultural norms. To illustrate, Sinha (2017) had originally designed pictorial representations or fingerprints to record participants’ assent but realized that the indigenous community espoused an oral tradition and that their culture demanded a respect of their word. She therefore decided to record children’s consent/assent audio-visually before each activity or conversation, thus respecting their word as a binding agreement. Sinha (2017) described how she tried to listen authentically and reflect on power, gender, and positionality within indigenous discourses and also adhere to her university’s research regulations.

Cultural Values and Norms Sinha stated that her research with indigenous children in India raised a number of issues, including those of power and privilege, sociocultural differentials, and potentially tensions with established research practices (Sinha 2017). She posited that reliance solely upon dominant views of ethics is unethical if this means disregarding the marginalized view, on what constitutes education, for example.

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A similar position was taken by Bourke et al. (2017) when they drew on Māori principles and values in their research in a bilingual preschool and school. They closely monitored their modes of enquiry, processes for gaining access and inviting participation and their overall commitment to the settings and their communities to ensure that they were responsive to Māori needs, values, knowledge, and practices and acknowledging the Māori world (Te Ao Māori). Māori culture places children within the context of the family and community, not as independent agentic individuals. This meant that the ethics of children’s participation in research extended to the child, the family, the setting, the researchers, and their institution (Bourke et al. 2017). Bourke et al. (2017) drew on Rogoff’s (2003) categories of research ethics to interrogate their processes. They identified in the first instance a community lens for ethics, covering cultural-institutional processes, and how they connect with the culture and history of the setting and with national and educational policies. The second lens, the interpersonal lens included interactions among all those involved in the research project and how they operated in relation to one another. The third lens, the individual or personal lens showed how people change as a result of their involvement, for example, how they respond to ethical dilemmas. In this sense, the researchers found ways of respecting both the university and the education communities and negotiated protocols of adhering to the ethical requirements of both communities. One example given was using a formal welcoming ceremony as signifying approval for the project (Bourke et al. 2017). To summarize, greater awareness of cultural diversity is evident in more recent research with some indigenous communities setting out their own frameworks for research. This may involve tensions between established institutional and community norms for areas such as consent. Another important research direction is conceptualizing students’ research and ethical issues relating to it. Therefore, ECEC students should also be given ethical research training for their dissertations in order to acknowledge good practice and avoid being judgmental.

Critical Issues and Topics Ownership of Ideas, Practices, and Academic Discussion Researchers may struggle with dilemmas of ownership of text and representation of voice in participatory research (Robinson-Pant 2017). Academic confidentiality determines that educators and teachers should not be identified, not least to protect the anonymity of any children involved, and there are real problems of identification in small populations. However, tensions can arise when it is perceived that due regard is not being paid to the educators whose practice is being observed. Sometimes a difficult choice has to be made between acknowledging practitioners’ good practice and adhering to best ethical practice in research. Alternatively, some contributors to research projects may wish their contribution to be acknowledged and their ideas attributed to them. However, in academic research for degree awards, this may not be

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acceptable and raises questions of how realistic the research training is, who is being protected, who makes the decisions, and what are the consequences for the researcher and the researched? It may be possible in future publications to note that permission to be identified has been granted (or even requested) by participants.

Languages in Fieldwork Robinson-Pant (2017) stated that culture and language influence research design, data collection, analysis, and writing. She problematized the issue of language in international research as she realized that the languages she used (English or Nepali) with adult interviewees influenced who she could interview and the nature of their responses. The communication was also influenced by historical relations around gender, power, and equality (Robinson-Pant 2017). Many adult bilingual speakers are fluent in English or other world languages, but may be more forthcoming in their views with speakers of a minority or local language. Other speakers of minority languages may not be in a position to discuss issues in depth in English or may chose not to do so. This applies to a much greater extent to young children who may be at an emergent stage of second language acquisition. The availability of sources may influence the language selected for writing and publication. Robinson-Pant observed that most academics draw on English-language publications from the USA, UK, and Australia and that English language sources tend to dominate the literature in an “hierarchal model of global knowledge production” (Robinson-Pant 2017, p. 14). Theoretical sources in a minority language may not be available or an appropriate lexicon may not have been developed and academics may have to rely on English and other world languages, recognizing that a culturally specific world view is also being imbibed. Robinson-Pant (ibid.) noted that researchers may be reluctant to cite local research or to reflect indigenous knowledge, leaving a lacuna in the texts influencing the research.

Language of Publication It is important that academic discussion on relevant professional issues takes place among the in-group in minority or lesser-used languages to inform, debate, and develop the language and the issues in question. In the case of the Irish language, for example, national ECEC frameworks have been translated from English into Irish (Aistear, the Early Childhood Curriculum Framework; Síolta, the National Quality Framework; First Five Strategy). It is also important that minority language stakeholders use such documents published in the minority language when available as this adds to the depth of reflection in the domains of use and implementation. Researchers may have the opportunity to publish in a minority language or in English or other world languages, to make their work and insights available to the wider local and international community. Nevertheless, time constraints can often play apart in limiting the number of languages and focused articles that can be written. The issue of metrics and publishing in high impact journals also arises if

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publishing in a language other than English as few minority language journals have the global status, means or world reach to achieve high ratings. Robinson-Pant (2017, p. 130) called for the production of scholarly work (including dissertations) “which are not univocal, but multivocal,” and which are bilingual or multilingual. The research could be issued bilingually or at least include data in the original language. This may mean longer texts but does ensure the richness of the data in its original language is maintained. The local reader will be in a position to access the complete meaning of the quotation and its context. By making the research available to local audiences in whatever formats are most suitable, local readers can design culturally specific strategies for implementation if that is their wish. In order for this to happen, Robinson-Pant (2017) advises that supports are needed for writers in language other than English. She listed networks of like-minded academics, mentors, literature sources, translators, copy editors, and critical friends as important parts of a broad support framework.

Translation Translation may also be an issue in publishing early language learning research, particularly in regard to second language learning. Important aspects of language and of language learning could be lost in translation. For example, if one translates a text that contains code-mixing or code-switching, a critical aspect of the language used by the children may be lost or in regard to parent or educator language, it may indicate intimacy or knowledge of a status language (Wolf 2017). The avoidance of code-mixing can also signify a certain approach to language learning and pedagogy and other issues of language ideology, language competence, language influence, language use, and socio-linguistic matters are hidden. Polite or reverential forms of address, use of singular or plural personal pronouns, and evidence of developmental errors, for example, could all be lost in translation (Wolf 2017). Many young learners of a second language use vocabulary and sometimes structures of their first language in their speech and if the meaning is translated into another language, the dynamic of early second language learning is missed. Dalli and Stephenson (2010) reported that the children did not recognize some of the items in a tool for data collection that was originally designed in English and translated into the children’s L1, Samoan or Tongan. Translating or creating bilingual questionnaires/interview schedules for the children’s parents and educators could also create formatting difficulties if a block of text has to fit into a predetermined space, not to mention the difficult of accuracy of meaning or cultural relevance. Nursery rhymes in one language are rarely translatable into another language, for example, if used as examples of home literacy practices.

Power Relations Adults often play a major role in decision making in children’s lives. Teachers and early educators, for example, may wish to conduct linguistic research with the group

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of children they work with. But the power differential is very large and agreement/ permission should not be assumed or taken for granted. This power imbalance may create problems for participants and it is usually advisable to have another person involved as gatekeeper, to safeguard children’s interests (DCYA 2012). The same issue arises to an even larger extent in families where the researcher studies his/her own children and their development in first and second languages. It is noteworthy that many of the child language studies of first and second languages have been based on researchers’ own children and issues identified by Kimmel (2007) in related disciplines include increased self-consciousness, subtle distortion of human relationships, and the introduction of disequilibrium into family dynamics. Researchers should be aware of these types of ethical issues in their research and judge if they apply to any form of longitudinal studies with children. If they do, great care must be taken to ensure that parental roles and researcher roles are clearly distinguished and that family relations are not adversely affected.

Positionality: Insider Versus Outsider Status Researchers can act as guides to the insider view of a culture or experience, in an ethnographic sense. The issue of in-group or out-group status may arise, for example, through being a speaker of the target language or having experience of working in the early years sector. Researchers face the challenge of bringing their own experience and language background to bear on the research, but not allowing it to color the collection or analysis of the data. The researcher may have a different pedagogical approach or have a different standard of fluency/accuracy in the target language, but should try to maintain an objective perspective and not “improve” the data. Williams (2016) discusses issues regarding competency in and affiliation with target languages in New Zealand. Researchers’ competency in the languages used in research, particularly their ability to understand the nuances used by participants, is obviously important. She also felt that she had a shifting researcher identity across languages, a point taken up by Loy (2016) who discusses her roles and status as a cultural insider, an academic researcher, and an outside in a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis the community involved. Kearney (2016) argues that we should consider a continuum of positionality, rather than the binary opposites of insider/ outsider and try to position ourselves along the continuum in a dynamic manner. Te Maro (2010, p. 52) queried how one can understand about another culture when one is an outsider to that culture. If a researcher lacks insider knowledge and understandings of the philosophical, epistemological, lived experiences and historical background of a phenomenon, how can he/she report these authentically? By definition, any research project involving children will entail an “outsider” adult attempting to learn about and understand the (insider) world of children’ (Te Maro 2010, p. 52). Members of a particular culture will also be very different from one another. While confining research to insiders only could be very restrictive, it would be wise to be aware of one’s perspective and limitations and consult with

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knowledgeable member of that community to ensure the validity of interpretation (Te Maro 2010).

Child Language Learning One of the most significant aspects of language acquisition is that child language is developmental and that it evolves over time in line with input, interaction, experiences, affordances. Children’s abilities in first and second languages can manifest themselves differently in different contexts (Mitchell et al. 2019). Therefore, language studies that portray a deficit view of child language acquisition are problematic. Larsen-Freeman (2014) contested the practice of comparing second language learners’ ability in the new language to the standard of monolingual speakers and posited that it is important to look at the learner’s developing second language system in its own right. “This competence changes and evolves as the person goes through new linguistic and cultural experiences. It is fluid, not static” (ibid., p. 499). Similarly, it is important to know the accepted patterns of language use in the community, in regard to code-mixing, for example, in order to judge the child’s use of such patterns. Péterváry, Ó Curnáin, Ó Giollagáin, and Sheahan (2014) raised many of these questions in their analysis of bilingual competence of native Irish speakers aged 7–12 years in a Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking area. The authors acknowledge the challenge of assessing bilingual competence in minority language contexts where the majority language (English) has had a substantial influence on the minority language. It is unclear what the target of acquisition is for a minority language speaker when the language is undergoing considerable change under the influence of the majority language. Their solution is also problematic as they compared the children’s standard of Irish in the 2014 study to that of adults from a study in the same local areas in the 1950s when the influence of English was lighter (ibid.). Perhaps the more pertinent issue is the lack of comparable studies in child second language acquisition which would allow a more relevant comparison.

Time and Familiarization Spyrou (2011, p, 156) highlights the importance of taking sufficient time at the beginning of a research project to get to know the children, to build relationships between the researcher and the children and to allow the children to become informed about the project. This familiarization process can give the children a measure of control of their role within the research context. Over time, the researcher can become familiar with the practices of the community, observe the interaction strategies in the second language, and form relationships with the gatekeepers and participants. A period of familiarization also allows the researcher to reflect on their own position vis a vis the research participants and to establish their position as a researcher within the community (Barley and Bath 2014; Spyrou 2011).

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At the same time, researchers need to be continually reflective and reflexive as the project evolves and to guard against over-familiarity and loss of objectivity. The benefits of engaging in a period of familiarization far outweigh the extra time and resources that need to be devoted to this stage of the study (Barley and Bath 2014), but it can be a challenge to create such time and space especially in funded projects (Loveridge 2010). Time is also an issue for children, and they may lose interest or tire of the project before the data collection is completed. This leads Pinter (2015) to ask if it is ethical to insist that they continue to participate in these circumstances.

Methodologies The particular challenges presented when researching with younger children have led to creative methodological developments and researchers now work with a variety of methods to elicit children’s perspectives such as drawings, map making, photography, and storylines (Clark and Moss 2001; Einarsdóttir 2007; Nic Gabhainn and Sixsmith 2005). Authors such as Alderson (2007) remind us however that in choosing different methods for different age groups care must be taken not to infantalize children or lose sight of their competencies and expertise, particularly when researching with younger children. Dalli and Stephenson (2010) provided a comprehensive list of the most commonly used methods of data collection with young children, including second language children. These included conversations, interviews with children with/ without parents or other adults, group interviews, drawings, and photographs as prompts in interviews and photography as a tool. Many of these methods are melded together in the mosaic approach (Clark and Moss 2001), giving children a range of ways of participating in the research. The underlying point is that the research and research methods must make sense to children, be interesting to them and tap into a range of methods of expression as far as possible (Dockett et al. 2011). Visual methods are often recommended in the early childhood education literature and are particularly useful in second language contexts as they shift the balance away from expressive language to imagery (Clark 2005). Einarsdóttir (2007) used photographs of children in an early year setting as they went about their daily routines as a stimulus for conversation. This gave the children power to direct their own involvement. Drawings are often used as a stimulus and Clark (2005) stressed the importance of listening to the children during the drawing rather than merely analyzing the picture afterwards. Ibrahim (2015, p. 50) found that research methods influenced the ability of young bilingual children to participate in research. She offered children the choice of which language to use during interviews and asked them to draw and comment on various cultural artifacts. The children were 6 years old and had Korean, French and English backgrounds. While literacy is rarely a focus of study with young second language learners, the children in this study chose to sign a consent form in both Roman and Korean script (Ibrahim 2015), thus using the opportunities for agency.

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Creative methodologies, particularly visual methodologies, offer many ways of collecting data with young language learners. Children’s drawings and photographs can act as a stimulus for conversations in ways that make sense to children and can give them a range of ways of participating in the research. This applies especially to bilingual children who can be offered the choice of language they wish to use in the conversation.

Data Analysis and Report Writing Dalli and Stephenson (2010, p. 28) note that research reports need to be “fit for purpose” and should be accessible to a range of audiences including children, families, and practitioners. Spyrou (2011) stated that data analysis and reporting research findings allow the researcher to edit the data in a new way. Data can be included, excluded, or summarized thematically. However, data collected from children over a period of weeks or months can be presented as though it occurred simultaneously, thereby presenting a new false reality. All data is situated in its immediate context and this context can be lost if, for example, quotations taken out of context in the research report to highlight certain points or as part of the report design. One thinks of the use of speech bubbles or highlighted quotes in research reports. Spyrou (2011) asked whether children’s words are presented as decontextualized quotes, a practice which obscures the role of the researcher, or if they are presented in a contextualized manner along with the researcher’s question. The latter practice would allow the reader to understand the context and the influence of the adult on the child’s response. Overall, many of the same issues apply to ethical practice in research with young language learners as apply to other research participants, and many of the same issues arise in the conduct of child research. The researcher needs an “ethical radar” to navigate day-to-day issues as they arise but should also develop a “language radar,” recognizing the implicit influence of the chosen language on participants and on the type of data that can be collected. Dissemination of the research is also a language issue and influences who will be in a position to read and benefit from the research. Translations need to be handled sensitively, so that one is aware if one language is privileged over another. Power relations also play a part and gatekeepers should be in place if researching children with whom the researcher has a close relationship. Relationships are also involved if the researcher has an affinity with a specific language or group, a position that both offers insider understanding but also requires objectivity and balanced judgment. In-depth research requires time to become familiar with the children and setting and allow the participants to get to know the researcher. Children may also lose interest in the project over time, so judicious time management is of the essence. The choice of methodologies will influence children’s willingness to participate and visual methods in particular are often suitable for young language learners.

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Further Research Directions Ethical Issues and Approaches Further research with young second language learners should include greater discussion of ethical issues and dilemmas. Similar difficulties and dilemmas can arise in all research with young children but focused deliberations should consider the specific issues that arise when researching heritage, endangered, minority, and second language learning. There are numerous programs in English as a foreign language early years and children are learning additional languages through immersion and other approaches in early years settings around the world. Consideration should be given to the principles and processes leading to the resolution of these dilemmas and included in research reports and publications. Research in the field of early childhood education is also a relatively young field, (Farrell et al. 2016) but does encompass a wide range of methodologies and approaches. These include quantitative and qualitative studies as well as longitudinal studies. Some take a discipline-based approach and others are multidisciplinary. Research on second language learning to date has focused largely on qualitative methods and small scale studies. While these are undoubtedly valuable in their own right, larger quantitative studies in a range of contexts are needed to provide a full review of language learning by young children (Pinter 2015). There is also a dearth of longitudinal studies on children learning minority, indigenous, or second languages in the current context and thus little evidence on which to base trajectories of development in language learning. Long-term funding would enable these types of studies to be commissioned. Different ethical issues would undoubtedly arise, but these could be considered in their own context. Multidisciplinary studies, drawing on the disciplines of applied linguistics and early childhood education, would be a fruitful way of broadening the field and benefitting from different perspectives.

Key Points for Consideration Drawing on the literature reviewed in this chapter and the questions posed by Dalli and Stephenson (2010) and Pinter (2015), a series of key points to bear in mind in future ethical research with young second language learners are proposed. 1. Image of the child: What is the researchers’ image of the child in the context of second language learning? How is child agency involved? What ethical issues can be envisaged. Will the methods connect with children’s previous experiences? 2. Relationships between participants: How are the child’s family and community included in the research? How will partnership, collaboration, and communication affect the participants? How will power issues between researcher and researched be mediated?

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3. How does the researcher’s background and experience match those of the research participants? Does the researcher have adequate knowledge and experience of early years education and the second language to conduct the research directly or will intermediaries be involved? If so, how will training in research be given and how will the work of the intermediary be monitored? 4. Language issues: Do researchers take the child’s and other participants’ language competencies into consideration? How are language issues embedded in the design, methodologies, tools, data analysis, and report writing? 5. Who will benefit from the research: Will it benefit the children involved directly or indirectly, or will it serve the researcher’s and funder’s interests? If constraints are evident how can researchers ensure that children’s rights are respected and that the research process has integrity? How will the results be analyzed and disseminated? What language(s) will be used in publications and will accessible versions of the research be made available in relevant language(s)? To recap, critical issues that should be raised in future research in regard to second language learning include assessing the influence of the languages used in the totality of the research process (design, sources, interviews, other forms of field work, and publications). Issues of power, identity, and affiliation with the languages are involved on the part of the researcher and should be acknowledged. Children’s second language competency and their own lived experiences should be noted. Appropriate methodologies must be found, that are relevant to the children and sufficient time built into the research process to allow relationships grow between the children and adults involved.

Conclusions There are a small but growing number of research studies in early second language learning which recognize the importance of discussing the ethical issues encountered. Common themes among the research projects reviewed in this chapter include the socio-cultural contexts of children’s lives, the limits of ethical guidelines, and the relationships between the researcher and researched children and other participants. Reflexivity on the part of the researcher is called for in order to go beyond institutional guidelines and deal with ethical dilemmas as they arise. The universality of established Western research principles is being questioned and new ways of working respectfully within community values are being developed in some countries. There are however very few reports or publications which give young children’s views on learning second languages in ECEC settings and young children remain somewhat invisible in this area of research. Applied linguistics studies tend to deal with assessments and evaluations, that is, the results of language learning programs or interventions, and more general early childhood studies often neglect second language learning. Perhaps it is now time for researchers from these disciplines and

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more to pool their understandings, knowledge, and methodologies and work together in an ethical manner with young second language learners. Ethical practice is fundamental to all research and child participation in research raises complex ethical issues beyond methodologies and methods. As Loveridge (2010) noted, greater emphasis on ethical dilemmas would lead to greater transparency about the judgments researchers make in the field. She states that this transparency could then provide guidance for establishing ethical ways of working instead of relying on decontextualized or prescriptive solutions. This chapter opened with the question of whether there are substantial difference between the ethics of second language research with young children and the discipline of early childhood education? The resounding answer is that the same basic fundamental principles and many commonalities apply, but a heightened awareness of ethical praxis and language issues is needed in research with young second language learners to ensure that children’s rights to participation and representation in research are met.

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A Critical Overview of Research Methods Used in Studies on Early Foreign Language Education in Preschools Marianne Nikolov and Re´ka Lugossy

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Experimental Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quasi-Experimental Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Combined Research Design: Large-Scale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments . . . . Combined Research Design: Action Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Studies Using Observation of Teachers’ Collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Studies Using Interviews to Explore Teacher Cognition and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Case Study Using Interviews with Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Studies in Homeschooling Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethnographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lack of Unified Theory of Early FL Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realistic Age-Appropriate Outcomes and Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes what approaches and research designs studies on early foreign language (FL) education apply and how. In the research reviewed, children’s age ranges 2–6 and they were studied in contexts where access to a M. Nikolov (*) · R. Lugossy University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_9

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FL is typically limited to the classroom in up to 2 h per week. The dataset comprises 22 published papers in refereed journals, edited and coauthored publications written in English. Studies were chosen along these criteria: (1) published in the past three decades, (2) includes empirical research and seeks answers to relevant research questions, (3) embedded in a theory, (4) information allows for some type of replication, (5) findings are in line with the questions, and (6) offers new insights into phenomena they investigate. The chapter overviews how children, their teachers, and parents were researched and involved, what research designs were chosen, how large the samples were, what research questions the studies aimed to answer, what data collection instruments and procedures were applied, how the datasets were analyzed and triangulated, what the key findings are, what lessons can be learnt for studies in other contexts, and what ethical issues emerged. The overall picture is similar to the state-of-the-art decades ago in early FL learning in primary schools. Realistic curricular aims are rarely specified, and the body of research comprises experimental and quasi-experimental studies on learning vocabulary, as well as surveys; combined research designs include mixed methods and action research, whereas qualitative studies range from case studies to ethnographies. All approaches to research design used in the studies have their advantages as well as disadvantages. Researchers collected their data with the help of tests, questionnaires, observations, interviews, teachers’ notes and narratives, and used statistical, content, narrative, and discourse analyses. Publications tend to give accounts of successful projects, though some problems are also critically discussed. The overall picture of realistic aims and optimal conditions is vague; researchers do not seem to draw on a clearly outlined theory. Recurring themes concern children’s slow progress in the FL and the lack of motivated teachers proficient in the target language and age-appropriate classroom methodology. The chapter concludes by raising some issues and recommendations for future research. Keywords

Research designs · Age-appropriateness · Quality criteria · Validity · Generalizability · Replicability · Credibility · Triangulation · Ethics

Introduction About three decades have passed since very young learners appeared on the language pedagogy scene and their teachers started to experiment with age-appropriate materials and activities. This chapter explores what published research has revealed about the quest for what works best with very young learners of a foreign language (FL) and how tasks and activities designed by researchers and teachers are used in various European and Asian contexts. Research on very young learners (ages 2–6) of foreign languages is an emerging field of interest to a growing number of stakeholders. Publications document important trends worth exploring to map out what

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theories, approaches, and research designs researchers apply to answer meaningful questions (Creswell 2012; Dörnyei 2007; Mackey and Gass 2005; Nikolov 2009). The field of teaching a FL, typically English, to very young learners emerged in the 1990s and experts, businesses, and publishers were aware of parents’ and teachers’ needs early on. In this chapter, the term FL refers to contexts where the target language is not used as a second or an official language, and its use is mostly limited to the classroom, although the terms foreign language and second language should be seen more like a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Systematic research into how childcentered approaches were implemented was hardly existent, as the first baseline study coauthored by Blondin et al. (1998) indicated. A follow-up survey on research into the teaching and learning of FLs in primary and preschools in Europe (Edelenbos et al. 2006) synthesized the field along pedagogical principles, published research, and good practice. The main findings of these and other recent overviews (e.g., Kubanek 2018; Moon and Nikolov 2000; Nikolov 2009; Nikolov and Curtain 2000; Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2006, 2011; Singleton and Pfenninger 2019) are valid not only for children learning at schools but also for preschool learners. As for the outcomes of these inquiries, it seems that both the encouraging findings and the challenges characterizing early primary-school programs are similar to the emerging picture of FL teaching at preschools. (1) Programs vary to a large extent in a range of contexts: for example, private and state institutions, urban and rural settings, small to large groups, free and expensive programs. (2) Most publications reflect highly optimistic views on how well programs work, how motivated children seem and claim to be, and how they progress in their FL. (3) Critical voices overwhelmingly concern teachers’ competences in the target language and age-appropriate methodology, their beliefs and motivation (Kubanek 2018; Lugossy 2018; Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2011; Portiková 2015; Wilden and Porsch 2018), contextual limitations (e.g., Ng 2015) and even how useful songs are (Davis 2017). Although studies offer evidence on how slowly children progress over the months and years in minimal exposure programs (e.g., Jaekel et al. 2017; Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2011; Singleton and Pfenninger 2019), no author emphasizes slow rate of FL development. (4) No research was found on how continuity is ensured: how teachers build on what children learnt in their FL in preschool (for a detailed discussion see ▶ Chap. 23, “From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues”). The situation is also similar in that more research into how preschool programs work and achieve their stated goals with large cohorts of children, discouraging evidence may accumulate on minimal achievements in the FL over the years, as is the case in studies on primary-school learners (e.g., Baumert et al. 2020; Jaekel et al. 2017; Singleton and Pfenninger 2019). The aims and main benefits of preschool programs should not be measured in language gains, but they should focus on other domains (e.g., attitudes, motivation, self-confidence, beliefs, see Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019; Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2006, 2011), which may impact long-term outcomes in more important ways, although they are more challenging to evaluate. Discouraging findings on children’s minimal progress and teachers’ inadequate professional skills shared in scholarly publications, however, are not expected to

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impact parents’ enthusiasm toward the most frequently researched early English programs. Despite growing evidence underpinning challenges, parents’ beliefs and willingness to invest in their off-springs’ very early exposure to English are not impacted. Parents are motivated for their children to be part of early English, despite the multiple challenges characterizing early FL programs: (1) the younger the children are, the slower their progress is, (2) the lack of continuity may demotivate young learners, (3) what children find motivating during the first phase of learning English may lose its intrinsic value and become boring and demotivating in school. (4) Teachers’ inadequate motivation, proficiency in English, and age-appropriate methodology may not offer experiences conducive to children’s development (for a recent overview see Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). Important dissimilarities also characterize research into kindergarten English programs. Many projects, both quantitative and qualitative, are small-scale studies involving small groups of learners; thus, although the findings are thought provoking, they are limited to the participants in their contexts. This is a key difference between research into early programs in primary schools and in preschools: the corpus of studies analyzed in this chapter includes no large-scale comparative study on children starting in preschool vs. primary school (for a recent analysis of comparative experimental studies starting at different times in primary school see Nikolov and Timpe-Laughlin 2020) conducted to examine language-related, affective, cognitive, social, and intercultural benefits of a very early start over time and few included multiple variables internal and external to learners, their teachers, and the context. The publications included in this chapter were identified by using three strategies: (1) Multiple searches were conducted in Scopus and Google Scholar using the following keywords and their combinations: very young learners, preschool, kindergarten, foreign language, English learning and teaching, teaching foreign languages, English to children aged 2–6, early language programs. (2) Refereed journals on language pedagogy and early childhood education, publishers’ websites, and ResearchGate were consulted. (3) Lists of references were browsed in published materials on very young learners. Unpublished theses and self-published materials were not included. The dataset analyzed in this chapter (Table 1) comprises 22 studies published in refereed journals, edited and coauthored publications written in English. Studies were chosen along the following criteria: (1) study was published between 1990 and 2018, (2) it includes empirical research and seeks to answer relevant research questions, (3) research is embedded in a theory, (4) there is enough information in the text to make the study replicable, (5) findings are in line with the research questions and offer new insights into the phenomena the authors set out to investigate, (6) finally, the study was conducted in contexts where the FL is not an official language or widely available and contact is limited to a modest amount of time (up to 2 h per week; Johnstone 2019, p. 19). Studies on content-based instruction, partial or full immersion bilingual or dual language programs were not included. Publications sharing teaching ideas with no empirical data analyses were not considered. Studies meeting the criteria set for the overview (Table 1) have been recently published in

Case study using interviews and Ts’ reflection notes

Case study on Ls’ interviews

Quasiexperimental: pre-, post-, delayed posttest Quasiexperimental: pre-, posttest

Bekleyen (2011)

Brumen (2011)

Coyle and Gomez Gracia (2014)

Davis and Fan (2016)

Ethnography

Approach/ design Quasiexperimental: pre-, post-, delayed posttest

Alstad and Tkachenko (2018)

Authors Albaladejo Albaladejo et al. (2018)

How many words can Ls learn through songs and choral repetition in 7 weeks?

How do Ls benefit from learning a song in 3 x 30 min?

How are Ls motivated to learn English and German?

What do Ts’ practices reveal about their beliefs as they implement a new EFL program? How do preservice English Ts benefit from teaching two sessions at a kindergarten?

Purpose/research questions How do Ls benefit from story, song, and combination of both?

Two private kindergartens in Beijing

Semiprivate kindergarten in Spain

7 kindergartens in Slovenia

Kindergarten affiliated to university in Turkey

31 kindergartens in Norway

Context State kindergarten in Spain

Table 1 An overview of the research methodology characteristics of 22 studies

64 Ls (age 4–5)

25 Ls (age 5)

120 Ls, 11 Ts at 7 kindergartens

82 preservice Ts

About 1000 Ls (ages 1–6) and their Ts over 3 years

Participants 17 Ls (age 2–3)

Productive vocabulary test of 15 items (yes)

Receptive and productive vocab test on 5 nouns (yes)

Semi-structured interviews of 15 questions (no)

Interviews before and after teaching Ts’ reflective notes (yes)

Instruments (included yes/no) Receptive vocabulary test of 15 nouns; video recordings of Ss’ engagement (yes) Observations, interviews, narratives

A Critical Overview of Research Methods Used in Studies on Early Foreign. . . (continued)

Most Ls learnt 1–2 words in songs and drills, no difference was found

Practices varied due to Ts; freedom to implement program. Mostly good practice was observed. Although many Ts gained selfconfidence, only 10 would accept a job with very young learners Ls liked playful activities and had mostly positive attitudes Most Ls learnt nothing, 4 learnt a few items

Findings Ls learnt most by listening to story, but mostly cognates

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Jin et al. (2016)

IoannouGeorgiou (2015)

Authors Griva and Sivropoulou (2009)

Ethnography using content and discourse analysis

Approach/ design Combined research design: small-scale study using tests + other instruments Combined research design: large-scale survey + other instruments Combined research design: large-scale survey + other instruments

Table 1 (continued)

What are Ps’ and Ls’ attitudes like toward learning English? How do Ls perceive learning English? How do findings compare in 3 contexts? What do Ls’ comments say about meaning making? How do Ts respond to comments? What do their responses reveal about their beliefs?

How does a new pre-school English program work?

Purpose/research questions To develop positive attitudes and motivation to learn oral English

Classrooms and private tuition situations where picture books were used for teaching English

Kindergartens in 3 large cities and urban areas

12 preschools in rural and urban Cyprus

Context 2 state kindergartens in Greece

Hungarian Ls between age 5–12

240 Chinese Ls (mean age: 60.80 months) speaking Mandarin

550 Ls (age 4–5:6), 15 Ts

Participants 32 Ls (age 4–6) and 4 Ts

Observation, Ts’ diaries, informal discussions with Ts and Ls (yes)

Questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, elicited metaphor analysis, narrative analysis (yes)

Ts: questionnaire and interview; Ls: interviews (no)

Instruments (included yes/no) Tests on receptive and productive vocabulary; observations, interviews (no)

Discourse analysis applied to Ls’ comments in L1 and L2 offer insights into their meaning making. Ts integrated, ignored, or prevented comments

Ps are very motivated; Ls’ answers are varied and difficult to interpret; controversial findings

Positive findings, but every fourth L faced difficulties

Findings Ls were motivated and learnt some words and expressions

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Ethnography using discourse analysis

Case study using observation

Case study using observation

Case study in homeschooling context

Combined research design: small-scale study using tests + other instruments

Lugossy (2018)

Mourão and Robinson (2016)

Ng (2015)

Prošić-Santovac (2017)

Prošić-Santovac and Radović (2018)

Role of L1 and L2 in “English only”; stakeholders’ agency

What difficulties do native and local EFL Ts face in team teaching? How do they collaborate? How do watching cartoons and using related toys contribute to 1 girl’s learning EFL and motivation?

How do Ls and Ts use L1 and L2? What are Ts’ beliefs about meaning making? How do they benefit from reflections? How do two Ts collaborate to offer Ls opportunities to learn English?

Private EnglishSerbian bilingual kindergarten

Author’s home in Serbia

Private kindergarten in Hong Kong

A preschool in Portugal

Two private kindergartens in Hungary

2 Ts; 18Ps, 20 Ss (mean age 6.48)

Girl between 3:4 and 4:10

1 T and 1 English language specialist, 23 Ls (age 4–5) 3 local EFL Ts, 1 native English speaker

30 L1 Hungarian and 6 bilingual Ls and 4 Ts

Interviews, questionnaires, observations, receptive and productive vocabulary tests (no)

(continued)

The two Ts built on one another’s practice and established an English learning area No collaboration was found due to pedagogical, logistical, and interpersonal reasons L was highly motivated and aware; her English vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and pronunciation developed Despite English only rule, Ls used L1

Observations, field notes, informal discussions (no)

Classroom observations, videos, field notes, and semistructured interviews (no) Active vocabulary test, observation and recording of L2 use, structured interview on motivation (no)

Ts’ practices and beliefs vary; what they know and do are not always in harmony

Participant and nonparticipant observations, field notes, teaching journal (yes)

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Case study in homeschooling environment

Case study using interviews

Experimental between-group design

Scheffler and Domińska (2018)

Unsworth et al. (2014)

Approach/ design Combined research design: large-scale survey + other instruments Combined research design: action research

Scheffler (2015)

Robinson et al. (2015)

Authors Portiková (2015)

Table 1 (continued)

How much do Ls develop in English over 2 years? How do L-, T-, and teachingrelated variables impact their vocabulary?

How does exposure to authentic cartoons over 2 years impact spontaneous use of English? How do Ts and Ls use L1 and L2?

Purpose/research questions What is the language teaching situation in kindergartens? What are stakeholders’ views? How effective are English learning areas?

Preschools in the Netherlands

State kindergarten and private language school in Poland

Author’s home in Poland

Two kindergartens in Portugal and South Korea

Context State, private, and church preschools in Slovakia

168 Dutch Ls in 17 groups (mean age 4:4)

20 Ts of Ls between 2 and 6

Twins (boy and girl; age 1:9 to 4:3 months)

3 Ts and 16 Ls (age 5–6) in Portugal

Participants 175 school principals, 73 Ts at 535 preschools

PPVT tests of vocabulary, grammar, aptitude, questionnaire (no)

Semi-structured interviews (no)

Field notes on spontaneous L2 use (all data included)

Observations, anecdotal feedback

Instruments (included yes/no) Questionnaires, observations (no)

Ls enjoyed activities in English learning areas, some initiated them voluntarily Ls used some English appropriately in context; codemixes were typical Ts accommodate to Ls’ needs by using L1 for various purposes; more so in state school than in private school Ls developed in treatment and control groups; best predictor of Ls’ English: Ts’ proficiency

Findings T education lagged behind needs; half of Ts were not qualified

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Experimental between-group design

Yeung et al. (2013)

How do Ls develop in phonological awareness program in 12 weeks?

How much English vocabulary do Ls learn from stories in rich, embedded, and incidental approaches

Note: L learner, Ls learners, T teacher, Ts teachers, Ps parents

Quasiexperimental: pre-, post-, delayed posttest in 3 conditions

Yeung et al. (2016)

3 kindergartens in Hong Kong

Private kindergarten in Hong Kong

76 Cantonese speaking Ls (mean age 5.14)

30 Cantonese speaking Ls (mean age 5:1)

12 tests, e.g., word reading, naming objects, PPVT, syllable deletion, rhyme detection

Observations, vocabulary test, 3 tasks measuring 12 words (no) Rich approach resulted in more and better learnt words, no difference between embedded and implicit approaches Controversial findings: best predictor of word reading was phonological awareness in treatment group: in control group: Ls’ oral skills

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refereed journals, in edited volumes and coauthored books reflecting the organizing power of a few dedicated researchers and the British Council (e.g., Mourāo and Lourenço 2015; Murphy and Evangelou 2016; Robinson et al. 2015; Schwartz 2018).

Main Theoretical Concepts The main concepts discussed in this chapter concern the research methodology used in the design of the studies and the age-appropriateness of the instruments (including classroom tasks, activities, and tests as well as other tools of data collection, e.g., observation, questionnaire, interview) and procedures (how data were collected). Readers are assumed to have solid background knowledge on approaches and research designs in language pedagogy and applied linguistics (e.g., Creswell 2012; Dörnyei 2007; Duff 2014; Mackey and Gass 2005; Nunan and Bailey 2009); however, a short outline of the key concepts used in the analyses in this chapter is presented here. Some constructs not used in the studies are not discussed in depth. Research is a process of collecting and analyzing information to increase understanding and to add to the knowledge of a topic, to suggest improvements for practice, and to inform policy debates (Creswell 2012, pp. 4–8). When choosing a topic and formulating research questions, researchers can choose from three approaches to research design: quantitative, qualitative, and combined or mixed approaches. The first two should be placed along a continuum between two extremes, whereas the third one combines the first two approaches. Some researchers word the difference between the first two approaches as psychometric and naturalistic (Nunan and Bailey 2009, p. 6): quantitative studies aim to measure a known construct, whereas qualitative studies explore meaning in the data. In quantitative studies, researchers apply experimental or correlational or survey designs (Creswell 2012, p. 12) with a hypothesis “followed by the quantification of data and some sort of numerical analysis is carried out” (Mackey and Gass 2005, p. 2). Quantitative studies assume a stable reality and involve controlled measurements or observations. They are considered objective, removed from the quantified data, oriented toward verification and outcomes, reliable, involving “hard” and replicable data, and their findings can often be generalized to other groups and contexts. Research questions tend to be narrowly focused to collect measurable data on known variables (Creswell 2012, p. 14). In contrast, qualitative studies assume a dynamic reality, use naturalistic and controlled data, they are perceived as subjective and exploratory, discovery- and process-oriented. Research questions tend to be broad and open-ended to allow researchers to explore how things are without assumptions or known variables. Researchers view “reality and meaning as coconstructed through the dynamic processes of interacting with others and with the wider social, material, and symbolic world” (Duff 2014, p. 4). Researchers are close to the “soft” data and results are not meant to be generalized to other groups or contexts (Mackey and Gass 2005, p. 2), as

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they are shaped by the context and participants. Qualitative inquiries may, however, lead to new research questions and hypotheses, which can be then tested in a new quantitative study. As Duff (2014) pointed out, some qualitative researchers assume that “some degree of generalization may be both warranted and desirable in case studies under the appropriate conditions” (p. 9) as readers will “draw inferences from studies and . . . consider their wider relevance, a process described as analytic (or theoretical) generalization as opposed to statistical generalization” (p. 10, italics in original). Qualitative designs include grounded theory, ethnography, and narrative studies (Creswell 2012); researchers use content, narrative as well as discourse analysis (Nunan and Bailey 2009; on coding qualitative data see Saldaña 2009). The integration of these two approaches, combined designs, comprise mixed methods and action research (Creswell 2012, p. 12), although mixed methods is often used as the umbrella term (e.g., Nunan and Bailey 2009). Combined designs apply both quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting and analyzing data in one research study or a series of studies. Action research is typically narrowly focused on a specific practical problem and it aims to find a solution to it (Creswell 2012, p. 577). In experimental studies researchers use either between-group or within-group designs, depending on the number of participants and groups and how they are sampled. True experiments are rarely conducted in educational research, unless participants can be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Thus, in most contexts, quasi-experimental design, involving existing groups or classes, is more feasible (Creswell 2012, p. 309). In both types of between-group design, an experimental treatment group and a control group are compared, and only one group gets the treatment. In studies applying a within-group design, all participants of a single group receive all experimental treatments, thus, they are their own control: their performances (measurements or observations) under one experimental treatment are compared with their own performances under another experimental treatment (p. 515). In a single-subject design, only one participant gets different types of treatments and his/her performances are documented on an individual basis over time. In correlational research designs, researchers “use a correlation statistical technique to describe and measure the degree of association (or relationship) between two or more variables or sets of scores” (Creswell 2012, p. 619); whereas in surveys researchers “administer a survey or questionnaire to a sample or to the entire population of people to describe the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, or characteristics of the population” (Creswell 2012, p. 628). Quantitative studies can be categorized as cross-sectional or longitudinal depending on whether data are collected at a single point or at multiple points. Within qualitative research design, a case study is a type of ethnography, which originally means “writing about groups of people” (Creswell 2012, p. 461). A case study aims to provide a “holistic description of language learning or use within a specific population and setting” (Mackey and Gass 2005, p. 171). Case studies may focus on individual learners, classes, or schools and they should offer rich contextualization and insights into complexities of learning processes (p. 172) not possible to document in quantitative studies. Researchers can offer an emic perspective of

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what meanings participants attach to phenomena under investigation. Data collection is open ended and cyclical, focusing on themes as they emerge (p. 162). Case studies are different from studies applying single-subject designs as they include no treatment, they are open ended and do not aim to find evidence to support (or refute) a hypothesis. Language data can be analyzed using discourse analysis, which concerns a systematic study of how language(s) are used in context (Nunan and Bailey 2009, p. 423), for example, by teachers and learners in classrooms. It comprises a wide range of techniques analyzing conversation and interaction in all the languages (including body language) learners and teachers use with one another and among themselves. Narrative inquiries use, for example, learners, teachers’, or parents’ stories as data and offer “rich accounts of language learning and teaching experiences in their social contexts and as they evolve over time” (Benson 2014, p. 166). Another subcategory is often used related to where data are collected: classroom research has recently been loosely defined as any of the above approaches to research design with data collected in the classroom or outside it through extramural exposure to languages (Nunan and Bailey 2009), including online media and gaming. As is clear from these short discussions, the types of studies within the three approaches to research design may not be easy to distinguish, as they may overlap and the boundaries in some categories are fuzzy. For example, authors may frame their research as a quasi-experimental study or action research, but it can also be characterized as a case study. As was pointed out above, qualitative studies often quantify, for example, frequencies of patterns in answers to open questions or in themes emerging from classroom discourses (in multiple languages), in elicited narratives, and in observation data. All research studies have some quality control issues: in the case of quantitative studies, these concern reliability, validity, and replicability. Reliability means “the degree to which there is consistency in the results” (Mackey and Gass 2005, p. 364), whereas validity is the “extent one can make correct generalizations based on the results from a particular measure” (p. 369). Different types of validity are distinguished (pp. 206–218): internal validity indicates the extent to which the results are a function of the factor(s) the researcher intended, whereas external validity concerns how relevant the findings are for a wider population. Content validity refers to the representativeness of a measurement; construct validity indicates the degree to which the study captures the construct it intends to measure. Finally, replicability requires researchers to include all details (context, instruments, procedure) necessary to allow other researchers to fully or partially replicate their quantitative study. Quality control issues in qualitative studies are somewhat different (pp. 179–185): credibility (a similar notion to internal validity) means how accurate the findings are for the research population; therefore, researchers use triangulation, thick description, and member checking to ensure the accuracy, transferability, and confirmability of their study. The latter concept is similar to replicability; thus, researchers should include all details and data to allow other researchers to confirm (or reject) their results. Dependability, similarly to reliability, concern the extent to which other researchers not involved in the study, would draw the same conclusions based on

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the same dataset (p. 351). Finally, researchers can use multiple research techniques and sources of data to corroborate evidence by triangulating (as they compare and contrast) them (Mackey and Gass 2005, p. 368). Interestingly, the term triangulation is used only in connection with qualitative studies (Creswell 2012; Mackey and Gass 2005), although the concept could be applicable to studies mixing qualitative and quantitative techniques. An additional criterion on quality assurance concerns the age group involved in the studies. When designing a study, researchers must ensure that all data collection instruments and procedures are age appropriate and ethical. They must reflect how young children think, learn, feel, and live their daily lives to make sure that they benefit from interventions, observations, etc.; therefore, all components have to be aligned to and conducive to children’s physical, cognitive, emotional, and social well-being and development in order to be ethical.

Major Contributions The 22 empirical studies overviewed in the chapter are presented in two complementary ways: First, in Table 1, for a quick overview, they are listed in alphabetical order of the authors’ names and their five key features are presented according to their: (a) purpose/research questions, (b) context, (c) participants, (d) instruments [included or not], and (e) main findings. Then, in the sections “Experimental Studies,” “Quasi-Experimental Studies,” “Combined Research Design: LargeScale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments,” “Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments,” “Combined Research Design: Action Research,” “Case Studies Using Observation of Teachers’ Collaboration,” “Case Studies Using Interviews to Explore Teacher Cognition and Practice,” “A Case Study Using Interviews with Children,” “Case Studies in Homeschooling Environments,” and “Ethnographies” under major contributions, they are organized along the approaches and research designs presented in the previous discussion.

Experimental Studies Two studies applied between-group design by involving treatment and control groups (Unsworth et al. 2014; Yeung et al. 2013). In a 2-year project implemented in the Netherlands, Unsworth et al. (2014) involved 168 Dutch preschool children (mean age 4.4) at 14 experimental and 3 control schools. Children’s receptive vocabulary and grammar were assessed at three points with the PPVT-4 and the Test for Reception of Grammar, TROG-2 (Bishop 2003) tests. The tests were administered first upon entering the EFL program, and after 1 and 2 years. The longitudinal study aimed to assess how much children developed in English, and how learner-, teaching-, and teacher-related variables impacted their achievements. Learner-related variables included out-of-school exposure and aptitude (measured by phonological short-term working memory); teaching-related data were collected

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on weekly exposure to classroom English in minutes, and as an indicator of the quality of input, teachers’ English proficiency was also included. Participants achieved statistically significantly better scores on both tests after 2 years; children’s scores with more than 60 min per week of EFL were significantly higher than their peers’ scores with less input. Children’s scores were more strongly related to whether their teacher’s proficiency in English was at B level on the CEFR than on the amount of their weekly exposure to English, and whether they were native and nonnative speakers did not seem to matter. In other words, the best predictor of children’s English score was their teachers’ English proficiency. The authors claimed that Dutch children developed in 2 years about as much as native speaker children did over 5 months. What they did not emphasize is that all children knew quite a few words at the first time of testing and the control group’s scores also increased over 2 years without formal EFL instruction. For example, the average raw score on receptive vocabulary before start was 10 in both the experimental and control groups. Comparing the control groups and the 120+ min per week groups, averages were 15 and 21 after 1 year, and 20 and 32 after 2 years, respectively (p. 535). These average scores indicate that, on the one hand, English is clearly present in Dutch kindergarten children’s lives. On the other hand, children’s development in all groups, including the treatment groups, was minimal: for example, the average after 2 years of over 2 h a week of English was only 12 points higher than the average of the control group. No data were collected on what happened in the English classes; therefore, a key variable was missing. Participants in another experimental study conducted in Hong Kong (Yeung et al. 2013) were 76 Cantonese speaking children (mean age 5.14) at three kindergartens who had two to three English lessons per week, of about 20–30 min, taught by six native English teachers. Half of the children participated in a language-enriched phonological awareness program focusing on auditory training to promote their awareness of the sound structure in English words in 24, 30-min sessions over 12 weeks. Words were first presented and taught explicitly in both the experimental and the control groups, but in the treatment group children were taught to tap syllables and find rhyming words, in addition to other exercises, including word reading and copying. Children in the two groups did similar activities focused on “print learning through whole word learning and copying” (p. 697). Outcomes were tested by 12 different tests: some assessed what children learned (e.g., word reading, naming objects in pictures), other tests were unrelated to the program (writing of unknown words, PPVT English receptive vocabulary), and five tests measured phonemic awareness (e.g., syllable deletion, rhyme detection). Although the aim was to measure the impact of phonological training, the findings were controversial: the best predictor for children in the control group was their oral language skills, whereas in the treatment group phonological awareness predicted word reading. The authors admit that the vocabulary tests were most probably not valid and reliable, as they reflected Western concepts Chinese children were unfamiliar with. The teaching methods were not in line with what this age group could be expected to do in English, and instead of teaching listening and speaking in context, vocabulary was pre-taught without context and emphasis was on reading and copying.

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As the two experimental studies show, they offer important insights into what they set out to investigate; however, choosing a quantitative research design does not guarantee valid and reliable results. The variables assumed to contribute to outcomes and the tests applied may not cover what really matters: for example, what activities teachers use, to what extent they are developmentally appropriate, and thus ethical, and build on what children can do, how teachers and the children use their languages, how teachers scaffold children’s learning in the classrooms over the years may be more important than what the instruments they applied could measure.

Quasi-Experimental Studies Four independent studies applied a quasi-experimental design to assess children’s learning of English vocabulary among other factors by applying a within-subject design in which all children were exposed to the same treatment administered by the same researcher or teacher; thus, each participant served as their own control, as they all participated in the same activities. Three (Albaladejo Albaladejo et al. 2018; Coyle and Gómez Gracia 2014; Yeung et al. 2016) out of the four studies used multiple datasets. Vocabulary learning was the focus of Coyle and Gomez Gracia (Coyle and Gómez Gracia 2014) who investigated how 25 Spanish children at a semiprivate preschool benefited from three 30-min English lessons based on a song and activities related to it. All 5-year-old children had two 50-min English weekly classes. The experimental sessions were taught by one of the authors and targeted five nouns in the song. In the first session, she taught parts of a bus and sang the song twice while pointing to parts on an interactive white board to clarify word meanings. In the second and third sessions, children were involved in total physical response (TPR; they acted out the movements accompanying the song) and other activities and sang the song (including the target words) seven times. Participants were individually tested on the receptive and productive knowledge of the five words before and after the three lessons, and then 5 weeks later. The authors reported a “steady increase in the receptive vocabulary” (p. 280): M ¼ 1; SD ¼ 1.41after the third class and M ¼ 1.72; SD ¼ 1.67 after 5 weeks. No significant growth was found in productive word knowledge: only 4 of the 25 children could name 1–5 objects, others none. Half of the children were able to comprehend one or two words; two understood all five, but they had known one or two of them prior to learning the song. The authors, quite controversially, argued that the use of gestures and onomatopoeias may have prevented children from memorizing the words and they suggested that teachers should “be wary of distracting the children’s attention away from the target input” (p. 283). In addition, they referred to interview data in which one of the “poor” performers “admitted to ‘feeling sleepy’ during some of the song sessions” (p. 283). These points raise ethical issues: (1) the positive framing of children’s receptive vocabulary gain overestimated the results to make the study look valid; (2) labeling children as poor learners at this young age based on a formal test of five words is dangerous; (3) if children are tired or sleepy, formal sessions may not be in their best interest.

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In a similar study using a within-subject design, Davis and Fan (2016) aimed to find out how songs and choral repetition contribute to vocabulary learning. Participants were 64 Chinese children between 4 and 5 in three classes at two private kindergartens in Beijing. Interventions lasted 15 lessons of 40 min over 7 weeks; the teacher, the same person, was new to all participants. Eleven songs comprising 15 target sentences were borrowed from a teaching material for first and second graders: they were new texts set to the tune of four traditional children’s songs. The songs and repetition drills on the same texts were introduced by pre-teaching vocabulary projected on a screen. All children were exposed to the same 15 short sentences in a song, repeat, and control treatment in a different sequence. The teacher repeated the sentences in each class and in each condition twice with pictures, whereas in the control condition without visual support. Children were tested on a pre- and posttest: a productive vocabulary measure of 15 items borrowed from the same teaching material before and after the treatment. They were asked individually to say what they could see in 15 cards showing animals and people involved in some action. The answers were recorded, transcribed, and the mean length of their utterances was calculated from meaningful morphemes, a technique used in first language acquisition studies. Teaching songs and choral repetition with pictures resulted in similar and significantly better results, whereas in the control condition of no pictures children did not develop significantly. What children learnt was modest: the average mean length of utterance for the song, repeat, and control on the pretest were .60, .59, and .58, respectively, whereas after 15 classes of 40 min they were 1.48, 1.30, and 0.66, respectively. As the author pointed out in his response to a clarification question, “The overall range was 0–11, with 0 or 1 word being by far the most common” (Davis, email communication 1/10/2019). In other words, children learnt very little from the songs and drills: on average one or no new words at all. Another quasi-experimental study adopted a within-subject design: Yeung et al. (2016) aimed to compare three methods of teaching vocabulary through reading storybooks. They identified three (rich, embedded, and incidental) approaches in the literature. The first two applied explicit techniques, whereas the third one served as control condition. A convenience sample of 30 Cantonese speaking children (mean age: 5.1) from three classes were exposed to all the three intervention conditions at a Hong Kong kindergarten. The teacher, trained by one of the researchers, was the same home room teacher working with the groups for three times 30 min over 3 weeks. Three different storybooks on animals were chosen and four target words were identified in each: a total of twelve (two nouns and ten verbs). In the rich condition, new items were pre-taught, then defined for in-depth learning while reading the story, and further contexts were offered for using them. In the embedded condition, the same procedures were followed but no extended practice was applied when the teacher retold the story. In the control condition, children heard the story with no explanations. Data were collected with the help of an observation checklist for the teaching sessions, and a standardized oral receptive vocabulary test of 36 items before the treatment. Three tasks were applied on the twelve words before and after listening to the stories, and 8 weeks later. First, children were asked to explain the meaning of the 12 target items; then, their comprehension of word

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meanings was measured; finally, they had to respond to yes/no items on meanings in one-on-one settings with their teacher. Cantonese was used in the items and accepted in the answers. The rich method resulted in significantly better scores than the other two methods, and there was no difference between embedded and incidental methods. Gains, however, were minimal over the 3 weeks, and some children learnt hardly any words from the four words per week target. The authors do not mention that by pre-teaching vocabulary the teacher failed to involve the children in meaning making, guessing meaning actively in context, which may have offered them opportunities to learn vocabulary more efficiently. The youngest participants, 2- and 3-year-old children, were involved in Albaladejo Albaladejo et al.’ (2018) quasi-experimental study. They wanted to find out how 17 Spanish learners of English learnt nouns in three types of activities and how their behavior during the sessions impacted their learning. Children listened to (1) stories, (2) songs, and (3) both to enhance their receptive vocabulary and they were exposed to each word between three and nine times. They were given a pretest, a posttest, and a delayed posttest (3 weeks after each condition) on five words (total ¼ 15) they were exposed to in each of the three conditions over 3 weeks. Data were also collected by video recordings to analyze their engagement in the activities (as high, average, or low). Findings indicated that children benefited most from stories, although the choice of vocabulary may have impacted the outcomes: three words in the story were cognates and the relevance of nouns in the song was an issue, as the authors state (p. 124). Also, the frequency at which they were exposed to the words (3–9) varied. These points cast doubt on the validity of the treatment and the tests. In the song condition only four children could remember between one and four words. How much visual and body language support the teacher used was not studied. In addition to the tests, children’s behavior was checked for the two best and lowest achievers, thus the authors mixed their methods, although only with four participants. Analysis of the video data showed that the children who looked focused and engaged quietly achieved better results than their more physically active peers. The overall outcomes of these experimental and quasi-experimental studies are discouraging in that young participants learn very little despite the carefully designed research projects. Both implicit and explicit teaching techniques result in minimal outcomes and there is no “best way” forward to speed up their rate of learning. The choice of language items needs careful consideration and ethical issues are also to be borne in mind. Some children may be overwhelmed by formal sessions and feeling unsuccessful or being labeled as slow learners may negatively impact their motivation, self-confidence, self-image, and development over time.

Combined Research Design: Large-Scale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments The next three sections “Combined Research Design: Large-Scale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments,” “Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments,” and “Combined Research Design: Action

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Research” present studies using different combinations of quantitative and qualitative designs and involving large (section “Combined Research Design: Large-Scale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments”) and small (sections “Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments” and “Combined Research Design: Action Research”) samples of participants. The three studies overviewed in this section aimed to draw a larger picture by applying a survey and other data collection instruments to involve various stakeholders. One was implemented in Cyprus (Ioannou-Georgiou 2015), another one in Slovakia (Portiková 2015), and a third one in China (Jin et al. 2016). They combined a survey with interviews, observations, and questionnaires. The first project was longitudinal, whereas the others were cross-sectional. As is often the case with programs for very young learners, they were launched due to parental pressure. In the first large-scale project, Ioannou-Georgiou (2015) overviewed the introduction of an early English program into kindergartens involving 12 institutions, 15 teachers, and 550 children (ages 4–5:6, some of them immigrants) in a pilot project and used surveys and interviews with teachers and children over 3 years. Teachers were offered a 20-h course and on-going in-service training opportunities. They filled in questionnaires on their attitudes toward FL learning at the beginning of the study. Then, focus-group interviews were conducted with the teachers after the first, second, and third years on how the children developed and how they implemented the program. About half of the children were interviewed before and after a year of learning English to explore their awareness of languages, expectations, and attitudes toward FL learning. All interviews were recorded and transcribed; the results are presented along large categories, but how they were established was not discussed in the paper. Overall, the project was successful, although at first, teachers found the lack of teaching materials challenging. They appreciated the on-going support and they could apply what they learnt not only with children with Greek as L1, but also with immigrant children speaking a range of languages. The findings are worded in very positive terms without indicating how many teachers said what. Children’s awareness of and favorable attitudes toward languages and learning them increased over 2 years. They showed interest not only in English but also in other languages. Although 97% wanted to continue English after the second year in the program, 23% reported difficulties in learning it. What kinds of challenges they met and how they impacted their development later was not discussed in the publication. The second study involving a large sample was implemented in Slovakia, where Portiková (2015) conducted a survey involving 175 school principals and 73 teachers of English at 535 pre-schools. Besides using questionnaires, teachers working in classrooms were observed at seven schools including state, private, and church institutions. Almost half of the institutions integrated an FL (most often English, but also German and French) into their curricula in 45 min per week on average. The FL programs aimed to develop positive attitudes toward the target languages and cultures and to teach vocabulary in a playful way. In the observed sessions, teachers successfully used playful TPR activities, song, rhymes, role-play, and storytelling. A third of the teachers had no qualifications to teach in kindergartens, although

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principals were legally obliged to hire qualified educators. Therefore, the FL sessions were not integrated into official school curricula, but they were most often implemented as after-school activities to avoid legal issues. The majority of teachers and principals would welcome more educational opportunities for teachers to work in preschools. As for the teachers’ proficiency in the FL, observations revealed frequent “mispronunciation” (p. 184); therefore, the author suggested emphasis on phonetics and phonology in preservice teacher education. Many participants were concerned about children’s speech disorders; 20% of the children were diagnosed with them but they were not defined or categorized in the survey. Little information was shared on the actual dataset, but some of the main issues in teacher education were presented critically. The third large-scale mixed method study, sponsored by the British Council, was implemented in three locations in China. Jin et al. (2016) designed a cross-sectional project involving 240 children (mean age 60.80 months) and their parents at kindergartens in three large cities and in rural areas around them. The aim was to survey the parents’ and their children’s attitudes toward learning English, the children’s reflections on what learning English meant to them, how parental attitudes contributed to children’s learning of English, and how results compared to one another across contexts. Over half of the families paid extra for English learning in about 30 min or less a day on average. The better off families were, the keener they were on their child’s English, and the more intensive the programs were. The authors used questionnaires, semi-structured interviews with the parents and the kindergarteners. In addition to these instruments, they elicited metaphors and narratives from the children. Questionnaires for parents and children included 38 three- and fivepoint Likert scale items on attitudes, support, and purpose of learning English. Some of the questions asked from children were neither age-appropriate nor valid: for example, “Do you dislike learning English if you find learning is hard?” was aimed to elicit data on attitudes toward English in comparison to Mandarin, and how parents helped children with their English learning. Narratives were elicited from the children in one-on-one sessions by asking them to tell the interviewer any story about their experience of learning English. Metaphors were elicited by showing children “pictures of fruits, food, cars, clothes; toys of fruit, cars and animal; plastic or wood learning aids with different shapes and colors. Paper and colored drawing pencils were provided so that children could draw anything to represent their metaphors” (p. 11). They were asked to use the pattern “Learning English is like. . .. because. . .” in four steps. While looking at the objects, they were asked to state, “What’s your mother like?” first, then what learning English was like. If they could not answer, they could point to one of the objects or pictures. This confusing sequence of tasks resulted in mixed data, raising questions about the tasks and their impact. The authors give an example of transcribed data (p. 13) illustrating how stressed a child felt (vomited). However, they comment on this example as unrelated to English; the interviewer pushed further and the child, perhaps guessed what was expected, mentioned “mum and grandma’s hair . . . light and relaxing,” which was then interpreted as a positive metaphor. Children produced 736 metaphors: half were categorized as positive, 13% negative, and the rest neutral. Two main types were

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found: food and animals. Although the authors did not seem to realize, the answers were clearly induced by the visuals children were shown. The categorization of the answers and the explanations offered indicated that the study has serious content validity issues (pp. 24–30): as the details above indicate, many items in the interview and the elicitation of metaphors were not in harmony with how children think in concrete terms. The authors found the data hard to interpret. For example, “learning English is like an elephant, because it is hot in English class and the teacher is fat” (p. 26) and other examples indicate that many children had no idea what was expected from them. Asking children 38 questions in one sitting, showing them concrete objects to associate with English learning, do not reflect age-appropriate research methodology tuned to the learners’ cognitive level and raise ethical questions. Also, analyzing single sentences including verbs as narratives is not in line with the literature. Findings on the parental datasets made more sense than the analyses of the children’s answers.

Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments In a small-scale study, Griva and Sivropoulou (2009) used mixed methods and involved two groups of preschool learners (14: age 4–5; 18: age 5–6), two kindergartens and two English teachers in two classrooms in Greece. They aimed to shape children’s positive attitudes toward learning English and to develop their oral skills by providing “multi-sensory learning” in two phases. In the first 3 months children were offered opportunities to interact in print-rich environments (e.g., flashcards) to evoke their interest. In the next 5 months 12 “interventions” were implemented by organizing activities on topics (e.g., colors, body, professions) based on “drilling words and phrases” and interaction in playful contexts (e.g., role-play). The two teachers organized activities in small groups in four steps: children solved puzzles to connect words and pictures, listened to songs, acted out role-plays, drew pictures, and as a last step, they were assessed on naming pictures. A test battery was applied before and after the project: children were asked to name 20 items in a poster, point to 3 actions in the poster their teacher described, and to complete 3 sentences by looking at what the teacher pointed to. The authors found significantly better performance after the treatment. For example, on the pretest the mean on the word recall test was 5, whereas on the posttest 10.3. Results were calculated along how much help children needed (no help, some help from teacher). The pretests showed that many children could do the tasks without intervention, whereas others were unable to do them even with scaffolding. On the third pretest 21 children could not respond correctly, whereas on the posttest 17 were successful. The tests were not quite appropriate for the age group: productive vocabulary was assessed by many more items than receptive skills (23 vs. 3), although it is reasonable to expect children to be better at comprehension than production. For triangulation purposes nonparticipant observations were conducted ten times. The children showed a lot of interest in the activities and maintained motivated behavior. The authors observed

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some problems in the children’s oral production and their overuse of gestures to overcome difficulties. The four teachers were interviewed: they were overwhelmingly positive about their experiences and were only concerned about children’s difficulties in recalling words, time limitations, and suggested only one weekly session instead of two and more varied tasks. Two recent classroom-based projects focused on how the children’s first language and the target language were used. Although the studies share some important features, they were framed differently: the first one (Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018) mixed multiple methods with a small sample, whereas the second one (Scheffler and Domińska 2018) was a case study. Prošić-Santovac and Radović (2018) examined three stakeholder groups’ agency in how the “English only” principle was applied over 3 months at a private bilingual kindergarten in Serbia. The authors framed their project as “QUAL-quan parallel mixed method design” (p. 3) including “a linguistic ethnographic study” (p. 4). Two teachers, 18 parents of 20 children (mean age 6.48) were involved; data were collected with the help of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, observation checklists, and tests of English vocabulary, thus allowing for triangulation of the data. The authors concluded that despite the strict “English only” rule, children tended to use their L1. The two teachers used different strategies to adhere to the rule and to adjust to the children’s needs. Although a lot of data were collected, some of the analyses (e.g., types of motivation) and presentation were unclear (e.g., percentages in tables and the text). It is an insightful study about the way teachers interpret and implement methodology recommendations.

Combined Research Design: Action Research Robinson et al. (2015) evaluated the impact of a holistic and integrated approach to teaching English to very young learners. They framed their study as action research (p. 18) and implemented it in three phases in two locations. They aimed to analyze how children’s use of English learning areas increased opportunities for using the FL in meaningful contexts. Teachers and children at two kindergartens participated in the project in Portugal and South Korea: a primary educator, her assistant, and an English specialist taught English to 16 children (age 5–6) in 30 min twice a week at a private preschool in Portugal. In South Korea a kindergarten affiliated to a university was the other location: two English teachers volunteered to give the same amount of instruction to unspecified participants. Findings concerned how children replicated teacher-led activities, used chunks of English, took on the teachers’ roles, and how frequently they used the English learning area in their free play. The text includes photos of children reading or interacting and some examples of how they used flashcards or imitated their teacher in role-play. The lack of details on what tasks the holistic and integrated method included would make the study hard to replicate even partially. Short narrative descriptions of “anecdotal feedback” (p. 27) offer some insights into children having a good time, but there is not enough thick description for an ethnography. The authors seem to credit the unspecified frequent

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use of a physical space that was established for learning English as a key indicator of success. A more detailed evaluation study should have offered more evidence and useful insight into good practice. As the above sections “Combined Research Design: Large-Scale Studies Using Surveys and Other Instruments,” “Combined Research Design: Small-Scale Studies Using Tests and Other Instruments,” and “Combined Research Design: Action Research” on studies applying combined research design show, researchers are aware of the potential advantages of using mixed methods. Reflecting contextual constrains, researchers may be able to involve larger or smaller samples and collect data either once or over a longer period. The critical overview of the studies shows that all designs have strengths and weaknesses, using mixed methods is not a silver bullet, researchers have to bear in mind quality criteria for both research designs. In the next sections, studies applied multiple data collection instruments and procedures to triangulate datasets.

Case Studies Using Observation of Teachers’ Collaboration Different types of case studies are presented in the next four sections: the first two focused on teachers, the third and fourth one on children. Section “Case Studies Using Observation of Teachers’ Collaboration” includes studies on how teachers collaborated by collecting observation and other data, whereas in section “Case Studies Using Interviews to Explore Teacher Cognition and Practice” case studies explored teachers’ cognition and practices. Section “A Case Study Using Interviews with Children” presents a study using interviews with children, and two studies (section “Case Studies in Homeschooling Environments”) were implemented in a homeschooling environment. A qualitative approach is popular in studies on not only very young learners, but also their teachers, as was seen in the previous studies using mixed methods. Teachers’ collaboration was explored in two publications. The first one (Mourão and Robinson 2016) was implemented in Portugal and inquired into using an English learning area (also discussed in Robinson et al. 2015); the second one (Ng 2015) was implemented in Hong Kong. Mourão and Robinson (2016) analyzed field notes on observations, informal interviews, and documents in a case study. Participants included 23 children (age 4–5) and two experienced teachers: a preprimary educator with First Certificate of English (B2, independent user) and a teacher of English and French of older children. The teachers set up an English learning area to promote children’s development, invited the children to bring and share all they knew in and about English, and organized various activities to engage them in using English. The English specialist worked with the children twice a week for 30 min while the home room teacher observed them. The study gives a narrative account of how the kindergarten teacher built on what the language expert introduced and practiced with the children. The main outcome of the collaborative practice was that most children volunteered to use the English learning area for free play, they were keen on talking about English, and they inserted some English words and chunks into their

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Portuguese utterances during the day. There was no pressure on the children to repeat or produce English, but they were encouraged to interact with both teachers and one another in English. Both teachers were responsible for English in the classroom, but their roles were different, and the children were aware of the differences. This descriptive study shares good practice which could be applied in other contexts, although there is not enough detail on what tasks were used and how. Collaboration was the focus of another case study conducted at a private kindergarten in Hong Kong. Ng (2015) explored the difficulties an unqualified part-time native English speaker teacher and her three full-time colleagues, local English teachers, faced when expected to teach in a team. The author video recorded 180 min of classroom observations, took field notes over 4 weeks in three groups, and interviewed the teachers so that she could triangulate datasets. Ng found a lack of collaboration, as the pedagogical, logistical, and interpersonal conditions did not allow the participants to work together. All four teachers were inadequately trained, had no time or motivation to share with one another, and used classroom techniques (boring drills, translation) not in line with what is known to be conducive to children’s learning of English. This is the only study offering insights into why an innovation that would make perfect sense and is supported by the literature was not feasible due to various constraints. Understanding the teachers’ emic perspectives allowed Ng to present a convincing case about the unrealistic demands the four teachers tried to cope with.

Case Studies Using Interviews to Explore Teacher Cognition and Practice Two other case study projects inquired into teachers’ practices and development: the first one focused on experienced teachers, whereas the second one involved preservice teachers. In a qualitative exploratory study, Scheffler and Domińska (2018) inquired into how 20 EFL teachers and their pupils (age 2–6) used English and Polish in two types of programs. Ten teachers taught at state nursery schools, whereas ten others at private language schools. Semi-structured interviews elicited teachers’ views on their own practices and how young learners developed in English. The authors analyzed the emerging themes in their dataset and found that the conditions and teachers’ strategies in the two contexts were different. Parents participated in the private school classes, but no parent was present at the state schools. Teachers were focused on children’s needs in both contexts and they used their L1 (“own language”) in line with them, for example, they used Polish in cases of emergencies, for disciplining and managing the kids. Teachers at the state institutions were quite relaxed about code switches and considered them natural, whereas teachers at the private schools explicitly stated insistence on English, although they were also aware of difficulties children faced in comprehension. Translation (sandwiching ¼ L2-L1-L2, also observed in Lugossy 2018) was applied as a strategy for meaning-making in both Polish contexts, indicating how teachers try to make sense of their job. They may be aware that guessing the meaning of

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utterances is a key strategy children use when learning their first and additional languages, but they may lack techniques that scaffold comprehension by paraphrasing, pointing, asking yes/no questions, and by involving peers, among others. Interviews were conducted with 82 preservice teachers of English at a university in Turkey (Bekleyen 2011). Participants took a special two-semester course on teaching very young learners to fill a gap due to a shortage of teachers. The first part prepared them for teaching English to kindergarten children and in the second semester each participant taught two times 40 min under a mentor’s supervision at a kindergarten affiliated to the university. The program was implemented to fulfill parents’, mostly university employees, needs. After each session, participants were asked to write up a short summary of their lessons, to reflect on their experiences, and to discuss how activities worked. They were interviewed before and after the second semester on three main issues: if they thought kindergarteners should be taught an FL, if they could teach them English, and if they wanted a teaching job at a preschool or at a secondary school and why. The author analyzed the interview data based on their contents and quantified how many of the answers indicated certain emerging patterns in the datasets; data from the two interviews and the reflections written after classes were triangulated to make the study more credible. In the first round, 53 and 65 answers to the first two questions were negative, respectively, and all respondents voted for older students, mainly because they thought they were easier to teach. After the short teaching experience, only seven teachers thought very young learners should not be taught English, 34 claimed they could not teach them, and ten would have taken a job at a preschool. When asked about their experiences, they concluded that children needed a lot of varied activities, they did not tolerate monotonous drills or situations they found unfair, boys could not sit still for long, and teachers had to be extremely patient. Overall, many participants gained in self-confidence, but the low number of volunteers to teach preschool children indicated that they realized how challenging the job was and most were not prepared to choose it as a career path.

A Case Study Using Interviews with Children A nonrandom sample of 120 (age 4–6) Slovenian children and their 11 teachers participated in a project (Brumen 2011). English and German were learnt at 7 kindergartens in 16 classes. Children were interviewed about their motivation with the help of six closed (yes/no) and nine open-ended questions. They concerned what they liked to do at the kindergarten and in their English and German sessions. The answers were analyzed based on the emerging themes (but no details were given how) and quantified data were presented on how many children and what ratio of the participants mentioned each theme. The majority mentioned playful activities involving movement and interaction in general, listening to and speaking with their teacher and stories among the FL activities. Only 3.3% answered no to the question if they liked English or German. Some questions were oddly worded, and it is unclear how they were related to the construct of children’s motivation. For example, children were asked to say something in their FL to elicit oral language

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with no context or scaffolding. Their answers were mostly classroom instructions and chunks from songs and games they must have heard many times. As to the question if they understood what the teacher said, 81% said yes; others either used body language or asked her if they did not get the message. Among the things they did not like, children tended to point out what they liked. The author failed to add how frequent certain answers were and which FL they concerned, so it is unclear how typical certain phenomena were: for example, children disliked discipline problems and boring activities taking too long. The results for English and German were grouped together and no information was offered on frequencies of responses under certain categories (e.g., what children disliked). Despite these weaknesses, the author concluded her findings: children were “motivated by their positive attitudes” (p. 729) and proud of their FL competence.

Case Studies in Homeschooling Environments Two independent case studies were implemented in homeschooling contexts by tutors of English who wanted to give their own children an opportunity to benefit from early exposure to English. Both Scheffler (2015) and Prošić-Santovac (2017) used authentic British cartoons and follow-up activities to help their children learn English between the age of 1 year and 9 months (1:9) to 4:3, and 3:4 to 4:10, respectively. Scheffler used translation for meaning-making with his twins during and after storytelling, and after watching cartoons. He collected data over the last 6 weeks by taking field notes on how the two children whose mother tongue was Polish used English spontaneously. Prošić-Santovac applied more meaning-focused activities (role-play, board games, literacy tasks) and collected data by using a vocabulary test, observing and recording her daughter’s use of English focusing on vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and fluency, thus lending the study an aspect of single-subject quasi-experimental study characteristic. She implemented her study in Serbia and elicited data on her daughter’s motivation by using a structured interview. Both authors analyzed the outcomes in terms of linguistic categories (size of vocabulary, codemixes, grammar, fluency, etc.). Findings of both studies indicate that the children were intrinsically motivated by watching cartoons, reading picture books, and playing games. In our view, they were also extrinsically motivated to please their parents very keen on English. They used some words and chunks in interactions in specific contexts and comprehended some English. Prošić-Santovac (2017) assessed her daughter’s vocabulary over time and found that in 225 h of exposure and interaction over 18 months she learnt 298 words, about 4 words a week (p. 577). Both studies offer valuable insights into how the children codemixed when they volunteered to interact in English meaningfully. The lessons learnt from these cases are helpful in ideal conditions with dedicated experts on English, who are personally and professionally motivated to offer their children regular contact with and interaction in English; children’s development follows stages familiar from studies on second language acquisition from single words, to multi-word chunks, to some meaningful communication in familiar contexts.

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As the case studies overviewed in Sections “Case Studies Using Observation of Teachers’ Collaboration,” “Case Studies Using Interviews to Explore Teacher Cognition and Practice,” “A Case Study Using Interviews with Children,” and “Case Studies in Homeschooling Environments” illustrate, they comprise a wide range of highly relevant studies triangulating multiple types and sources of data, and by drawing on multiple qualitative data, they allow readers to understand the contexts and what the participants must have experienced in them. In many cases thick descriptions were missing, and although authors quantified some data, they did not contribute to a deeper understanding of the emerging issues. Cleary, designing and conducting an informative case study is a great idea and not easy to implement.

Ethnographies Finally, in this section ethnographies involving children and their teachers in Hungary and Norway are presented. The authors analyzed and triangulated data collected with a range of techniques and analyzed them with the help of discourse and narrative analyses, among others. Lugossy (2012) applied sociocultural theory to frame her study looking into how children’s comments contribute to their meaning-making while sharing picture books in English and how teachers use their comments for scaffolding learning or neglect them. She analyzed transcribed data collected from children between 5 and 12 in private tuition and classroom contexts. Analyses drew on observations, teachers’ diaries, and informal discussions with young learners (including her two children) and in-service teachers participating in graduate programs. The study discussed how children’s comments in Hungarian focused on tiny details they noticed in the pictures rather than on the storyline, how what they said offered insights into what they comprehended and why, and ways in which their meaning-making helped the teacher understand and build on what they said. Classroom data showed that children commented in their mother tongue for various purposes and teachers often ignored them, as they perceived them as off-task, although they offered important insights into meaning-making and learning. Discourse analysis allowed the author to reveal nuances in teachers’ practices and beliefs. In another publication Lugossy (2018) analyzed data collected from 36 children between the ages of 1 and 6, and their four teachers at a nursery and two private kindergartens in Hungary. Based on self- and other observations, field notes, and follow-up discussions on teachers’ own classroom data and reflections, the study revealed how teachers tried to make sense of their job of teaching very young learners, apply intuitively appealing sandwiching (translation sequence: L1-L2-L1) as a technique of meaning making, among others. The focus of the inquiry was to reveal in what ways teachers benefitted from reflecting on their transcribed classroom discourse data and lived professional experiences. The study offered insights into two of the teachers’ development as teacher researchers with the help of scaffolded discussions about their practice. In a publication on early English in Norwegian kindergartens, Alstad and Tkachenko (2018) explored teachers’ beliefs and practices in their classrooms by

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analyzing teachers’ semi-structured interviews and narratives about their own experiences while working with children and video-recorded observations of classroom interactions. They reanalyzed two datasets: (1) collected with a teacher and her group of 16 children, including two bilingual children, over a year, and (2) at 30 kindergartens on about 1000 children between the ages of 1 and 6 over 3 years. Although the authors framed their studies as experimental (p. 255) as well as action research (p. 256), as they aimed to find out how teachers implemented a new EFL program, and how they coped with the emerging problems, their work can also be characterized as an ethnography, since teachers enjoyed freedom in implementing the program and datasets reflected how they made sense of their own and the children’s experiences. Teachers’ stories and transcribed classroom discourses offered rich descriptions as well as new insights into the teaching and learning processes. For example, how a child initiated further practice on colors (p. 262), how children integrated what they learnt in English in their free play (p. 265), and in teacherinitiated activities in Norwegian to show off what they could say in English (p. 267) by mixing codes, and thus, translanguaging freely. The teacher’s emic perspective emerged on what it felt like to do something new every day: “we are feeling our way around” (p. 269). The story (p. 273) about how Albanian immigrant children’s status among their peers changed and how the Norwegian children’s language awareness of other languages than English contributed to their development is a memorable example of great age-appropriate practice. It illustrates why early programs may be a good idea and how they may impact children’s lives in important ways. The teacher observed the children’s interactions, was able to diagnose their needs, and saw an opportunity to build on them. Such stories on teachers’ daily successes may inspire others to observe their learners and integrate their ideas into their practice.

Critical Issues and Topics Lack of Unified Theory of Early FL Learning There is no widely accepted theory and clearly outlined model of how early learning of FLs works with preschool children (for a key publication see Murphy 2014), although none of the studies overviewed in this chapter stated the obvious. It is not clear how (1) children’s individual differences in their physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development and their level of proficiency in their first (and second), and foreign languages interact with their (2) teachers’ proficiency in these languages and competences in age-appropriate classroom methodology, beliefs, motivation, and other individual differences, plus (3) classroom-related variables (quality of input, amount of interaction, length of program, amount of time per week, timing of FL activities, task types, physical space, size of group, etc.) and (4) extra-curricular opportunities (comprehensible input and scaffolded interaction with significant others, mediated by authentic materials including picture books, cartoons, games, etc.) interact (5) at each moment and over years. As was pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, there is no agreement on how the outcomes should be defined: in

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terms of the FL domain (for example, in aural and oral skills or vocabulary or language awareness) or other domains (attitudes, openness, self-esteem, self-concept, knowledge, and skills of culture) may be equally or even more important than what children learn in a FL. Researchers explicitly or implicitly draw on various theories: second language acquisition theories on bilingual children and adults, early childhood development, language socialization, behaviorism, and others they find relevant for the age group and context. Some constructs are applied intuitively, for example, repetition and translation, but the ways in which children make sense of the world around them and guess meaning of new language phenomena should be clearly understood, observed, and techniques promoting them implemented. The lack of a unified theory of early FL learning has important implication for research design: theories in quantitative studies explain and predict the relationships between independent and dependent variables, that is, how they impact one another. All the quantitative studies build on an underlying model, but if the model is fuzzy or not valid, the study will be flawed. Qualitative research is exploratory as it aims to find out how things work in order to contribute to theories and to work toward models which can then be tested. It is clear from the overview that many researchers assume that not enough is known about variables to use quantitative research designs and find qualitative approaches more relevant to answer question they are eager to answer.

Realistic Age-Appropriate Outcomes and Continuity Critical issues concern narrow foci and emphasis on language outcomes in the FL, most frequently vocabulary, and no other aspect (e.g., intonation, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, pragmatics; listening and speaking) in quantitative studies. The validated tests used for assessing children’s FL (vocabulary and grammar, Bishop 2003), were not designed for very young FL learners and they were not aligned to curricula. Other tests tapping into what teachers taught, however, were often extremely poorly designed and unreliable. In some studies, the number of tests researchers administered was beyond what is considered ethical and clearly not in the children’s interest. Expecting measurable outcomes after a few hours over a few weeks indicates little understanding of how children learn. Besides language-related results only motivation has been researched, but other individual differences (e.g., attitudes, anxiety, willingness to communicate, mindset, self-concept, aptitude) and domains typically listed among the aims of very early FL learning (e.g., language awareness, awareness of other cultures, openness) were hardly studied, especially not over the years. As for studies on motivation, a systematic approach to task motivation and the roles teachers and peers play in the classroom are missing. Motivation changes dynamically, the ups and downs are typical of not only young learners but also their teachers. Another missing piece to the larger picture concerns how teachers’ motivation is shaped by their professional experiences (for a detailed discussion see Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019).

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Truly longitudinal quantitative studies on how children’s languages interact with one another and with their affective, cognitive, and social development were not found in the database. There is some empirical evidence in a few studies on what children gain by learning English or another FL at preschool over time; however, how early exposure contributes to their identity, self-confidence, attitudes to other cultures and speakers of other languages, language learning motivation, anxiety, and other individual differences besides their developing proficiency in the FL and in other languages they learn later were not examined. Long-term outcomes may be less encouraging for all learners, as retrospections of unsuccessful Hungarian adults indicated as they recalled their memories of early foreign language learning experiences (Nikolov 2001). Research is missing on how and what children learn in preschool is further integrated into syllabi in schools and how teachers cope with mixed groups comprising children with and without previous FL learning experiences. No study focused on struggling learners, as if early programs were in fact for the elite and not for everyone. Previous research on some children’s preschool exposure to English indicated that their boasting about their special English skills and private tuition made them unpopular with their less fortunate peers (Nikolov 1999). Although a few studies allow readers to gain some insights into what challenges teachers face every day and how they cope with them while bearing in mind the children’s best interest, not enough is known about the teaching–learning processes. Also, little information is revealed about parents’ and other stakeholders’ expectations and what can be realistically expected in preschools. The voices of kindergarten teachers can be heard vaguely: none of them authored or coauthored a study.

Ethical Challenges Six ethical issues have emerged in the publications: 1. Assessing very young children may induce their anxiety and low performance may negatively impact their self-perception and motivation. Testing children before a project on something they most probably cannot do may induce their anxiety, especially in situations where parents are extremely keen on their children’s learning English. 2. Some publications seem to be biased for positive outcomes and downplay children’s and teachers’ discouraging experiences. For example, we wonder why (a) children mentioned being sick or saw their teacher like elephant and fat [Jin et al. p. 201]; (b) they dislike the FL because of discipline problems (Brumen 2011); (c) they are tired and sleepy in the English sessions, or (d) would simply prefer free play to participating in structured activities (as was the case when the first author used to teach English at a kindergarten). 3. In the experimental and quasi-experimental studies, children learn hardly anything (0–5 words) in weeks, but the results are framed enthusiastically as major achievements, and they get published in refereed journals and edited volumes.

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Some researchers see the main value in terms of learning vocabulary, but what children comprehend and produce on a test may be impacted by attrition (yet another topic not considered). 4. Preschools are expected to develop the whole child, whereas most studies discussed in this chapter neglect the person. How very early programs help children become open, accepting, tolerant, interculturally competent people over time is not at all explored. Researchers should be concerned with what a child’s day is like and how all the above discussions are relevant to their overall well-being and development. Studies may be neglecting too much that is more important for a child than the narrow concerns in some studies. 5. Another key ethical issue concerns the relevance of all these studies and discussions for teachers (Kubanek 2018; Medgyes 2017). In most publications they either only enter the scene to “deliver treatment” or they are observed, interviewed, but rarely involved in designing and implementing the studies as coresearchers and equal partners. There is hardly any study with teachers (but see Lugossy 2018; Alstad and Tkachenko 2018) and with children (Pinter 2019). Member checking was not used in the projects to validate findings by asking participants to comment on credibility (Creswell 2012, p. 230). It should be the concern of the research community to validate research findings with stakeholders to make sure they benefit from them and best practices prevail. 6. Finally, many studies give an account of privileged children’s experiences without stating the obvious: many programs promote elite bilingualism. Not all parents can afford to pay for their children’s early exposure to English and other FLs. Children’s varying socioeconomic status raises important equity issues: researchers should emphasize how programs can offer equal opportunities to all young learners (Mourão 2019; Nikolov 2016).

Future Research Directions In the future, the wider preschool programs spread, and the higher parents tend to value them, the more pressure there will be to evaluate programs and to assess what children can do in their foreign language. In order to offer insights into how children develop in their new language, studies should be longitudinal and apply observations rather than tests (Nikolov and Timpe-Laughlin 2020). If researchers assess only FL outcomes, they are not in line with the main aims of early FL programs, as they should focus on shaping children’s attitudes to learning FLs, motivate them to willingly participate in interactions, see themselves as able, active, and successful learners, and appreciate and be open to speakers of other languages and their cultures. In studies narrowly focused on FL outcomes findings will be disappointing, as in modest time exposure FL benefits are minimal and hard to document. It would be a lot more important to explore and publish how specific tasks and activities work and why to allow more teachers to use motivating activities in age-appropriate ways and not to worry about assessing outcomes. Assessing children’s progress and achievements in preschool programs does not seem to be

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reasonable. First of all, teachers are not trained in techniques of assessment of and for learning, and as the overviewed studies show, even published research designed and implemented by academics supposedly well-versed in assessment is often misguided, as they are not age-appropriate and valid, and their impact is not known (Nikolov and Timpe-Laughlin 2020). Second, the rate of learning is so slow that focusing on assessing children to document their progress and achievements in the FL may send the wrong message to children, teachers, and parents. Third, preschool sessions should encourage children to participate in activities with no pressure on them to perform before they feel ready to volunteer their answers in their multiple languages. Fourth, teachers should not be under pressure to assess their young learners to prove that they are doing a good job. Evidence for quality assurance should be collected by other means (most importantly, by observations) and by focusing on the whole child. In sum, the main aims of early learning of an FL should not be seen in terms limited to languages, but they should include and emphasize other domains and the whole child’s well-being (Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2011, 2019). As Johnstone (2019) suggested, researchers should identify key conditions in which early programs work well in “highly diverse contexts” in which they are implemented. He argued for this approach to help children to make some basic progress in learning English but there is much that can also be done in order to complement it with progress in children’s general cognitive, social, intercultural and other development and their awareness of important values in life, e.g., humanitarian, citizenship, entrepreneurial, international outlook. Research should focus on realistic aims of teaching very young learners an FL, which may vary in different contexts. Research should look into what conditions have to be met to achieve them and what should be done to make programs implementing good practice more widely feasible, available, and beneficial for more children, not only the ones whose parents are motivated and can afford to pay for them. Studies should also focus on struggling and disadvantaged children and teachers so that practices can be changed to meet their needs. Possible threats to success must also be researched systematically. Motivation is a key domain in need of further research. Researchers should explore how teachers’ motivation, beliefs, competences, and practices interact with very young learners’ motivation over time (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). Teachers’ and children’s motivation complement one another as they change dynamically. To find out how, participants’ motivated behavior should be systematically observed and analyzed. An additional perspective of children’s and their teachers’ motivation concerns how preschool programs are related to later programs. As Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović (2011, p. 112) pointed out, emphasis should be on how teachers can build on what children can do and how they can maintain their motivation over the years. Otherwise, the “most widely applied early language learning models may turn out to be less motivating and cognitively challenging after a few years.” Teachers’ uses of languages also interact with children’s uses of their languages. Only one study (Unsworth et al. 2014) inquired into how teachers’ level of English

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proficiency impacted children’s learning over time. In most contexts included in this chapter, teachers were not native speakers of the FL; in the case of English, the most frequently taught and researched target language, they use it as their lingua franca. Therefore, studies should explore how native and nonnative teachers’ language use (intonation, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics, codemixing, etc.) and level of proficiency impact children’s FL development. In addition to the target language, teachers’ proficiency in the children’s languages is also a key to scaffolding meaning-making. Little is known about the typical tasks and activities that work well with children of different ages between 2 and 6. Studies should explore how repetition drills, translation, pre-teaching vocabulary and other activities not conducive to children’s development can be replaced by meaning-focused tasks making use of authentic language and materials in context and children’s background knowledge of the world and other languages in age-appropriate ways. More inquiries are needed to reveal emic perspectives of teachers and very young learners: little is known about what it is like to be a teacher and a child in a preschool FL class. It is also necessary to find out in what ways activities in the FL are integrated into and in line with preschool curricula and seen by teachers and children as an integral part of a normal day. In addition to these, it would be useful to explore how early FL learning shapes children’s identities and the way they are perceived. For example, how peers and teachers at school relate to children boasting of knowing it all from preschool or being bored because what is new to other children was covered in kindergarten or how their home languages are appreciated. There is growing evidence on children acquiring English by watching cartoons, videos, and playing video and online games and developing good comprehension skills early without formal teaching (e.g., Fenyvesi 2018; Unsworth et al. 2014) and with systematic parental support (Prošić-Santovac 2017; Scheffler 2015). More research should inquire into how children benefit from exposure to comprehensible extramural input and interaction with other users of English as a lingua franca and other FLs and how what they can already do in the FL can be integrated into activities. The publications overviewed include valuable studies implemented at a few institutions. As a next step, three avenues are open. First, replication studies would be necessary to find out how good practices work in new contexts in different conditions. Second, it is time to critically overview theories and models of how young children learn in general, and languages, in particular, and to explore how integrating realistic aims and key conditions typical in modest exposure programs allow for testing these theories (e.g., an adapted model of children’s motivation proposed by Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). It seems to be a good time for the research community to outline a theory and to propose a model and hypotheses so that new research can collect evidence to support or refute them in a range of contexts. As time and age play a key role, the model should focus on long-term outcomes over multiple years. Involving representative samples over extended time periods in quantitative research projects may be one of the ways forward where such studies are feasible. As a third avenue, designing and implementing qualitative inquiries using triangulation and member checking would also offer valuable new

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insights into how programs work or fail and why, and by combining the two approaches theory building would be a realistic and desirable goal. One must fully agree with Johnstone’s (2019, p. 25) claim that “long-term thinking and development are essential, rather than one short-term change after another.” We may have reached a stage where new studies should be designed in a cyclic manner to aim for results that can be generalized to other educational contexts as well as many more qualitative studies are also necessary to generate more knowledge about how and why programs work well. It is also important to assure that programs are sustainable after funding for pilot projects is reduced or gone. To achieve these aims, replication studies are necessary to examine how programs are implemented in new contexts. Both replication and new studies should apply a framework of innovation and change (Kennedy 2013) to explore how all stakeholders relate to early language programs and what conditions are necessary to make them successful for everyone involved.

Conclusions This critical overview aimed to establish the state of the art used in research approaches and designs in the fields of teaching and learning an FL in preschools. The area is clearly gaining ground and some remarkable themes have emerged from the studies. The 22 studies applied quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches; the research designs included experimental and quasi-experimental studies, surveys, case studies, ethnographies, and a variety of mixed method and action research, applying statistical as well as discourse, narrative, and content analyses. Vocabulary and motivation are popular foci, and English is the most often researched FL in the European and Asian contexts where the studies were implemented. The recurring critical themes concern teachers’ professional competences in age-appropriate methodology and in the target language, and children’s very slow progress in the FL. Some studies had a narrow focus on a single aspect of teaching children, whereas others used multiple data collection instruments and informants as they combined quantitative and qualitative research designs and triangulated datasets. No study replicated previous research or aimed to build or test a theory or a model. The constructs underlying the data collection instruments were not all aligned with how children think, learn, and behave. Too much emphasis is on explicit learning, tapped into by instruments eliciting formal data in the FL, whereas still little is known about ways in which early contact with a new language may shape the whole child and different groups of children. More studies are necessary in analyzing authentic interaction data showing emerging patterns in implicit learning in children’s languages (not only their FL but also their L1 and L2), individual differences, and spontaneous behavior. In other words, researchers should apply observations are a key technique to capture children’s emotional, cognitive, and social development interacting with their languages.

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Studies tend to involve children of elite socioeconomic status and present success stories. No publication was found discussing challenges faced by less privileged learners and children with learning difficulties. Yet another under-researched area concerns the conditions in which very early programs can be made available to all children. Inquiries into these domains would throw light on needs in teacher education and other conditions language policy decisions should ensure before launching new programs. Therefore, a checklist may be helpful to guide stakeholders’ thinking. This chapter meant to offer insights into the research methods and designs applied to encourage further investigations into how preschool children and their teachers interact in their languages. The way forward includes multiple avenues: researchers should find out more about (1) good practices and optimal conditions in which all teachers and children can thrive; and (2) also about how children and teachers can best cope with challenges, avoid pitfalls, and benefit from early exposure to and activities in learning and teaching FLs. (3) The time seems to be ripe for proposing a theory of early FL learning so that it can be tested in multiple contexts to allow researchers to work toward the larger picture. (4) Small-scale qualitative studies zooming in on cases in their particular contexts should also be implemented, most importantly by teachers themselves, to show the nuances which add local color to the tapestry or early FL education.

Cross-References ▶ Ethical Issues in Research with Young Children in Early Second Language Education

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Part II Diversity of Contexts in Early Language Education

Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift

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Rene´e DePalma and Iria Sobrino-Freire

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Ecological Approach to Language Diversity: Endangerment and Vitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collective Language Rights in Hegemonic Historical Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Early Years Education in Language Revitalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Kindergartens in the Revitalization of Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Years Education and the Revitalization of Minoritized Languages in Europe . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Uneven Impact of Regional Language and Educational Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overcoming the Lingering Effects of Historical Hegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increasing Linguistic Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

In this chapter we provide an international overview of the role of early years education in revitalizing endangered or minoritized languages. Unlike mother tongue or maintenance bilingual programs, these initiatives often operate in contexts where the majority of children and their families are not habitual or confident speakers of the target language. This means that, aside from difficulties associated with finding qualified teachers and appropriate classroom materials, teachers have the additional task of addressing deeply rooted language prejudices R. DePalma (*) · I. Sobrino-Freire University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_10

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and raising community awareness of social and linguistic inequalities that have been rendered invisible by widespread misconceptions about historical realities and language acquisition processes. Such community and school-based projects face the challenge of bringing to life a language that may very well not form a part of children’s linguistic and social repertoire, which involves not only increasing linguistic competence but also making their heritage language feel attractive, natural, and fun. Beginning with an overview of key theoretical concepts, such as language hegemony, language shift, diglossia, and symbolic capital, we will examine past and current research data and analyze some of the sociolinguistic, political, and educational factors involved, including language policies at the local, state, and supranational levels. We will then review some of the strategies that have been employed at the level of early childhood education (ECE) in a variety of European contexts, which are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to represent a variety of strategies that have attempted to address universal tendencies by responding to the local, situated nature of these realities. Keywords

Early years education · Language shift · Language revitalization · Intergenerational transmission

Introduction Understanding language, power, and history is crucial for analyzing minoritized languages. Indeed, we use the term minoritized here instead of the alternatives minority, heritage, or regional languages, terms which appear in academic and policy documents, in order to capture the process of minoritization that has led to current linguistic practices and attitudes. As Heller (2008) points out, essentialized notions of bilingualism, bilinguals, and languages themselves erase important and relevant complexities. Where does one language end and another begin? What happens when state borders bisect speech communities? The inclusive term “language varieties” includes the various forms of a language that are often referred to as languages, dialects, or registers, but these terms are ideologically loaded and often contested. Which language varieties (and, by association, their speakers) are legitimate, and which are not? These are not strictly linguistic questions, as they involve political, economic, and discursive processes that take place over time. From a sociohistorical perspective, language varieties never simply peacefully coexist in a single territory, but rather are unequally distributed in ways that result in limiting access of certain segments of the population to important social spheres, such as employment, justice, or education (Martín Rojo 2016). In this chapter we provide an international overview of the role of early years education in revitalizing such minoritized languages, focusing especially but not exclusively on those languages receiving such support in the European context.

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Unlike mother tongue or maintenance bilingual programs, these initiatives often operate in contexts where the majority of children and their families are not habitual or confident speakers of the target language. This means that, aside from difficulties associated with finding qualified teachers and appropriate classroom materials, early years provision has the additional task of addressing deeply rooted language prejudices. This involves raising community awareness of social and linguistic inequalities that have been rendered invisible by widespread misconceptions about historical realities and language acquisition processes. Such community and early education–based projects face the challenge of bringing to life a language that may very well not form a part of children’s linguistic and social repertoire, which involves not only increasing linguistic competence but also making these minoritized languages feel attractive, natural, and fun. Beginning with an overview of key theoretical concepts in the following section, we will go on to examine some of the significant contributions to the field in terms of pioneering educational programs. We will then review some of the strategies that have been employed at the level of early childhood education (ECE), particularly in European contexts, which are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to represent a variety of strategies that have attempted to address universal tendencies by responding to the local, situated nature of these realities.

Main Theoretical Concepts In this section we review some of the concepts underlying minoritized languages and education. Language revitalization can be understood as a reversal of what has been defined by Fishman (1991, p. 1) as language shift, or a situation in which “intergenerational continuity is proceeding negatively, with fewer and fewer users (speakers, readers, writers, and even understanders) or uses every generation.” This shift takes place through processes of linguistic hegemony, where “consent is achieved predominantly through systematic, consistent persuasion through, for example, the media and through institutions such as education” (Clark 2013, p. 62). The more powerful language may initially be imposed by state-sponsored coercion, but language shift eventually comes to be seen by minoritized language speakers as the natural product of rational-free choice. These processes are mutually entwined, as exemplified by the Galician language in the Spanish state: after centuries of gradual displacement by Spanish as the language of clerical and noble ruling classes, oppressive policies under the Franco dictatorship (1939 and 1975) prohibited its use in educational and government spaces, and now old and new linguistic prejudices combine with unsupportive educational policy to weaken its presence in early years classrooms (DePalma and Zapico Barbeito 2018). In this section we will examine these processes of language minorization and revitalization, and the role ECE programs can play as part of broader initiatives supported by state and suprastate language policies – which transcend national boundaries.

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An Ecological Approach to Language Diversity: Endangerment and Vitality Activists and educators concerned with reversing minoritized language shift usually adopt an ecological perspective similar to conservationist arguments for protection of biodiversity: Most people know that global biodiversity in the early 21st century is experiencing mass extinction. According to some accounts, annual losses of plant and animal species are occurring at 1,000 times or more historic background rates.1 Yet few are aware of a parallel crisis for languages, with predicted extinction rates ranging from 50 to 90% of the world’s 6,900 languages by the end of this century (Romaine 2015, p. 31).

Within this conservationist perspective, linguistic diversity like biodiversity is understood to be positive, and the disappearance (extinction) of any language is seen as a loss. For those wishing to prevent or at least slowing down language loss, language vitality is a goal: “Language vitality is an indicator of a language’s sustainability, and of the extent to which intervention is needed for its maintenance” (Roche 2017, p. 193). At the same time, some language activists and scholars have criticized the developmental metaphors implicit in notions of language vitality, vulnerability, and extinction. McEwan-Fujita (2006) argues that statistics on declining use of Scottish Gaelic have been taken up in media and popular discourses to pronounce an early death sentence that may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Through repeated exposure to the idea that ‘Gaelic is dying’, there is always the possibility that Gaelic speakers themselves will become more fatalistic about the future of Gaelic, and will enact a self-fulfilling prophecy by failing to transmit the language to the next generation, since ‘it is dying anyway’ (p. 292).

In 1996 UNESCO published the first edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The most recent edition (Moseley 2010) categorizes about 2,500 of the estimated worldwide total of 3,000 endangered languages in terms of degree of endangerment, which is measured in terms of intergenerational language transmission: Degree of endangerment Safe Vulnerable Definitely endangered Severely endangered

Intergenerational language transmission Language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted Most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home) Children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home Language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves (continued)

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Intergenerational language transmission The youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently There are no speakers left

Source UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (online version)

The website Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com/) provides more recent figures published in February of 2020, using an expanded graded intergenerational disruption scale (EGIDS) to estimate that about 41% of the world’s languages are endangered: “A language becomes endangered when its users begin to teach and speak a more dominant language to their children.” According to UNESCO’s diagnosis, about 3,000 of the world’s languages can be considered to be either critically, severely, or definitely endangered, because the children no longer learn these languages through communication with older generations, even in cases where their parents and grandparents may understand the language and speak it among themselves. According to these criteria, a language is vulnerable when it is not supported by contexts outside the home, evidently including the school. We can conclude from these criteria that UNESCO considers the home to be the last bastion of support for a language that is losing speakers across the generations. Nevertheless, other social and institutional contexts, such as education, have been implicated in policies and programs designed to restore a language to a previous and more robust state of vitality.

Collective Language Rights in Hegemonic Historical Contexts Social actions designed to support language revitalization are supported by legislation and policy that protects collective linguistic rights. Group language rights do not always coincide with the kind of individual rights encoded and defended in claims for mother tongue or bilingual education, since community members, including children, may be more fluent in the majority or official state language. In these cases, language rights claims are based on the preservation of cultural diversity in the ecological sense described above, expressed by UNESCO’s as “the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public” (Moseley 2010). Many legal instruments adopt this framework, including UNESCO’s Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage (2003) – which establishes language as a form of intangible cultural heritage, and specifically mentions education as a venue for “recognition of, respect for, and enhancement of the intangible cultural heritage in society” (Article 14). In the European context, the current legal instrument for European language policy development, the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (hereafter ECRML), adopts a similar view, establishing the need for “protection of the historical regional or minority languages of Europe, some of which are in danger of eventual extinction” (1992). An international treaty signed by 33 states

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and ratified by 25, the ECRML aims to regulate the protection of languages that are “traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and different from the official language(s) of that State” (Council of Europe 1992, art. 1, par. a). This policy specifically designates “pre-school education in the relevant regional or minority languages” as a measure that should be made available at least to families who request it in sufficient number, “without prejudice to the teaching of the official language(s) of the State” (Council of Europe 1992). The ways in which these policies have been enacted in some European countries will be addressed in the following section of this paper. While the existence of language policy has served to support educational and other institutionally based language revitalization efforts, the ECRML has received some criticisms for several reasons such as the highly flexible wording of its provisions (Woehrling 2012), unequal recognition and therefore protection of European minoritized languages, and the gap between formal language protection and implementation of language revitalization strategies (Gorter and Cenoz 2012). May (2014, p. 225) argues that, as a supranational policy, the ECRML is too quick to accommodate “the ongoing reticence” of European nations to put minoritized language rights policy into practice. Despite these shortcomings, the ECRML has provided a framework for schools and other institution to strive to revitalize endangered or vulnerable European languages. Such collective linguistic rights claims are not simply attempting to slow down inevitable processes of linguistic decline and eventual death, but constitute collective political action aimed at redressing historical inequalities. The minoritization of certain European languages has been the result of long-term diglossia, where one of two languages in contact becomes associated with higher social and cultural functions and thus acquires greater power and status (Mendoza-Denton and Osborne 2009). Drawing upon Bourdieu’s understanding of language as symbolic capital (prestige, honor, or recognition), speakers of minority languages suffer “‘misrecognition’ [. . .] of linguistic-communicative resources not because of their ‘linguistic’ features but of the sociohistorical load they carry” (Blommaert 2015, p. 6). In this sense, policy designed to support language revitalization efforts also must contend with speakers’ own attitudes. In the European context, national (majority) languages are seen to offer instrumental value in terms of social mobility and access to resources, while the value of regional (minoritized) languages is perceived to be limited to the sentimental, in terms of cultural–historical ties. Such “common sense” and implicit understandings of languages may cast parents who claim their right to minoritized language education as limiting the socioeconomic opportunities for their children (May 2014). Roche (2017) points out that linguistic characteristics often seen as harbingers of declining language vitality, such as limitation to small language communities, speaker bilingualism, and lexical borrowing, are not themselves enough to explain these trends. He cautions against seeing language endangerment in terms of “generic, universal historical templates” rather than the result of “systemic power

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imbalances, particularly the minoritization of languages within state territories” that have emerged in particular contexts (Roche 2017, p. 209). Rather than language death, the more active notion of linguicide (language murder) place the blame squarely on state institutions, including schools, which, through the exclusion of minoritized languages from the curriculum, render them invisible (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995). By actively participating in efforts to revitalize minoritized languages, these same institutions can form part of efforts to claim collective linguistic rights and redress historic linguistic hegemony.

The Role of Early Years Education in Language Revitalization Mainstream schooling practices are influenced by broader language ideologies, defined by Pomeranz (2002, p. 280) as: constellations of people’s assumptions and expectations about language and language users. They differ from beliefs in that they are shared across individuals and implicated in power relations. Whereas beliefs are often characterized as existing within peoples’ heads, ideologies are seen as a social production, constructed within and through everyday linguistic practice.

Specific ideologies about language and education may derive from nationalist monoglot (one nation ¼ one language) views (Ricento 2013) or neoliberal priorities for competence in national or supranational languages (Martín Rojo 2016). These ideologies may also be guided by (mis)understandings about language learning, including popular (populist) convictions that monolingual children have cognitive and educational advantages, and that linguistic and metalinguistic skills acquired in one language are not applicable to another (Cummins 1998). As a result, formal schooling may be considered the appropriate domain for more prestigious language varieties, even by speakers of minoritized varieties (DePalma and Teasley 2013; Ferri 2017). Nevertheless, minoritized language-medium preschool education is specifically promoted by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (article 8). It is important to keep in mind, however, that this policy allows for a great deal of flexibility on the part of signatory states. Just as schooling has been complicit in the minoritization of certain languages as part of state sponsored national identity projects (Matusov and Julien 2004), educational institutions may serve to reverse trends of linguistic substitution. Early years education (ECE) at the preschool level may be particularly well suited to this task, as the philosophy and pedagogy are usually child centered and prioritize comprehensive social and personal development. Fishman (1991, p. 374) considers it an essential requirement for revitalization that the language obtain “a secure niche in the early pre-school and co-school intimate socialization processes at the familyneighborhood-community level.” Institutions that provide education to young children, before the onset of obligatory, primary schooling, can support intergenerational transmission by proving a basic language competency (especially when the language

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is no longer used in the home) and by generating positive attitudes toward historically minoritized languages. Young children are still in the early stages of initial language acquisition, and ECE programs can take advantage of their curiosity and aptitude for language learning. In fact, these preschool programs are often established through community-based language activist networks, as in the case of the Basque language Ikastola movement in France (Heidemann 2015), and may be easier to establish than primary-level programs, given state educational policy (Hickey and de Mejía 2014). While preschooling projects may result from, and in turn strengthen, grassroots language rights movements, they are not sufficient. In fact, the long-term results of school-based initiatives in general have not always been positive, in terms of students’ future language use. Thus, new speakers of minoritized languages may well have insufficient opportunities for use in less formal settings (Dunmore 2018; Ó Riagáin et al. 2008). School and ECE-based revitalization, therefore, must form part of a comprehensive social program; it cannot single-handedly provide (future) speakers with the tools, motivation, and opportunity to use the minoritized language in their daily lives. Drawing upon early sociological and psychological models of human behavior and accounting for factors specific to minoritized language contexts, Iglesias Álvarez (2003) proposed a comprehensive model to explain language choices that takes into account multiple factors: competence (real and perceived); habits of language use developed over the lifetime; potential contexts for use (family, community, school, and social media); and normative beliefs held by the social groups to which one belongs or wishes to belong. ECE can help to provide competence and confidence, as well as positive associations and attitudes – but it cannot address all these important factors in language revitalization. At the same time educators must avoid new problems associated with the institutional context itself – such as new prejudices about the artificiality of children’s school or preschool-acquired language varieties (Costa 2014; Hornsby 2017; O’Rourke and Walsh 2014) and the received relevance of these languages beyond these contexts (Smith-Christmas 2017). While primary and secondary schooling in minoritized languages may not be sufficient to determine minoritized language use in adult years and subsequent intergenerational transmission, early years education in particular may be crucial to make such choices possible. Thus, ECE may contribute to an individual’s eventual choice to use a minoritized language by providing a basic linguistic competence and, what may be even more important, confidence to use the language in social interactions (Iglesias Álvarez 2003). Preschooling in the minoritized language may also establish early language habits that can become automatic or default choices in certain contexts or when addressing certain speakers – for example, by establishing an internalized lexical repertoire related to games, chants, stories, and songs that can render intergenerational transmission more natural and comfortable. The ECE classroom is an ecosystem where teachers design language-conducive contexts for learning – the language is the first tool for exploration of the physical and social environment inside and outside the classroom (Schwartz 2018). In this sense, mere use of the minoritized language as a vehicle of instruction in the early years is not enough, and teachers need to create positive associations and language attitudes

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toward this language. For young learners, sources of motivation for language learning may include not only the learning activities themselves but relationships formed with the teacher, families, peers, and speakers in the broader community (Mihaljević and Nikolov 2019). Parents and other adults must be careful about how they motivate children’s minoritized language use beyond the classroom. In many cases, these parents are not themselves fluent and habitual speakers of the language, even though they may have emotional and political reasons for participating in revitalization efforts. By not using the language themselves in the home, or by unintentionally framing its use as a didactic activity to be performed rather than used in everyday interactions, motivations for speaking the language beyond the classroom may be undermined (Smith-Christmas 2017). In summary, ECE can be a valuable element of broader initiatives to revitalize minority languages. Early years education as well as primary and secondary schooling can equip potential new speakers with the necessary competence and experience, but it is up to other social institutions (employment and media) and informal social networks to provide the opportunities (contexts for use). Schools, and particularly preschools that have a more comprehensive learning philosophy, can also address language ideologies that affect language choices made by habitual and new speakers alike, but these speakers are ultimately responsible for claiming the language for themselves and for their children. In the following section we will examine some specific cases of early years education–based language revitalization initiatives.

Major Contributions In this section we will begin by presenting some of the early, well-known ECE programs dedicated to minoritized language revitalization, which have set important precedents and have served as inspiration for the European examples that follow.

The Role of Kindergartens in the Revitalization of Hebrew The case of Hebrew revival is often mentioned as an unquestionable model of successful language revitalization. The lack of native speakers, the high status of the language, and the sociopolitical conditions in which the process of revival took place make this situation rather unique (Fishman 1991; Spolsky and Shohamy 2001). However, this early example of reversal of language shift has been seen historically  and still is  as an inspiration for other contexts (Spolsky 1991, 1995; Zuckermann and Walsh 2011; Lemus 2012; Singh 2018). Moreover, it seems particularly relevant here due to the central role that education in early years settings such as kindergartens played in the process. As Fellman (1973, p. 11) points out in his seminal study, the term “Hebrew revival” refers to “the successful introduction into common, spoken, general, everyday use of a hitherto written language, conceived thereby as a national and cultural symbol of the Jewish people.” The first all-Hebrew school was founded in 1888 in

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Rishon Le-Zion. Ten years later, the first Hebrew kindergarten was opened in the same colony. This preschool level was added for pragmatic reasons that have served as a precedent for later initiatives in contexts where the children do not learn the target language at home. As Sitton (2001, p. 88) points out, this early exposure served to prepare them for school-based immersion: “Because most of the children who started school knew no Hebrew, the teachers’ work was very difficult and they felt that a preparatory year in kindergarten would make the beginning of schooling easier for both pupils and teachers.” By 1916, 40% of the Jewish population in Palestine declared that Hebrew was their first or daily language (Fellman 1973). Kindergartens managed to provide children with the necessary exposure to the language and encouraged them to take it outside the school, so they eventually became “the main instrument of developing Hebrew fluency” (Spolsky 1991, p. 144). The language became progressively a part of the children’s world, separate from their parents’ languages. These new generations of children educated entirely in Hebrew served as language propagators, bringing it into the households. The success of this model owed a great deal to the Zionist movement, which established the Hebrew language as a principal ideological pillar (Spolsky and Shohamy 2001).

Language Nests and the Revitalization of Indigenous Languages The majority of the endangered languages in the world are indigenous languages (Aboubakrine 2017), that is to say, the languages of those communities, peoples, and nations which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them (Martínez Cobo 1983, p. 50)

According to the 2017 report of the United Nations about the state of the world’s indigenous peoples in education, there is a continuous pattern of marginalization of those communities worldwide (United Nations 2017). This overview identifies some serious issues, such as the violation of the right to education and the use of education as a means of cultural assimilation into mainstream society. Nevertheless, over recent decades almost all regions have shown some progress in the development of intercultural bilingual education and revitalization of indigenous languages. Apart from the implementation of a number of maintenance programs, devised to preserve and dignify the language of L1 speakers (Bale 2010; McCarty and Nicholas 2012), there are also some remarkable language revitalization practices in contexts where the indigenous language is not the first language of most of the children anymore. Such is the case with the language nests’ initiative. Language nests are immersion programs in an indigenous language for preprimary school–aged children. They provide a homelike environment where children are intensively exposed to the language and traditional culture through meaningful content (Johnston and Johnson 2002), with a significant participation of the families along with other members of the community, ideally the elders or the fluent speakers of the language (Hinton 2018). They usually blend traditional

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indigenous pedagogies, which include experiential learning and acquisition of community values through daily coexistence with the elders, with Western teaching methods, such as Montessori’s (Borgia and Dowdy 2010; Chambers 2015). Most of them were started by groups of parents as pilot projects, some in early childhood centers and others in more informal settings. The involvement of the families and the community is essential for the success of these programs. The nests usually offer language classes for the parents, so they can support their children’s learning at home. Family members are also encouraged to participate in some activities, such as cultural events, field trips, and regular meetings with the staff, the elders, and the other families (First Peoples’ Cultural Council 2014). The first nest opened in 1973 in Tokoroa (Aotearoa/New Zealand) for the Samoan language, but it was the successful experience of Māori nests (Te Kōhanga Reo) in the 1980s that inspired the spread of this educational model throughout the world. This program has been established for the revitalization of languages as diverse as Mohawk in Canada, Hawaiian and Seneca in the USA, Mixtec and Zapotec in Mexico, Quechua and Aymara in Bolivia, and Sami in Norway and Finland (Meyer and Soberanes Bojórquez 2009; Chambers 2015; Instituto Plurinacional de Estudio de Lenguas y Culturas 2017; Hinton 2018; King 2018). The language nest experience is now globally acknowledged as a touchstone in language revitalization processes. The key element of this system is the creation of a culture-based immersion environment, which helps reinforce the sense of identity of the children and raise their collective self-esteem. However, a nest is just one step among many in the reversal of language shift, so it is necessary to implement further measures in order to guarantee the involvement of the whole community (First Peoples’ Cultural Council 2014).

Early Years Education and the Revitalization of Minoritized Languages in Europe As in the case of the language nests, in Europe, education through the medium of minoritized languages has often been pioneered by groups of activist parents in contexts where the state provision for those languages was inexistent or unsatisfactory for their standards. These associative programs exist at ECE, primary, and secondary levels and include, among the most relevant cases, Ikastolak for Basque, Gaelscoileanna for Irish Gaelic (see Chap. X in this handbook), Mudiad Meithrin for Welsh, Diwan schools for Breton, Bressolas for Catalan in Northern Catalonia, and Calandretas for Occitan. They typically began by establishing early childhood education for a small number of children and progressively added further levels. Over the years they have expanded and gained official recognition and even state support – in different degrees, though, depending on the states – and in the present day they coexist with other types of both public and private bilingual programs (Gorter and Cenoz 2012; Chapalain 2013; Ó Duibhir et al. 2015). This kind of immersion education will be illustrated using the examples of Mudiad Meithrin (Welsh-medium preschools) and Diwan skolioù-mamm (Breton-medium preschools).

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Mudiad Meithrin (literally “nursery movement”) is the main provider of preschool education through the medium of Welsh. It offers nursery provision (cylchoedd meithrin) as well as parent and toddler groups (cylchoedd Ti a Fi), which allow families to play and socialize in an informal Welsh-speaking atmosphere. Grant-funded now by the Welsh government, it also organizes training for nursery staff, and publishes preschool materials in Welsh. It was established in 1971 as a grassroots movement within a context of accelerated loss in the percentage of Welsh speakers and has significantly grown ever since, with a number of over 1,000 units registered in 2012/ 2013 (Jones and Jones 2014). A recent comparative study about the state of European minority languages in education has characterized the Welsh preschool provision as “excellent,” granting the possibility for every parent to enroll their child in a Welshlanguage nursery (Van Dongera et al. 2017). The same cannot be said, however, of the primary school system, so children attending Mudiad Meithrin might find it difficult to continue their education in Welsh in some areas of the country (Jones and Jones 2014). From a quantitative viewpoint, Welsh-medium preschooling appears to have a positive impact on the number of young speakers. According to the 2011 UK census, 23.6% of the children aged 3 and 4 were reported to be able to speak Welsh, showing an important increase over the 2001 figure of 18.8%, and over that of 1971 – 11.3% (Jones and Jones 2014). Regarding the qualitative outcomes of this education, data from an evaluation of achievement carried out by Roberts and Baker in 2002 (quoted in Hickey et al. 2014) show that children in Mudiad Meithrin make significant progress, in light of the low baseline, in different Welsh-language skills, such as listening and understanding, speaking and communication, and early literacy development. This applies particularly to children from English-language homes. Further research is needed to assess the progress in language skills among children from Welsh-speaking or mixed backgrounds. The situation of education through the medium of Breton is considerably different, due to France’s historical lack of support to its autochthonous languages (“autochtonous languages” refers to those historically present in European territories, while indigenous is usually associated with First Nations). France is one of the few member states that has not ratified the ECRML, and, although the state administration has shown more receptivity in recent years toward the introduction of regional languages to schools (Lyster and Costa 2011), immersion education still has to face major challenges to survive. Immersion education in Breton is provided by Diwan, a federation of associative schools which offer education for children aged 2 to 18, in which the French language is introduced gradually (Třesohlavá 2018). In ECE, skolioù-mamm, Breton is the only language used by the teacher, irrespective of the child’s home language. According to the Diwan organization, the evolution of the children’s linguistic skills in skolioùmamm is as follows: (1) they usually reach the understanding threshold very soon after they start school, by the repetitive and significant use of the language; (2) how quickly they attain the communication threshold mostly depends on external factors, such as the family languages or the degree of linguistic exposure of the child; and (3) the conceptualization threshold, which allows children to make a complex use of the language, is generally reached by the end of this level (Diwan n.d.-a). Proof of the effectiveness of this model is that Diwan pupils who were enrolled in the early

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childhood program outperform the students from the other bilingual models in their proficiency of Breton at the end of primary school (Vetter 2013). On the other hand, the quality of the Diwan pedagogical system has also been acknowledged, not only for the positive results in national tests in subjects other than Breton, and the teaching of foreign languages, but also for an emphasis on creativity and artistic disciplines (Chauffin 2015). This is one of the reasons why parents would choose Diwan today, as well as the understanding of bilingualism as an asset for their children. Some of the parents still base their choice on identity reasons, but it is clear their profiles have diversified considerably since the 1970s (Balcou-Debussche and Tupin 2017). Diwan is a part of Eskolim, the network of associative bilingual immersive nonreligious schools in metropolitan France, together with Seaska (Northern Basque Country), Bressola (Northern Catalonia), Calandreta (Occitania), and ABCMZweisprachigkeit (Association for bilingualism from Early Childhood Education) (Alsace/Moselle) (Chapalain 2013). It was set up in 1977, inspired by the immersion experiences in Québec, Wales, and, most especially, in the Basque Country. After years of tough negotiations with the French government to join the public system, the State Council eventually opposed the agreement in 2002, arguing that the immersion model contravened the French Constitution, which states in art 2 that “French is the language of the Republic” (Chauffin 2015). In the present day Diwan has 47 primary schools (K12), 6 collèges (12- to 15-year-olds), and 1 lycée (15- to 18-year-olds) (Třesohlavá 2018). It is the third option among the students attending a bilingual school, after Div Yezh (public schools) and Dihun (private Catholic schools), which provide bilingual instruction on a parity basis (50% Breton and 50% French) (Office publique de la langue bretonne n.d.). These cases illustrate the ways in which early years education has played an important role in reversing language shift in different parts of the world, including a range of different European contexts. Next, we will examine these initiatives in more recent years.

New Projects Early years education continues to be included in projects designed to revitalize minoritized languages. One of the most recent initiatives aimed at identifying and supporting European autochthonous language revitalization projects is the Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe (SMiLE) project sponsored by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (2019), a US-based organization that funds collaborative research teams working in six case study communities: Galician (the Spanish region escribed above), Greko and Griko (languages of Greek origins spoken in the south of Italy), Irish, North Frisian (a Germanic language spoken in coastal and island zones of north-western Germany), Occitan (a Romance language spoken in various national contexts – Italy, France, Catalonia, and Monaco), and Upper and Lower Sorbian (spoken by a Slavic ethnic minority group in Lusatia, Germany). The research and case studies are freely available on the project website (https:// folklife.si.edu/smile), with each team responding to a set of established common

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research questions to ensure comparability across the various case study contexts. These include key social actors (individuals, societies and organizations, and schools), attitudes, intergenerational transmission and lifelong learning, support, and infrastructure, and responses to new media, domains, and speakers. Early years education may be especially relevant to addressing some of these issues, since ECE programs are particularly well placed to impact linguistic attitudes, the recuperation of intergenerational transmission, and the formation of potential new speakers. While at the time of this writing the results of the analysis of these new projects have not been published, we can provide some insight into the Galician case study in Spain, based in part on a seminar presented by two of the SMiLE researchers (O’Rourke and Dayán-Fernández 2018). Their research has focused on the Semente (“Seed”) educational project, a network of preschool centers designed particularly to serve children in urban areas who are less likely to be immersed the minoritized language in the home or community context. As of 2018, Semente was running five preschools and one primary school, with plans to open three more preschools and one more primary schools in the near future (Pardo 2018). These schools are run as cooperatives, meaning that they depend on the support from families and other community members for funding and management. As described by SMiLE researchers (O’Rourke and Dayán-Fernández 2018; Smithsonian Institution 2019), key features of this initiative include: • Language revitalization as a grassroots effort • A communities of practice approach to learning, which means taking into account the collaborative efforts of teachers, families, children, language activists, and language speakers • Education as a social movement, a perspective which links education to activism through the combined agency of teachers, families, and community activists • An emphasis on the circulation of alternative, positive, language ideology as part of the language revitalization process The Semente movement identifies its school language policy as one designed to counter processes of majority (Castilian, or Peninsular Spanish) language substitution, and relates these to broader processes of cultural hegemony operating within the Spanish state. Encoded in Semente policy is a sense of belonging to a broader international language revitalization movement, with ideological ties to Ikastola, Diwan, and Bressola school–based language activism projects. Semente does not see a contradiction between promoting regional language and identity and adopting more global perspectives, as evidenced by their commitment to alternative pedagogies that have not yet been embraced by the Galician public school system (DePalma and Zapico Barbeito 2018). These new programs illustrate that the precedents set and lessons learned by early, pioneering programs continue to guide practice. In the following section, we will describe some of the current issues that early years educators must take into account when designing and implementing minoritized language revitalization projects.

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Critical Issues and Topics In this section, we describe some of the main critical issues facing efforts to reverse language shift through ECE programs: these include weak policy support, low speaker competency, and language prejudices concerning the value of the minoritized language. We will focus on the European context, in order to illustrate that despite geographic proximity, relative economic privilege on a global scale, and a shared supranational policy that actively promotes preservation of minoritized languages (ECRML), these initiatives must address significant difficulties.

The Uneven Impact of Regional Language and Educational Policies The current European policy framework (the ECRML) provides an important positive impulse for striving to protect rights of linguistic groups (rather than individuals) and for recognizing early years education as a venue for action. It has been acknowledged for having extended protection to some languages that were previously neglected. Moreover, the monitoring of its implementation by a committee of experts has been considered as an incentive for some members states to improve their policies and practices (Oeter 2014). Nevertheless, it has also been criticized for establishing a threetiered order where official state languages take precedence, regional languages are protected when this is deemed feasible according to rather vague criteria, and migrant language varieties are excluded. According to Gorter and Cenoz (2012), the à la carte formula of the Charter – allowing the states to choose the level of protection they wish to bestow on their languages – has provoked many states to adopt a “cautious approach.” Thus, the most common case of language use inside the curriculum is the inclusion of the minoritized language as a subject area and the use of the dominant language as a medium of instruction. Therefore, the potential for public education to improve the situation of minoritized languages in Europe varies considerably as a consequence of state language policies, which may be more or less in compliance with the European policy supporting minoritized language revitalization (ECRML). The Roma people, a minoritized group commonly referred to as “gypsies” living in various European national contexts and speaking variants of the Romani language group, are an especially interesting yet often forgotten case of European language diversity. While most countries that ratify the ECRML have identified Romani as a language to be protected, the actual protection of the language has been deemed inadequate in many of these countries by the Charter’s committee of experts: The high level of ratifications for Romani – mostly based on an equality principle between all minority languages of the country in question – often lack implementation. This imbalance in the level of ratification as well as the deficits in implementation indicate, at least to some extent, the reality of marginalisation of both Romani and its speakers (Council of Europe 2015).

In Hungary, for example, the argument that many Roma have already lost competence in their community language has been offered as an excuse for not

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applying the European language revitalization policy. According to the very Hungarian authorities responsible for monitoring compliance with the ECRML, such compliance is cast as detracting from the “real” problems of social exclusion: The majority of Roma/Gypsies have lost their native language, speaking only Hungarian as mother tongue (although often with severe deficiencies in linguistic skills [. . .] For the purpose of the Charter, only these some 30% of minority language-speaking Roma/Gyspies are relevant, not the large majority of Hungarian-speaking Roma/Gypsies whose main problems are social exclusion and discrimination (2001 Hungarian ECRML Monitoring Report, cited in Tremlett 2009, p. 138).

Moreover, language protection may be uneven and unequal even within the same European nation, in cases where education falls under the competence of local/ regional administrations. Such is the case with some regions (autonomous communities) of Spain, like Catalonia, Euskadi (the Basque Country), and Galicia, the three “historical nationalities” recognized by the Spanish Constitution. In these three territories both Castilian (Spanish) and the co-official language (Catalan, Euskera, or Galician) are present in education, but their current policies and practices are completely different. In Catalonia there is one single linguistic model, which aims at balanced bilingualism through total Catalan immersion from the early years onward. In the Basque Country parents are allowed to choose between three models: model A, which offers Castilian-medium education and Euskera as a subject area; model B, in which both Castilian and Euskera (the Basque language) serve as media of instruction; and model D, which provides Euskera-medium education and Castilian as a subject area. However, over the years parents have increasingly leaned toward models B and D (DePalma and Teasley 2013). Such a tendency for parents to select full or partial immersion in the minoritized language may be explained not just by the wish to revitalize the language, but also for pragmatic reasons – proficiency in Euskera is required for a number of jobs, and students schooled exclusively in the majority language generally achieve a very poor command of the minoritized language (Gorter et al. 2014; Vila et al. 2017). In Galicia current language policy requires early years–level teachers to use the predominant L1 among the children, which is largely the majority language in areas of higher population density (DePalma and Teasley 2013; Vila et al. 2017). Since nearly two-thirds of Galicians live in urban areas where Castilian is dominant (Mesa pola Normalización Lingüística 2017), most Galician children received Castilian-medium early years education – a situation contrary to European language revitalization policy. The parent collective Semente, described above, emerged as a popular response to this failure of the public school system to guarantee quality preschool education.

Overcoming the Lingering Effects of Historical Hegemony From the beginning, early childhood education programs designed to promote minoritized languages have met with logistical difficulties derived from historical

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exclusion of these languages from the school system and other social contexts. Even in the early pioneering work with Hebrew, teachers faced major challenges, such as their own lack of experience and training, the unavailability of teaching materials in Hebrew, and the inexistence of a proper classroom vocabulary in the language. A whole new repertoire of Hebrew games, songs, and dances needed to be invented (Fellman 1973). It is important to keep in mind that positive community attitudes were highly instrumental in the success of Hebrew revitalization efforts. As Spolsky and Shohamy (2001) put it, the use of Hebrew as an everyday language among children was a common practice supported by the ideology of the Zionist movement and promulgated as policy by the leaders of that movement. In this context the strong ideological acceptance of Hebrew was of central importance for the language revitalization (Spolsky 1991). Language nests also had to overcome important problems resulting from the lingering effects of a colonial past that resulted in a scarcity of speakers with sufficient proficiency to serve as language models, accompanied by a general lack of educational expertise. This has led to the recruitment of young educated teachers, either new speakers or ongoing learners of the indigenous language, and to the development of parallel language training programs for adults. On top of these problems, a shortage or lack of official funding has often motivated the request of parental contributions in the form of money or volunteer work (McIvor 2009; Chambers 2015; Hinton 2018; King 2018). While these early immersion programs have proven to be one of the most effective tools for indigenous language restoration, they are not enough to reverse a language shift produced by such enduring and powerful legacies of language hegemony. Further immersion or bilingual education using the minoritized language at the primary and secondary level is needed (Hinton 2018), in addition to “whole community” approaches to language revitalization (McIvor 2009). When the Basque Autonomous government in Spain began implementing its language policies, it encountered problems similar to those experienced by language nest programs, such as the shortage of teachers who were proficient in Euskera (less than 5% in 1976) and the lack of teaching materials. In this sense, the substantial economic support of the Basque government is to be highlighted. Teachers were allowed the opportunity to spend three years studying the Basque language while they kept their full salary, which raised the percentage of qualified teachers to over 85% in 2007. A wide range of curricular up-to-date materials was created (Gorter et al. 2014; Ó Duibhir et al. 2015). This financial support is especially noteworthy if we take into account that preschool programs are often undervalued and even confused with simple childcare facilities. In the European context, some so-called national languages (like French, Spanish, and English) have become associated not only with the unity of the nation-state but also with progress and suitability for educational advancement, even beyond their national boundaries. English-medium education beginning at the early years level is becoming more and more popular in many European countries. In Spain’s Basque country, this has caused concern in some sectors of the population about a possible reduction of the time devoted to Euskera-medium instruction. Thus, the challenge is

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to continue developing measures to protect the minoritized language while paving the way toward a multilingual model (Vila et al. 2017). Given the sociolinguistic environments of Welsh and Breton, where the omnipresence of English and French within and beyond the society strongly determines the outcomes of the educational system, the strategy of immersion of these schools does not aim for monolingualism, but for balanced bilingualism (Mudiad Meithrin n.d.; Diwan n.d.-b). Both in Mudiad Meithrin and in Diwan preschools children are fully immersed in the minoritized language until primary school, where the dominant language is ideally introduced at the age of 7 (Vetter 2013; Ó Duibhir et al. 2015: Balcou-Debussche and Tupin 2017).

Increasing Linguistic Diversity Another critical issue faced by these programs is that processes of language substitution by stronger national languages has resulted in internal diversity, so that even in regions where minoritized languages have historically been spoken, children may come from families that speak the majority language in the home. This means that children from the same region may bring quite different minoritized language competencies to the same ECE classroom. For example, in Mudiad Meithrin and Diwan preschools children coming from these different linguistic backgrounds are grouped together. Thus, classrooms need to provide at the same time immersion education – for the second language learners – and maintenance language education – for children who come from families that speak minoritized (Welsh and Breton) languages. There is no data available for the case of Breton, but research on Mudiad Meithrin has shown that in these situations the nursery staff tends to prioritize the needs of the L2 speakers, neglecting those of the L1 speakers, who often end up switching to the majority language. In this sense, a specific approach to the provision for minoritized language speakers should include an enrichment in input through more linguistically challenging activities as well as opportunities to use the language with their peer L1 speakers (Hickey 2013; Hickey et al. 2014; Ó Duibhir et al. 2015). Migration, including internal migration (movements within nation-states), can contribute to this existing language diversity. Catalonia, for example, is home to immigrants from Latin-American countries and other areas of Spain, who speak the national language (Spanish) but not the minoritized, regional one (Catalan). A challenge faced by the Catalan administration has been the incorporation of these children into the Catalan school system. In response to this situation, the Catalan Department of Education has been implementing since 2004 a plan for language, interculturality, and social cohesion, which includes the creation of reception classrooms for the newcomers (Arnau and Vila 2013). As we have explained earlier, the Catalan autonomous government is committed to implementing Catalan-medium education, including at the ECE level. These efforts to regulate linguistic immersion in early years education have met with some political and judicial opposition, based on the controversial issue of whether parents have the right to choose their children’s school language (Corretja

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Torrens 2013). In an attempt, perhaps, to find a compromise between the two positions, the 2009 Education Act has established that in the first year of education parents of Castilian-speaking children may request personal attention in their L1.

Future Research Directions Taking into account Europe’s ambiguous policy framework and the presence of global languages such as English, French, and Spanish, that are strongly associated with internationalism and national identity, several areas of research and action are of particular relevance to the role of early years education in reversing language shift, including: • Linguistic realities and their implications for pedagogy Returning to Heller’s (2008) critique of essentialized notions of language, it is important to recognize languages themselves as fictions, whose borders may be imposed from above by state boundaries as well as (re)negotiated at the grassroots level by speech communities. Fluid language practices (such as translanguaging, or the use of linguistic codes attributed to multiple languages in the same interaction) have been rightly embraced as a positive and creative aspect of many speakers’ linguistic repertoires (García and Wei 2014), and have been incorporated in some minoritized language pedagogy (Moriarty 2017). At the same time, it might be useful in some educational contexts to separate the minoritized from the majority language, in order to provide nonhegemonic spaces where they might flourish (O’Rourke 2019). We recommend more research to explore how pedagogical strategies can account for and draw upon linguistic realities and practices beyond the classroom. • language variation and standardization In many areas, a standard variety of the minoritized language has been supported by language policy and educational practices, to the detriment of others. In the case of the Galician Semente project, for example, participating schools have chosen to use the “reintegrationist” variety, which stresses the language’s historical proximity to Portuguese, over the official standard variety, which is closer to Spanish. The basis for and impact of such pedagogical decisions remains to be more fully explored through classroom and community-based research that goes beyond essentialist understandings of “language” to take into account minoritized language varieties. • longitudinal studies of minoritized language use The research reviewed here suggests that early childhood immersion in minoritized language can improve competency in these languages, but people’s adult decisions about language use, particularly in terms of intergenerational transmission, will be affected by many other social factors that require more comprehensive language planning and support. Thus, we recommend more longitudinal studies on language use by those children who have received early

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years minoritized language-medium instruction, in order to understand how to support them as lifelong new speakers. • family support and motivations In some countries early childhood educational provision is nonobligatory, or at least involves a greater degree of curricular flexibility than that provided by primary and secondary levels. In many cases, young children’s participation in minoritized language revitalization programs is based on family choice. Where attendance is not mandatory, preschool is often not free, which systematically excludes children from financially disadvantaged families from benefitting from these programs. In some cases, as we have seen, such early years programs depend on the active participation and support of participating families. Research focusing on the motivations and needs of these families would provide insight into the kinds of programs most likely to attract and maintain enrolment. • teacher training and resource development Because these programs are developed in contexts of historic language hegemony, teachers may themselves lack linguistic competency and may even have adopted implicit stereotypes regarding the minoritized language and its use in school contexts. These factors are often accompanied by a scarcity of teaching materials (such as children’s books, popular songs, chants, and games) that can provide important resources for young children’s early linguistic and social development. More research in teacher education institutions is needed to identify these pedagogical needs and explore how to respond to them. • innovative methodologies As we have seen in programs such Diwan and Semente, many of these schools go beyond language provision to incorporate further innovation into their curriculum, offering methodologies such as arts-based and experiential learning that many traditional ECE programs have not fully embraced. Further investigation into the specific pedagogies employed in these early years programs – how they affect children’s learning and language development as well as school–family relationships – can provide important insight into their potential for success.

Conclusion During the process of state formation, the endeavors to create national homogeneity have been a threat to language diversity. This has been the case throughout the world, as evidenced by UNESCO’s monitoring of the word’s endangered languages. Supported by the double pressure exerted from above by supranational policy and from below by grassroots activism, assimilationist educational practices have been challenged: International pressure to protect minority languages (that is, languages other than that of the state), combined with the political pressure exerted by linguistic minorities, is effectively shifting standard policies from assimilation to bi- or multilingualism. Minority language

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education is now becoming the standard policy in the territories inhabited by linguistic groups other than that of the state (Pujolar 2007, p. 79).

In collaboration with other approaches, such as adult education, language modernization, and language-dedicated social spaces, early years education has had a key role in reversing these trends (Hinton 2018). In Europe, language shift has particularly accelerated since the nineteenth century, due to different factors, among which the spread of universal basic education has been decisive. This monolingual habitus (Gogolin 2009) has been hegemonic in the educational system for a long time and still persists in the present (Busch 2011). Nonetheless, in the last 50 years, a number of initiatives on behalf of minoritized languages have flourished. Programs like the ones described in this chapter are faced with the daunting task of reversing linguistic inequalities that have developed over many years and have become entrenched in lower speaker competencies and negative attitudes. Their success will require a great deal of support from the professional, academic, and activist communities that are dedicated to effecting long-term sociolinguistic change by inspiring new generations of minoritized language speakers.

Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education in Israel ▶ Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland ▶ Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chilex

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Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile

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Rukmini Becerra-Lubies, Dayna Moya, and Simona Mayo

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Language Education: A Brief Historical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Education in Early Childhood Centers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indigenous Language Revitalization in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Childhood and Intercultural Bilingual Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supra- and MacroLevels: Progress at National and Institutional Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Micro- and InfraLevel: Projects from Mapuche Organizations and Communities . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingualism Is Not a Goal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Over-Demand of the Role of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scant Consideration of Communities and Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

As is known, early childhood is the best time to introduce a second or even a third language. These considerations assume special relevance when the need to be

The original version of this chapter was revised. Correction to this chapter can be found at https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_37 R. Becerra-Lubies (*) · D. Moya Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Campus, Villarrica, Chile e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] S. Mayo Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez, Santiago, Chile © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_16

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fluent in a second language may be vital for social interactions or day-to-day communication. Chile is facing the continuous challenge of trying to revitalize Indigenous languages that have been in their twilight hour and almost lost within our culture. The government has taken many measures in this novel approach to revitalize Indigenous languages and educate a bilingual generation in the process. Unfortunately, due to the lack of concrete curricular measures, there is still room for improvement in this area. This chapter will examine government documents and experiences to review the path traversed, its future direction, the challenges this scenario presents, and the future research that may better inform new policies in this regard. Keywords

Early childhood · Language planning · Bilingualism · Chile · Languages policies · Indigenous languages · Indigenous communities

Introduction This chapter examines the main public policies and research in Chile in relation to the revitalization of the languages of Indigenous peoples in early childhood. We aim to understand in what way(s) government efforts through the National Early Education Board (in Spanish: Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles, JUNJI), INTEGRA Foundation, the National Indigenous Development Corporation (in Spanish, Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena, CONADI), and the Ministry of Education’s Intercultural Bilingual Education Program have or have not promoted the teaching of Indigenous languages. We also pay special attention to the work of Indigenous communities in the revitalization of their languages. To contextualize the notion of intercultural bilingual education developed in Chile, it is important to mention that this program was born in the 1990s as one of the first public policies focused on the Indigenous population, not long after the promulgation of the 19.253 Indigenous Law, established in 1993. This law is promulgated due to the demands of Indigenous movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Because of this, the intercultural education was mainly directed toward students belonging to the Indigenous communities of Chile and, currently, has also been opened to migrant communities in schools. First, this initiative has, as a primary objective, to integrate to the educational system the teaching and learning of Indigenous languages and cultures. Second, the program seeks to implement “interculturality for everyone” as a work horizon in progress that will allow the consolidation of symmetrical relations between communities where the cultural diversity of the Indigenous communities is valued. Although officially, early childhood education is not considered in the Bilingual Intercultural Educational Program (exclusively in elementary education), the concept of bilingual intercultural education comes, in large part, from the experience of the implementation of this in the nation’s territory and has been taken as an

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antecedent for other experiences, that propose as a goal the teaching, learning, and revitalization of Indigenous languages as a second language in educational contexts. In this context of the emergence of bilingual intercultural education initiatives and policies – institutional/state as well as experiences brought forth by Indigenous organizations – socio-educational debates over the revitalization of Indigenous languages begin to emerge. This notion refers to every project or initiative that has, as a goal, to contribute in some way toward the continuation, dissemination, and teaching/learning of the Indigenous languages that are currently receding, due to low indexes of vitality compared to Spanish. Therefore, by “revitalization,” it shall be understood as all that which relates to stopping the recession of these Indigenous languages and to expand its range of use and status in society.

Early Language Education: A Brief Historical Overview In order to understand the Indigenous languages revitalization initiatives, we would like to begin by presenting a broad overview of early childhood education policies implemented by the Chilean government. In Chile, the main state institutions that service children between 3 months and 6 years are the JUNJI and INTEGRA Foundation. It is important to mention that in Chile, education is obligatory beginning at 5 years old. JUNJI is managed fully by the state, in comparison to INTEGRA that receives funds from the state, but it is private. These two organizations currently provide the main coverage in early education facilities in Chile, accounting for 63% of the day care centers and early education centers throughout the country (Subsecretaría de Educación Parvularia 2019). It is worth mentioning that this day care system is especially relevant for children up to 3 years of age; according to the National Socioeconomic Status Survey (administered in 2015) from the total of 29.1% children attending early education centers in Chile, these two institutions cover approximately 97.8% of this age group (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social 2017). Indeed, the State lays the foundations for establishing minimum transversal quality standards in early education through these institutions.

Language Education in Early Childhood Centers Although these two main institutions mentioned earlier have a significant importance in early childhood education in Chile, they do not systematically promote countrywide bilingual education in foreign or Indigenous languages in their early education centers. This is unfortunate, since JUNJI and INTEGRA have a long history of including Indigenous children; for example, JUNJI has offered comprehensive care of children from Indigenous communities since 1970 and INTEGRA has been involved in similar initiatives since 1993 (De la Maza et al. 2010). Sadly, none of these initiatives have focused specifically on the language revitalization until now. Because of this, language teaching in early childhood has depended, so far, on the interests and efforts of the early education center themselves (private initiatives) or the families (parental/community initiatives). On one hand, this may not be surprising because the only official language in Chile is Spanish. But on the other

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hand, it is worrying, since Chile has taken measures to advance towards a bilingual population, but only in elementary and secondary education. We see this lack of concern towards early bilingual education in the following examples: there is no current information regarding the kinds of languages, spoken or taught, in the different early education establishments along the country. Moreover, there is no clarity as to what different initiatives the institutions respond to, in order to promote bilingualism, or information regarding the different languages children’s families speak at home as a first or second language (heritage). In this context – where early childhood education is not considered within the bilingual government laws, and the Indigenous languages are mainly ignored in educational public policy – we find Indigenous language revitalization efforts as pioneer initiatives regarding child education.

Indigenous Language Revitalization in Chile In this section, we present three aspects of the Indigenous language revitalization context in Chile: the political context in which languages are taught in educational institutions, the sociolinguistic dimension of Indigenous languages, and the legislation of intercultural education in early childhood. This broad view will provide information on the efforts of the government to teach Indigenous languages in a difficult sociopolitical environment.

The Political Context It is difficult to concisely address the political context of Indigenous people in Chile because of its complex and long history. It is evident that the multiple demands from Indigenous organizations, regarding their human, territorial, childhood, and linguistic-educational rights, have added up over the years and the government has not been able to give any clear solution to these demands. We will focus our chapter on the Mapuche people, as a representative example of what has happened to the Indigenous cultures in Chile, because the Mapuche are the largest group of Indigenous people in Chile and because its revitalization efforts in early education are most evident. The conflict between the Chilean State and the Indigenous people originated during the colonization in the nineteenth century has as a consequence the assimilation of the native people, their culture, and way of living. The colonization of the Mapuche territory is the most unmistakable evidence of this process, known as the “Pacification of the Araucanía” between 1860 and 1883. The consequences of the colonization can be summarized as the devastation of the Mapuche territory and communities, the forced “integration” of the people to the consolidated nations, the racial discrimination by non-Mapuche, and the separation of sociocultural and linguistic elements with the migration of the Mapuche people to cities to seek better opportunities (Antileo and Alvarado 2017, 2018; Pairican 2014; Vergara and Mellado 2018). During the last three decades, the relation between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people has been complex and strained with problems

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within a sociopolitical context and various failed attempts to establish different agreements (Pinto 2012). These tensions have also affected Mapuche children’s lives. There has been a historical violation of the Mapuche children’s rights, as reported by different institutions. In 2012, the Children’s Protection Foundation (Fundación de Apoyo a la Niñez y sus Derechos 2012) published a report that exposes the different types of violence that children and adolescents are subjected to by the Chilean State through its law enforcement agencies. Along these lines, the report outlines several complaints and concludes that the Chilean State has failed to comply with the American Convention on Human Rights or act on the recommendations of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. This overview of the tense reality of Mapuche children in Chile provides a necessary context to consider when planning educational policies for Indigenous children. We know this type of institutional violence towards Indigenous children also has a direct impact on their learning process (Lindau et al. 2016) and the government has failed to ponder these factors when planning the education of Indigenous children. In summary, the Mapuche context is a reality immersed in a structure of violence, generated by years of conflicts. It is key to consider that the revitalization of the Mapuche language is not alienated from this situation, much less if we take into account the early childhood reality in these communities and their history.

The Sociolinguistic Situation Chile constitutionally recognizes nine ethnic groups in its territory: “Mapuche, Aimara, Rapa Nui or Pascuenses, the Atacameño, Quechua, Colla and Diaguita communities in the north of the country, and the Kawashkar or Alacalufe and Yámana or Yagán, of the southern channels” (Law No. 19253, 1993, art. 1). These groups constitute 9.0% of Chilean population (CASEN Survey Ministry of Social Development 2015), of which the largest Indigenous community is the Mapuche, with an 83.8% representation of the Indigenous population in Chile. The second largest is the Aymara community with 6.8% representation and the third community is the Diaguita, with only 4.0% representation. Regarding Indigenous language usage and knowledge, only 10.7% of survey respondents reported being able to speak and understand their Indigenous language. The majority of these groups of speakers were over 45 years of age, reflecting the sociolinguistic displacement that the Indigenous population in Chile has developed intensively over the last 50 years. This aging population of speakers represents the reality of the majority of the Indigenous languages in Chile, reflecting the critical state of some languages at risk of going extinct. We will focus here on one of these languages used by the Mapuche community – that is, Mapudungun. As was mentioned above, the urgency of promoting the generational replacement of native speakers is a key factor in keeping the language alive. Government reports reflect that 88.6% of the Mapuche people under 14 years of age informed that they do not speak or understand the language (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social 2017). To address this matter, it is

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fundamental that a more structured intervention in early childhood be considered as a way to revitalize the language. This data has also revealed a retraction in the vitality of Indigenous languages in Chile, despite the fact that relevant public policies have been promoted in the last 25 years, hand-in-hand with remarkable work by organizations. Furthermore, in terms of use, there are currently few spaces in society that allow for the daily use of Indigenous languages, with a low number of platforms and materials for their development. Some examples of these few spaces are: (1) independent Indigenous organizations that offer language workshops in different urban centers like in the Metropolitan Region Rekeche, Trawün, or Yafüluwaiñ Mapudungun mew; (2) language immersion programs planned by organizations such as Mapuzuguletuaiñ Wallmapu mew; (3) Indigenous language courses developed by the School of Indigenous Languages of the Metropolitan Area; (4) virtual social platforms that produce infographic material, Kimeltuwe (Pacheco-Pailahual et al. 2019); (5) and cultural productions from the Indigenous communities such as traditional games, music or audiovisual material. Within this context, most of these resources are targeted for and used by adults and adolescents, with limited resources to broaden their scope in terms of age. This summarizes the current state of the organizations trying to promote traditional spaces for interactions. At the same time, these communities contribute to construct contemporary spaces for the dissemination of languages, through Internet, social networks, digital and printed media, new technologies, public spaces, among others. Fortunately, despite these issues, there is a moment of reversal in the linguistic loss, as well as identity reinforcement and social reorganization (Mayo 2017). These processes for the recovery of the use of Indigenous languages have been implemented in different contexts, autonomously by Indigenous organizations and in parallel by the State of Chile, for more than 50 years. To conclude, it is worth mentioning that Chile has an Indigenous legislative framework in place. First, the International Labor Organization Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and, in addition, the Law No. 19253 (known as Indigenous law), through which the State grants “recognition, respect and protection of Indigenous cultures and languages” (Law No. 19253, 1993, art. 28). However, this legislative framework does not recognize Indigenous peoples as nations, key issue in the Indigenous demands. Within this legal framework, in 1993 the Indigenous Development Corporation was established and with it, a new Indigenous institution in the public sector. One of the first resulting measures in the field of educational was the establishment of the Intercultural Bilingual Education Program, a socio-educational public policy, stipulating an education with cultural relevance for the Indigenous peoples of Chile. A state linguistic planning process began with the creation of this government program, seeking to develop a pilot plan in sectors of high Indigenous concentration in its early years that would subsequently be advanced in the countrywide implementation of the program (Ministerio de Educación 2011). In the next section, we describe the implementation of an intercultural approach in early childhood education and its possible impact on Indigenous language learning.

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Early Childhood and Intercultural Bilingual Education The education of Indigenous languages nationwide is broadly and systematically conveyed through the Intercultural Bilingual Education Program – an initiative that has implemented a proposal for intercultural education in more than 1400 schools nationwide, out of 11,858 educational institutions nationwide (Ministerio de Educación 2017), in its 25 years of existence (Carvajal 2015). Still, this program has exclusively addressed the elementary education in Chile and not the early education level (attended by children up to 6 years of age). Disregarding early childhood education is surprising if we consider that the first initiatives in the context of an Indigenous education were launched in early education centers in Chile and that JUNJI was the first institution that adopted an intercultural approach to respond to the needs of children of Indigenous communities in the mid-1970s (Peralta n.d.). These initiatives began as isolated projects developed between 1970 and 1990. Fortunately, due to their importance, they led to the creation of the Comprehensive Early Childhood Care Program for Indigenous Communities (also called Ethnic Early Education Centers) by JUNJI in 1991. This was the first nationwide linguistic planning policy at the early childhood education level (Ansaldo and Avendaño 2004; Maldonado 2011; Peralta n.d.). In the last 15 years, intercultural education aimed at the early education level began its development through private support agreements between JUNJI and subsequently the INTEGRA Foundation, with the Corporation of Indigenous Development. A detailed analysis of the agreements between these agencies from 2007 to 2019 reveals that there has been an ongoing public policy under construction, in response to the demands of Indigenous social organizations. However, there is still no linguistic planning addressing the implementation of a specific educational model for bilingual intercultural education of children by the State of Chile. Although teaching Indigenous language has been stated in the above-mentioned agreements documents, there is still no clarity as to what types of strategies or methodologies are being considered in early childhood education.

Summary In the last two decades, there has been a growing concern for including Indigenous language education in early childhood, due to state initiatives and Indigenous movements. However, these concerns are diminished when we consider the state laws regarding bilingual initiatives that focus only on elementary and high school levels and consider mainly English as a second language. In contrast, in the early childhood curriculum, there are no inclusions of a bilingual education for all children; only an effort to revitalize Indigenous languages in some educational institutions (intercultural early childhood educations centers or early childhood educational centers where there is high Indigenous enrollment). In summary, Indigenous language education in Chile has two sides. On the one hand, there are few initiatives, and they have little support by public policy; but on the other hand, the process of revitalization is a pioneer endeavor and is growing in the area of early childhood bilingual education in Chile.

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Main Theoretical Concepts The key theoretical concepts used for understanding the status of Indigenous languages in childhood in Chile are presented in this section. Given the focus of the Handbook and this chapter, the broad notion of language planning sheds light on the general planning processes. This conceptualization has been used to study Indigenous languages in different parts of the world (e.g., Adegbija 2004; Gynan 2001; Hornberger 2012; McCarty et al. 2012; Viriri 2003). Furthermore, in order to acknowledge milestones, characteristics, and crucial processes of linguistic planning, we have employed the Chua and Baldauf (2011) model that identifies supra-, macro-, micro-, and infra-microlevels of analysis. Finally, considering the historical and more recent outlooks briefly described in the previous sections, we believe it is essential to include a critical perspective based on relevant conceptualizations of Critical Languages Policies. For this chapter, we considered language planning as a set of decisions that aim to systematically change a particular language, its codes and uses, generally by states, institutions, or government agencies, on a particular community of native speakers (Baldauf 2006). This directly focuses on the design and promulgation of language policies that act on linguistic-communicative practices. Under this approach, according to Baldauf (2006), language policies are bodies of ideas, laws, rules, regulations, and practices aimed at achieving changes in languages in a planned and systematic manner. Within the language planning approach, we focus on the model proposed by Chua and Baldauf (2011). This model analyzes language planning from four levels: first, the supra- (government and international institutions) and macrolevels (state, regional institutions); in other words, in the sociolinguistic structures that rule the use and practice of the language. Second, the micro- (organized communities, local institutions) and infra-micro- (families, individuals) levels, which capture the relationships, dynamics, and activities of the people that use the languages (Heller 2002). The primary focus of studies in this area has been to observe the language policies of government at the macrolevels of action in society; in other words, policies that are born from a global perspective of government agencies regarding a specific situation that directly influences a group of specific communities (Liddicoat and Baldauf Jr 2008). These studies have therefore sought to explain how language planning defines lines of action from a government agency to other groups involved. However, this understanding of planning is problematic, generally avoiding the inclusion of the voices of local agents, and instead focusing mainly on resolving sociolinguistic circumstances affecting a certain group of people. On the other hand, studies about language planning have been less systematic in the research of micro- or local linguistic planning, which refers to cases where businesses, institutions, groups, or individuals function as agents building their own linguistic policies from their local territories, focusing on the use, expansion, awareness, and learning of their languages (Baldauf 2006, p. 255). This type of local planning arises from the specific needs of the native-speaking community and

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responds to everyday problems in relation to languages and the requirements for maintaining them. Liddicoat and Baldauf Jr (2008) state that these local linguistic planning initiatives often arise from the concerns of the community and any actions in favor of them. Thus, the authors highlight that the actions of groups involved in education (such as microagents) are responsible for developing and designing educational programs or projects to fill the gaps that public policies leave unattended, or that are often not considered. These authors believe that language planning will evolve to the point where agents will no longer be limited to government agencies or institutions but will have the power to impose ideas through dominant policies. For this, local communities should be considered as key elements for the development of languages, their uses, their teaching, and their social positioning (Liddicoat and Baldauf Jr 2008). Another fundamental point within linguistic planning and language policies is presented by Chua and Baldauf (2011). The authors adopt the Critical Languages Policies approach, in which linguistic planning is analyzed and observed as a project that contains ideological and sociopolitical-cultural elements responding to social processes and specific social needs. This theoretical perspective seeks to examine the political and ideological origin of the initiatives of which a linguistic policy is composed. From this perspective, Johnson (2011) proposes to think of linguistic policies as mechanisms of hegemonic power that have a direct bearing on minority languages and their users. Consequently, this approach proposes examining how these projects affect social groups and their concerns regarding the linguistic and educational inequalities they are subject to (Barakos 2016). Likewise, Tollefson (1991) points out that one should also be aware that linguistic policies often create contexts of social inequality through the decisions handed down to the communities and that such decisions also promote the interests of dominant social sectors from the institutions. From this standpoint, Hornberger (2006, 2008) also states that in relation to the sociolinguistic inequality experienced by minority languages like Indigenous languages, bilingual education policies provide an opportunity to contribute to their revitalization. That is why it is necessary to construct these policies on the basis of critical points of view regarding linguistic policies, which lead to the marginalization of Indigenous languages in schools and society in the first place. These difficulties are reflected in the Chilean policies, as we have seen in previous sections. The next section will examine the advances made by public policies, focusing on the different levels (supra-, macro-, micro-, and inframicrolevels) – explained in this section – to present examples of the difficulties at each level.

Major Contributions Below we provide an overview of the main advances in public policies, in terms of revitalization of Indigenous languages in early childhood in Chile, focusing on the supra-, macro-, and microlevels of linguistic planning. We have organized this

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section in the following topics: supra- and macrolevels: (a) inter-agency collaboration, (b) teacher education programs, (c) consideration of communities, (d) family involvement, and (e) curriculum and pedagogical resources. At the microlevel: we considered projects developed by Mapuche organizations and communities such as Kimeltuwe, the Pocoyo in Mapudungun initiative, and the Walüng Chillkatuwe Mapudungun team.

Supra- and MacroLevels: Progress at National and Institutional Levels Inter-Agency Collaboration The Interagency collaboration between JUNJI and CONADI has been one of the most important milestones for the development of intercultural education in early childhood. The first agreements between JUNJI and CONADI began in 2007, leading to the formulation of an Indigenous language learning policy in early education signed between 2007 and 2019. In these agreements, the primary purposes were: (1) to invest in the learning of Indigenous languages at the early education level, (2) to review the quality of this proposed learning, after its implementation, (3) to consolidate this learning, (4) to strengthen it, and, finally, (5) to systematize the experience and create an Indigenous languages reference model through joint efforts between both agencies. The stated agreement, between JUNJI and CONADI in 2007, was broken down into six main ideas: (1) to carry out participatory diagnoses in Indigenous early education centers; (2) to create pertinent educational materials for the teaching of cultural diversity; (3) to design, validate, and apply intercultural methodologies and strategies; (4) to have participation of parents, grandparents, and family members for the transmission of knowledge; (5) to lay the foundations of the operational agreements between the participating institutions and the construction of 30 intercultural early education centers; and (6) to study and draw up an educational curriculum. These agreements have allowed some progress towards a linguistic policy for early childhood in the last 12 years. This collaboration between JUNJI and CONADI has had two important milestones: the creation of intercultural early education centers and the incorporation of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators. Regarding the creation of intercultural early education centers, JUNJI launched 41 intercultural early education centers, built in areas with high density of Indigenous population. There are currently three types of early childhood education centers with an intercultural approach within JUNJI. First, the early education centers with an alternative curriculum for Indigenous communities (ethnic early education center) from the initiative implemented in 1991. There were 41 of these establishments active up to 2019. Second, the intercultural educational centers directly managed by JUNJI, with a total of 116 establishments today, these learning settings have incorporated Indigenous Language and Culture Educators. Finally, intercultural early childhood education centers via a transfers fund, composed of educational units at the request of

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Indigenous organizations, through CONADI. With respect to INTEGRA Foundation, it began its work with an intercultural approach approximately in 2010 (Dirección Sociocultural and Fundación Integra 2017). This institution designed a diagnostic strategy for 997 of its establishments in order to analyze and characterize the practices implemented in its early education centers, moving towards specific actions to promote children’s culture. The creation of intercultural early childhood centers has made clear the need to have educators with intercultural skills to revitalize the language, develop pedagogical material, and include family and community participation. With regard to the Indigenous Language and Culture Educators, they were officially incorporated in intercultural early education centers through an agreement in 2010 that explicitly focused on the learning of Indigenous languages at the early childhood level for the first time, establishing a milestone in early childhood intercultural education. These Indigenous Language and Culture Educators are native speakers of an Indigenous language and teach all children present in a class (Indigenous or not). Their role in the teaching of Indigenous languages is vital, since there are not Indigenous language teachers. Nevertheless, since these educators do not have a teacher education degree, they have the function of assisting the early childhood educators in the pedagogic activities and do not function autonomously. There is no participation model for Indigenous Language and Culture Educators, and so the method of collaboration of these educators varies in different education centers. In some centers, the educators participate for a few hours a week, while in others, they participate during all school hours and educational activities. Since 2010, these specialized educators have been formally recognized as key educational agents in the revitalization initiatives in early childhood. Their tasks have consisted of: (1) being the main agent of the “bilingual process,” dedicated exclusively to the teaching of the Indigenous language (JUNJI, 2010), (2) as far as possible, also teaching the language to families, as well as the preschool staff, and finally, (3) participating in training in teaching the Indigenous language, since they are not professionally trained teachers. The importance of these educators in intercultural contexts has been reflected in the increase of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators in early education establishments, growing from 42 in 2010 to 116 in 2019. However, it is important to advance towards a concrete support for these educators to fulfill this important task, as we will see in the Critical Issues section.

Teacher Education Programs Regarding the educator’s preparation, these policy changes have resulted in some intercultural early education programs developed by different universities in Chile. However, each of these programs is fairly new, and we do not have specific data about how this might impact the development of Indigenous languages in early intercultural education centers. In addition, unfortunately, these programs do not have a bilingual approach, leaving the learning of the Indigenous language to the preference of the student as electives, and not as mandatory courses within the curriculum. Consequently, student-teachers do not how to an Indigenous language.

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It is fundamental to move towards an early childhood professional education that includes intercultural matters as well as language revitalization, a necessity even identified by early childhood educators themselves. Participants in the BecerraLubies and Fones’ (2016) study have stated that they would have liked to know more about Indigenous language and cultures before beginning to work at an early education center. These educators have also mentioned that they would have like to know more about the historic processes surrounding the Indigenous language and culture in their context (Becerra-Lubies and Fones 2016).

Consideration of Communities The inclusion of the communities in early childhood education is essential in documents covering the topics of interculturality and infancy. Public policies state explicitly the importance of having participating communities in these educational establishments, because their linguistic and cultural knowledge is what will support and complement the educational system. Moreover, early education centers are expected to include the community in several ways: (1) acquiring knowledge of the characteristics, traditional attire, upbringing styles, feeding habits, house norms, beliefs, and native cultural expressions of each Indigenous culture the children belong to; (2) learning about each child’s cultural games, with the goal of incorporating them into the educational process; (3) evaluating the vitality of Indigenous languages and culture in their territory; (4) developing educational material based on community input; and (5) promoting children’s participation in community relevant social activities. Even though the majority of the educational establishments do not have the community support stated above, research confirms that intercultural early education centers have a higher Indigenous community participation than regular centers (Becerra 2015). For example, in these centers, communities have supported cultural celebrations by receiving children in their territory and ancestral sites, teaching children to play instruments and educate them about ancient textile and ceramic techniques. Regarding the community role in learning the Indigenous languages, their involvement in the intercultural early education centers creates and visualizes the language through daily practice (Becerra-Lubies, Proyecto FONDECYT N
11,160,746, Becerra-Lubies 2016). Indeed, the presence of community members reinforces a space and moment where the Indigenous Language and Culture Educator – and any other educator – can practice and use Indigenous languages naturally during the learning activities at the educational center (Becerra-Lubies and Fones 2016). Regrettably, in the vast majority of intercultural early educational centers, community members are seen as mere volunteers who should be willing to participate when called upon. It would be interesting to see public policy that could result in concrete changes, such as an intercultural early childhood curriculum co-created with Indigenous communities in each intercultural educational center; and higher financial support for the intercultural centers to develop learning activities with Indigenous communities inside and outside the educational establishments.

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Family Involvement Families are particularly important in early education (Hindman and Morrison 2011) especially in the intercultural context we have presented so far. Public policy documents respect and value this importance, inviting families to be part of the activities developed in the educational centers. The focus is a collaborative practice, articulating, relating to, and respecting all participants in the educational process and its cultural context. The documents also heighten the understanding that the curriculum is in permanent construction, given the participants, contexts, and cultural background that determine the final product (Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena and Centro de Estudios Interculturales and Patrimonio Universidad de Valparaíso 2009). In this light, it is expected that the educational center/community/family triad determines what needs to be learned in that determined territorial setting. Research has shown that families of Indigenous communities are crucial in the educational centers because they become the network and support group of these educational centers (Becerra-Lubies and Mayo González 2015, 2017). The families are the ones who support the cultural celebrations; they participate in activities and experiences, invite further community members to participate, and enhance children’s’ learning and understanding of their culture, for example, teaching them how to play musical instruments (Becerra-Lubies, Proyecto FONDECYT N
11,160,746, Becerra-Lubies 2016). However, most of the time, families still have a passive role, mainly supporting activities that are chosen by the educational establishments. Because parents of these new generations rarely speak Indigenous language, the role of this key aspect is relegated to a nonexistent importance, and families rarely engage in learning practices in the intercultural early education centers (Becerra 2015). These limitations are also noted by early childhood educators, who have stated they would like more participation from the families in the decisions and activities developed in the educational establishment. Most families want their children to learn Indigenous languages, but they reported not having the time to learn Indigenous languages themselves (Becerra-Lubies, Proyecto FONDECYT N
11,160,746, 2016). Curriculum and Pedagogical Resources The publication of the new Curricular Guidelines for Preschool Education (Ministerio de Educación 2018) makes a small advance in intercultural matters. Although this document is not extensive in addressing interculturality and the teaching of Indigenous languages, unlike the previous one, it provides more information and enhances the relevance of these topics. This has meant an improvement in curricular policy, progressing from previous versions that only mentioned interculturalism, to including this concept as a core element of quality and significance in a child’s learning, as well as an overall social right. Although the progress from one document to another is valuable, this curricular framework, or any actual public policy, still lacks specific guidelines and materials for the application of interculturalism and the revitalization of the Indigenous languages in the educational system. There are dictionaries and illustrated glossaries for children to use, but there are no specific resources designed for an early language intervention.

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Most of the materials created by the government focus on parenting guidelines from an Indigenous perspective (JUNJI and OEA 1998), or in strengthening the historical identity as well as elements of oral tradition, like stories and songs (JUNJI 2009; JUNJI and CONADI 2017). Other educational resources focus on traditional games, such as strategy to enhance motor skills, like with the Mapuche game Palin (JUNJI, 2017; 2018). However, they do not focus on the language learning aspect, the reality of the community, or early childhood education as a whole.

Micro- and InfraLevel: Projects from Mapuche Organizations and Communities Following the theoretical framework of this chapter, we present a small micro- and infralevel review of relevant initiatives implemented by Mapuche organizations in childhood. As stated in the introduction, our emphasis has been on Mapuche experiences that exemplify bottom-up actions. Among the reviewed initiatives for teaching the Mapuche language, there are few that focus on working with children and those that focus on the preschool level are even more scarce. In this chapter, we would like to highlight the work by the Mapuche organizations Kimeltuwe, Pocoyo, in Mapudungun initiative and the Walüng Chillkatuwe Mapuzungun team in the design and production of teaching materials for learning by young children in different formats.

Kimeltuwe Initiative The first organization, Kimeltuwe, is composed of a group of young educators, activists, and speakers of Mapudungun and has concentrated its work exclusively in the production of materials in the Mapuche language since 2015. Their resources are developed for different types of audiences, although mainly for children, and are widely used by teachers and educators in schools and early education centers. The materials produced are infographics, reading material, and brochures about speaking situations. Kimeltuwe is one of the most successful programs in the production and diffusion of materials in Mapudungun, as evidenced by the amount of downloads, online shares, and sale of printed materials (Pacheco-Pailahual et al. 2019), and it has contributed to demystifying the Mapuche culture and language through the eyes of contemporary Mapuche. These resources have clarified the reality of Mapuche people, and the language has been reappreciated as a valid way to communicate. This group is also an important linguistic activist – by using social media and technology, they impact new generations of people to understand and use the language (Pacheco-Pailahual et al. 2019) (Figs. 1 and 2). Pocoyo in Mapudungun Initiative The Pocoyo in Mapudungun initiative, launched by members of the Mapuche Mapuzuguletuaiñ Language Institute, aims to translate Pocoyo’s videos to Mapudungun, so that children can learn an Indigenous language. They contribute

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Fig. 1 “Reñma. The family” (Source: Kimeltuwe, materiales de mapudungun)

by generating eye-catching contemporary materials for children to promote Mapudungun. Due to the scarce funds for producing audiovisual materials, this project has consisted of translating three episodes of the Pocoyo children’s series (educative 3D animation show for young children) to Mapudungun, particularly because of its broad dissemination and positive reception by children in Chile. These episodes are available on YouTube. By using this cartoon, the organization hopes to

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Fig. 2 “Chumleymi am? How are you?” (Source: Kimeltuwe, materiales de mapudungun)

foster a close relationship between material children already know and their Indigenous language. Unfortunately, given lack of funds, they state that it is impossible for them to generate their own animations (Becerra-Lubies, Proyecto FONDECYT N
11,160,746, 2016).

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Walu¨ng Chillkatuwe Mapudungun Finally, one of the initiatives for children that has the longest trajectory is the Walüng Chillkatuwe Mapudungun Summer School. The main objective of this intervention is to teach the Mapuche language to children between the ages of 5 and 10 in Santiago, Chile, organized by the educator Antonia Huentecura. This summer school focused on teaching Mapudungun has taken place in spaces provided by urban mapuche organizations in the city of Santiago, Chile. It has printed supporting material, made by educators, and its methodology combines a communicative focus on teaching language, together with cultural dynamics specific to Mapuche education. Thus, in the process of teaching and learning, knowledge of the language intertwines with its practice and with traditional Mapuche games (such as palin or lingo, both team games) and with resources from oral tradition (such as the epew or traditional stories, piam or ancient stories, konew or riddles, among others). Even though this work has been systematic for several years, there has been no research about the educational or linguistic impact of these actions. However, there is a report of the history and motivation of the founder – Antonia Huentecura – who shares that in a pewma (dream) she saw an image of her late uncle writing in Mapudungun on a board. To Antonia, this was a sign to follow Mapudungun and dedicate her life to teaching and learning the language. She now works as a traditional Mapuche early educator and states that she would like to become a linguistic weychafe (fighter) for the Mapuche language (Calderon et al. 2018). Summary Based on the initiatives described above (supra-macro- and micro-infralevels), we can examine several points associated with linguistic planning in the teaching of Indigenous languages in early education. First, JUNJI, INTEGRA, and CONADI have strengthened the establishment of the intercultural work in early education centers and have initiated the systematization of experiences throughout its institutions. JUNJI remains the leading institution nationwide in the planning of a linguistic policy for the intercultural education of children at the early education level, as evidenced by the agreements. This has meant that, in terms of infrastructure, one can see the establishment of several intercultural early education centers. We can also see progress in the incorporation of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators in these centers, both in JUNJI and INTEGRA, undoubtedly one of the most relevant improvements and milestones of this initiative. However, progress is still needed in this area; it is necessary to advance and outline a work approach for Indigenous languages, with concrete measures for their revitalization. On the other hand, policy documents have been clear in promoting family and community participation in the learning of Indigenous cultures and languages at the educational centers. Even though collaboration between these agents towards bilingualism is still rare, early education centers do have the participation of family and community members who could be key agents in supporting the learning of the Indigenous language.

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Finally, the Mapuche community initiatives show us the dedication here is to revitalize their language, employing the use of audiovisual materials that can be attractive to small children. These Mapuche community actions are relevant, because they encourage the presence of the Indigenous languages in other contexts (not only the ones in educational centers).

New Projects At the time this chapter was written, we only have information about the contributions of a few new projects of different Indigenous cultures. The first one is called I cultivate my culture by gardening: the garden as a language and cultural revitalization project (Becerra- Lubies, Proyecto CONICYT EXPLORA, 2019). This project expects to contribute to the biocultural knowledge of children attending intercultural early childhood education centers in the Araucanía Region, through the purposeful use of gardens as an educational strategy to strengthen the scientific knowledge of the Mapuche culture and language. This project considers a few fundamental factors for language revitalization in intercultural early childhood centers: – – – – –

Encouragement of the Indigenous Language and Culture Educator participation. Promotion of family and Mapuche community participation. Contextualization of Mapudungun in the garden context. Creation of daily spaces, in the early education centers, to use Mapudungun. Transversal use of Mapudungun in science learning activities.

To date, we do not have evaluations of this project; however, during the implementation, there was evidence to indicate that the garden is a space that could enhance the daily use of Mapudungun. It is also a place where the Indigenous Language and Culture Educators can safely use their language and cultural knowledge, strengthening the Indigenous language learning. We recommend that future versions could include at least two Indigenous Language and Culture Educators, to offer a modeling of native language use in a conversation, and thus, to increase the everyday use of the language. On an institutional level, JUNJI has a recent project called Honga’a o te Re’o”Monto. This initiative started in 2017 and revitalizes Rapanui language through linguistic nests. This intervention has attempted to educate children on their Polynesian roots and teaching them about their Hui Tupuna (ancestral heritage). It is a 100% immersion program in direct connection to their context and natural environment, covering everything from ancestral history to naming daily plants and fish. Even the food must be traditional in this environment (Tepano 2018). There is no data yet about the impact of this program, due to the novelty of this first initiative. Finally, there are projects led by the Indigenous communities, such as the TV series Kiñe Rupa (Once upon a time) launched in 2018 and developed based on research done by Pewvley Taiñ Rakizuam, an anthology of native stories. Originally, this series was launched in Spanish and it has recently been translated to

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Mapudungun and subtitled to English in 2019. This work was based on the tales from the book Segundo Llamin Ñi Kuyfike Nütram/Las antiguas conversaciones de Segundo Llamin (Llamin et al. 2015). It has been reported that the four episodes about the tales of the wise Mapuche Llamin have been well received by the children of the Mapuche community (Figs. 3 and 4).

Critical Issues and Topics The urgency of having initiatives for the revitalization of Indigenous languages of Chile has led to the implementation of different actions, but unfortunately, without them necessarily being connected to one another. Furthermore, the focus of these efforts is particularly aimed at adults, adolescents, and children in the school system (i.e., older than 6), sadly disregarding decisions and specific linguistic revitalization policies in early childhood. Among the main challenges to date, we highlight the following as critical issues: (1) bilingualism is not a goal, (2) over-demand of the role of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators, and (3) scant consideration of communities and context.

Bilingualism Is Not a Goal One of the main issues with the intercultural early education approach in Chile is that bilingualism is not a goal of the program. Some documents (such as Orientaciones curriculares para una educación parvularia intercultural, [Curricular guidelines for an intercultural preschool education], and Educación Parvularia en Escuelas con Enfoque Intercultural [Early Childhood education in schools with an intercultural approach]) describe and formulate an educational proposal for the construction of intercultural preschools and promote the importance of implementing Indigenous language and culture teaching plans. However, these documents do not address how to teach the language, what methodology to use, what level of proficiency are they aiming to achieve (e.g., words, songs, phrases, greetings), how to evaluate the language proficiency, among other issues. In fact, while public policy mentions the creation of a Reference Model for the teaching-learning of Indigenous languages and cultures, actual strategies for the teaching of second Indigenous languages in early childhood are not evident. Moreover, recovery and teaching of the knowledge of Indigenous peoples focuses on a cultural dimension; that is, language is not a central element. By way of illustrating this matter, the document Early childhood education in schools with an intercultural approach states the following: When organizing the educational process in contexts with an intercultural focus, it is essential to consider the language of the corresponding Indigenous peoples. Although children are not required to be bilingual at this stage of learning, the understanding and use of some simple words and phrases that favor communication and a sense of belonging of children within their community must be encouraged. (Ministerio de Educación 2014, p. 35)

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Fig. 3 “Kiñe rupa. The show,” Source: Pewvley taiñ rakizuam)

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Fig. 4 “Fotograma Kiñe rupa. The show” (Source: Pewvley taiñ rakizuam)

We believe that the ambiguity of these statements and lack of clear objectives create an obstacle in the promotion of bilingual children in intercultural settings to advance in the revitalization of Indigenous languages. In this sense, intercultural early education centers teach Indigenous languages, but to date, we do not have information about the impact of these programs in terms of language development and language learning.

Over-Demand of the Role of Indigenous Language and Culture Educators The inclusion of the Indigenous Language and Culture Educators is a positive change in public policies for the teaching of Indigenous languages in childhood, since they are the ones who are mainly entrusted with transmitting the language to future generations. However, the scant support that they receive and, in particular, the excessive demand for their services are critical issues when providing adequate teaching in Indigenous languages. The different agreements signed between 2007 and 2017 show progress in this matter, specifying tasks, responsibilities, and authority assigned to the Indigenous Language and Culture Educators; however, these statements are not accompanied by decisions or initiatives that impact all preschools and their teaching staff. Thus, Indigenous Language and Culture Educators are solely responsible for teaching a language, because the rest of the educational staff in the context does not promote

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bilingualism among children. The performance expected of these educators surpasses the working conditions offered to them; for example, they are expected to train teachers, while at the same time planning and coordinating educational interventions, interacting with communities, and teaching the language to their colleagues and the children’s families (Becerra et al. 2019). All of these requirements make sense if one wishes to have articulated learning processes between children, families, and teachers; nevertheless, the centers for education do no offer the necessary conditions (e.g., more time and economic resources) to fulfill this intergenerational work.

Scant Consideration of Communities and Context One of the points we consider critical in current educational policies is the assignment of a contradictory role to communities and context. Contradictory, because some documents promote the active participation of families and communities in teaching Indigenous languages, but other policies propose that Indigenous Language and Culture Educators should teach Indigenous languages to families and communities, because they do not know Indigenous languages. The last issue may not be surprising, if we consider that Indigenous Language and Culture Educators have questioned how they can connect their teachings with “communities” if there are no longer any communities that speak Indigenous languages, or if such communities are not close to the schools (Becerra et al. 2019). Hence, we deem it essential to acknowledge conceptual differences regarding what is understood by “communities” when collaboration between schools and communities is expected. It is also crucial to identify the knowledge and skills that these actors have and thus, identify what work can or cannot be done with them. Sociolinguistic studies of intercultural early educational centers and their surrounding context could contribute to this area by studying the linguistic communities of these centers. In addition, as we have stated in previous studies, “public policies ignore the existence of territorial conflicts, demands for rights, and violence by the state against many Indigenous communities, and expect communities to participate harmoniously and in full agreement with the requirements of the formal education system” (Becerra et al. 2019, p. 12). In the last year, communities and Mapuche organizations have started the recuperation process of their land and have experienced only failed violent responses by the state. All of this makes it hard to enhance the revitalization of the Indigenous language in early childhood. Today, public policies assume that all actors have the same interests, and therefore, difficulties with collaboration between early education centers, communities, and families are experienced as particular problems (between individuals), and not as part of historical processes that affect relations in the present. We consider that the awareness of territorial conflicts, where some early education centers are located, can be seen as a pedagogical information that gives relevance and meaning to children’s learning. Indeed, in the international literature, schools’ projects have been implemented that acknowledge and discuss territorial conflicts (Melin et al. 2019). It would be interesting to link these projects to Indigenous language learning in

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Chile, since early childhood education provides opportunities to connect children’s learning with their sociocultural realities and the history of their communities.

Future Research Directions Given that linguistic revitalization in early childhood is a relatively unexplored field with many issues that still need to be examined, we think that future research in the Chile should address some of the following themes to influence the work of public policies and early education centers. From a practical approach, future research must systematize and provide information on the types of bilingualism existing and being promoted in early educational centers. It is relevant to study if Indigenous language teaching occurs within families and communities, or if it is mainly imparted in early education centers. We therefore deem it essential for government agencies to be able to provide information to early education centers regarding, for example: (1) the languages spoken by teachers, families, and related communities; (2) the perceptions and appreciations of Indigenous communities regarding the teaching of Indigenous languages; (3) resources available to early education centers for implementing these initiatives; (4) the need for teaching staff to learn the Indigenous language in question; and (5) and the kinds of efforts that have or have not been made in early education for the teaching of second Indigenous languages. In other words, a sociolinguistic study that provides additional data regarding the early education centers’ reality and its educators. It is also crucial to analyze information regarding the most appropriate assessment tools related to Indigenous languages in early childhood. While we recognize that assessment is a weakness in intercultural education in Chile, it is essential to know the competences of children (in listening, reading, writing, and speaking) in their respective native languages. On the other hand, one must determine the types of existing bilingualism (heritage language, second language, etc.) in order to define the most pertinent strategies to use in these early education centers. Similarly, it is key to know Indigenous language vitality of early education institutions, especially in families and surrounding communities. This would orient early educational centers, providing them with additional information to enrich curricular planning and select optimal teaching strategies. It is also important to conduct research that highlights the contributions of children, parents, and preschool teachers in the language revitalization processes. In this matter, there has been an increasing number of studies in the field of bilingual education in childhood that explore the contribution of children and teacher-parent partnership for bilingualism (Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). Unfortunately, there has not been much research in this area in Chile. Still, it is extremely important to consider that without the engagement of children in their learning processes, bilingualism in a minority language is difficult to achieve. It is also key to have research that follows an ecology of language learning viewpoint (Van Lier 2010), which means that environmental variables are considered in the construction of the language learning. This research could provide

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referential frameworks regarding the characteristics of the environmental variables that influence language learning. For instance, how learners interact with their surroundings (spatial, social, educational), how they have been changing, and how and to what extent they are reflected in learning an Indigenous language in Chile. Likewise, Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner 2005) would appear to provide a relevant approach for understanding the interactions between children, families, and teachers in intercultural bilingual education learning processes. In line with Schwartz (2018), we believe that of the five dimensions proposed by Bronfenbrenner, three are especially suitable for bilingual education in early childhood in Chile, namely: the microsystem in which the different interrelationships of development and trust between children, their families, and their caregivers take place; the mesosytem, which helps to find two or more networks in which children, parents, and families connect; and the macrosystem, which connects the child with larger communities involved, helping to create broader social relationships (Schwartz 2018). Another line of research that would be interesting to pursue further would be to inquire about the type of bilingualism of the communities and the characteristics of the interactions in which they learn in early childhood. Some linguists have described the dialog between Spanish and Mapudungun as an “unstable diglossia” (Wittig 2009), emphasizing the importance of reviewing the socialization of the language in its natural context. This would contribute to a better knowledge of its attributes, which could be used to improve teaching practices. On the other hand, we think it would be pertinent for future research to focus on the implementation of concrete models or strategies to encourage and strengthen the teaching of Indigenous languages in preschools. Most current studies in qualitative and quantitative fields have emphasized examining the sociolinguistic contexts (Gundermann et al. 2009; Wittig 2008, 2011; Zúñiga 2007) and the problems of intercultural education (Cañulef et al. 2002; Loncon et al. 2016; Riedemann 2008; Williamson and Flores 2015). Nonetheless, there is a great opportunity for conducting research with participatory, community, and place-based methodologies. With these approaches, it would be possible to propose specific teaching strategies for the different early education centers. Along these same lines, some teaching resources used by Traditional Educators (Indigenous language educators in elementary and secondary level education) promote the use of strategies aligned with ancestral forms of teaching of Indigenous peoples, such as the emphasis on games, oral tradition, dancing, and music (Becerra et al. 2019), but we have not found that kind of research focusing on early childhood.

Conclusions In accordance with other authors (e.g., Schwartz 2018), we believe that in Chile it is necessary to focus on preschool bilingual education as a distinct research domain, because as has been widely pointed out, “early childhood is a critical period in a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic and cognitive development” (Schwartz

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2018, p.2), a stage that becomes even more crucial for the revitalization of Indigenous languages. We know, in turn, that merely starting at an early age or exposing children to second languages in the educational context is insufficient for producing children with Indigenous language skills, especially if there are no planned and clear procedures at the time of their implementation. It is therefore essential to carry out methodological innovations in the teaching of Indigenous languages in early childhood, observing other international experiences in the same area, while also observing what is happening within Indigenous organizations, that is, investigating what they would like to do for the teaching of their languages, what innovations are proposed by the communities and Indigenous language speakers, and which can or cannot be implemented with the available resources. It is imperative to examine what the organizations, communities, and Indigenous language speakers propose, starting with local terms of reference and initiatives, and then moving forward to the meso- and macrolevels. Within the international initiatives of other Indigenous peoples, language nests have shown important results that could be useful for considering a similar initiative in Chile (McIvor and Parker 2016). The Indigenous peoples that have experimented with this methodology include the Samoans in the Pacific Islands, the Mohawk peoples in Kahnawà: ke in Canada, the Māori in New Zealand, the Hawai’ians and the Seneca in the United States, and the Sámi in Norway and Finland (Chambers 2015). We already have language nests for the Rapanui language in Easter Island, but we could have more nests throughout the country and managed by Indigenous communities. Along these lines, we believe that it would be key to create and promote a reference model of Indigenous language teaching at the preschool level, built and designed with the collaboration of the Indigenous peoples and communities. This work would allow Indigenous peoples to have power of decision regarding their own languages and the way they are taught.

Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education in Australia ▶ Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

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Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Sociolinguistic Context of Irish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociolinguistic Context of the Establishment of Irish-Medium Preschools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heritage Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heritage Language (HL) Immersion in the Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . High-Quality Early Years’ Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Language Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language-Conducive Pedagogical Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grouping Heritage Speakers (HSs) and Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) in Early Years’ Immersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Agency and Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parent Agency and Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research on Outcomes of Irish Language Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Current Role and Functioning of Irish-Medium Preschools (Naíonraí) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evaluation of Outcomes from Irish-Medium Preschooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parents and Early Immersion: The Impact on Home Language Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pedagogical Strategies in Early Years’ Immersion and Teacher Beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quality Provision for Early Years’ Heritage Language Immersion: Addressing Different Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intergenerational Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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T. M. Hickey (*) School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_15

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Abstract

Early years’ education through a heritage language offers vital support for many minority languages, often catering both for heritage speakers (HSs) who need mother-tongue support, and for heritage language learners (HLLs) beginning to acquire the language as L2. In this chapter, the development, role, and 0functioning of immersion preschools in the Republic of Ireland will be examined. The chapter will discuss the contribution of such preschools to building support for the immersion model for L2 learners, while also (in some areas) providing vital support for the mother-tongue maintenance of Irish. Research outcomes from this sector will be outlined, and current issues and challenges explored. The effect of the decline of intergenerational transmission will be considered, and resulting challenges for the sector. Future research will explore improved supports for parents regarding minority language maintenance in the home, the promotion of better educational partnership with the parents of L2 learners, promotion of continuity between preschool and primary school, and enhanced preparation for educators. Finally, challenges such as difficulties in staffing and resourcing quality early years’ education through a minority language, and accelerated changes in Irish and the sociolinguistic context et al., will be discussed in relation to current and future practice in early years’ immersion education in Irish. Keywords

Early years’ immersion · Family language planning · Language-conducive pedagogy · Heritage language maintenance · Heritage language teaching

Introduction Preschooling through the medium of lesser-used languages has played a pivotal role in the maintenance and revitalization movements of many heritage languages (Wright and Baker 2017; Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). This has been noted in the Irish context (e.g., Hickey 2001; Mhic Mhathúna and Mac Con Iomaire 2013), and also, for example, in the Maori Kohanga Reo (“language nests”) in Aotearoa/New Zealand (King 2001), Welsh Cylchoedd Meithrin in Wales (Jones and Martin-Jones 2004), and Basque Ikastolas (Elorza and Muñoa 2008). In Ireland, immersion in Irish-medium preschools called naíonraí offers mother-tongue support for the minority of heritage speakers (henceforth HSs) from Irish-speaking homes, while for the majority who are heritage language learners (HLLs) of Irish, it offers the opportunity to begin to acquire Irish as L2 in an Irish-medium setting. Here the development, role, and functioning of Irishimmersion preschooling in the Republic of Ireland will be considered, looking at the implementation of immersion in the context of an endangered language and the lessons that can be drawn from it.

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Historical Sociolinguistic Context of Irish Irish is a Celtic language belonging to the Indo-European family. Irish-Gaelic, Scottish-Gaelic, and Manx belong to the group of Insular Celtic languages known as Goidelic, sometimes referred to as Q-Celtic, as distinct from the P-Celtic languages Welsh and Breton. While Irish and English are Indo-European languages, they belong to different branches (Celtic and Germanic), and there are significant differences between them: Stenson (personal communication, 2019) describes Irish as being “no more closely related to English than Greek or Russian.” Irish is a verbinitial (VSO) language, with post-positioning of adjectives after nouns, a complex set of initial mutations following pronouns and prepositions, and conjugated prepositions, to name but a few of its features. Written Irish employs a subset of the English alphabet, but Irish orthography uses these letters according to different conventions, to represent two sets of consonants (“broad” and “slender”), and adds a length marker to signal long vowels (Stenson and Hickey 2019). Many vowels in written Irish are not sounded as vowels but function only as markers of the neighboring consonant’s quality. Overall, learning Irish constitutes a significant challenge for English speakers. In Ireland, the Constitution recognizes Irish as the “first official language” of the state, although only a minority use Irish on a daily basis, and English, the language spoken by the majority, is recognized as the other official language of the state. Efforts at revitalizing Irish since Irish independence have had mixed success (Ó Riagáin 1997; Ó Duibhir 2018). Comparison of Census data over the decades (see Fig. 1) shows significant growth in Irish speakers, with 1.76 million people

Fig. 1 Republic of Ireland © Census 2016: Percentage able to speak Irish. (Reproduced with permission of the Government of Ireland Central Statistics Office (CSO))

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(about 38.5% of the population) reporting the ability to speak Irish in Census 2016 (Central Statistics Office 2017). However, this increase in speakers with (some) ability in Irish is not matched with increased daily use of the language outside of educational contexts. In his evaluation of revitalization efforts, Fishman (1991:143) noted the low levels of Irish use and intergenerational transmission and characterized Irish as a “test case” that all involved in reversing language shift should examine in order to understand “what went wrong.” He contrasted the threatened position of Irish with the successful revitalization of Hebrew that was supported by both education and families (see also Spolsky and Shohamy 2001). The Census figures show that the early ambitions of the new Irish state created in 1922 to revitalize Irish were not fully realized. Nevertheless, any fair attempt to evaluate Irish revitalization must recognize that the Irish state emerged from British colonization with limited infrastructure and resources, high levels of poverty and social disadvantage, and rampant emigration that continued through much of the last century. Thus, while state intervention did not restore the “patient” to full health, Ó hIfearnáin (2000) reminded us that the language would probably not have survived at all without that intervention. From the outset, the focus of state intervention was on the educational system as the means of promoting Irish revitalization. The policy was two-pronged: providing for the teaching of Irish as a second language to HLLs in schools, and the maintenance of Irish as mother-tongue among HS children in officially designated Irishspeaking areas known as an Ghaeltacht, a small number of rural areas located mainly on the western seaboard across seven counties. This context is the backdrop framing Irish educational provision, described in more detail below.

Sociolinguistic Context of the Establishment of Irish-Medium Preschools As noted above, schools were seen as the main means of revitalizing Irish at the founding of the State. Initially, it was recommended that children aged 7 and older would be offered instruction through Irish for at least one hour a day if possible, but for the youngest children in primary schools (4–6 years), it was recommended that Irish be the only medium of instruction. This was based on the view of contemporary educators that immersing the youngest children would lead to rapid proficiency gains in Irish, much as migrant children in New York acquired English quickly. However, as Ó Duibhir (2018) noted in examining the history of Irish immersion education, it is not surprising that this was not replicated, given the minority language context, the lack of teacher training and materials to teach in Irish, and the high rate of significant social disadvantage. As a result of these difficulties, opposition grew among teachers to using only Irish with the youngest children, and parents’ dissatisfaction increased regarding the amount of time spent on teaching Irish. This led to significant decline in the commitment to Irish-medium education by the 1960s (Ó Riagáin 1997; Ó Duibhir 2018), with a move to teaching Irish as a single subject to the majority of children; and state policy shifting from revitalization

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(as was achieved for Hebrew in Israel) to teaching Irish mainly as a subject, with a view to promoting (variable levels of) bilingualism. Against this backdrop of declining commitment to Irish-medium education, a grass-roots movement began among parents who were unhappy with the standard of Irish emerging from schools teaching the language as a single subject in that period. These parents were informed about the importance of early education and the success of Welsh-medium preschools in Wales. As a result of this promotion of parents’ aspirations and development of their agency, a number of Irish-medium preschools were founded in the late 1960s. Na Naíscoileanna Gaelacha (Irish Infant Schools Organisation) was established in 1974 to coordinate Irish-medium preschools with continued input from the Welsh Cylchoedd Meithrin movement regarding effective L2 pedagogical approaches. Significantly, the name was later changed to Na Naíonraí Gaelacha (Irish early-childhood-education/play-groups), removing reference to school to emphasize natural acquisition rather than formal language learning. Ó Murchú (2003) noted that the movement was well informed from the outset by evidence regarding first language acquisition, psychological development, innovations in L2 learning, and, critically, about advances in early years’ education that recognized the importance of play in children’s cognitive and social development. In recent decades, the number of homes where Irish is spoken to children has declined. Naíonraí and schools in the Gaeltacht (officially designated Irish speaking areas) that used to receive mainly heritage speakers (HSs) of Irish have in recent decades received growing numbers of children from English-dominant homes. There is long-standing evidence (Mac Donnacha et al. 2005) that HSs have been in a minority in many Gaeltacht classrooms for some time, and rising concern about deficiencies in the variety of Irish spoken by children in Gaeltacht schools (e.g., Mac Donnacha et al. 2005; Péterváry et al. 2014; Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2019; O’Toole and Hickey 2013, 2018). A significant feature of the Irish sociolinguistic context is the universality of bilingualism among Irish speakers even from an early age. The ubiquity and prestige of English results in high contact between the minority language and English: The declining number of home-generated Irish speakers, coupled with the rise in the number of school-generated L2 speakers of the language, has led to an observation of accelerated convergence with English in recent years (Péterváry et al. 2014). There is particular concern about signs of attenuation in the Irish spoken by younger HSs in Gaeltacht communities (see Ó Giollagáin et al. 2007; Péterváry et al. 2014; Hickey 1999a, 2001, 2007; Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2019). Ó Giollagáin (2014) argued that the qualified success of the revitalization movement in producing large numbers of L2 Irish speakers (of variable proficiency) has concealed the urgency now attaching to the decline of home-generated, fluent mother-tongue speakers of Irish. It must be acknowledged that Irish-medium education both inside and outside the Gaeltacht has had considerable success in producing high proficiency, not only in Irish, but also in English reading and in mathematics test scores (Gilleece et al. 2012). However, while Irish immersion schools aimed at HLLs show strong growth and positive outcomes in terms of Irish fluency, children leaving these schools show fossilized errors, evidence of convergence with English in their Irish grammar and

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phonetics, and high levels of code-switching. As a result, research (Ní Dhiorbháin 2014; Ó Duibhir et al. 2016) recommended that teachers adopt a “focus-on-form” approach (e.g., Lyster 2004) to improve L2 accuracy in immersion pupils. Ó Giollagáin (2014) warned that we are approaching a tipping point, given increasing numbers of learners who have significant grammatical, lexical, and phonetic deficiencies on the one hand, and declining numbers of HSs on the other hand, who also show attenuation in their Irish. Overall, it appears that the Irish of HLLs and HSs is exhibiting accelerated convergence with English, pointing to this endangered language now coming under unsustainable pressure. This has received media attention in recent years, particularly with regard to reports of a decline in the intergenerational transmission of Irish (e.g., Ó Drisceoil 2019; Ó Murchadha 2019).

Main Theoretical Concepts The experience of early years’ immersion in Ireland informs discussion of a number of theoretical issues discussed in later sections. The issues considered here are: heritage languages, heritage language immersion education in the early years, high quality early years’ education, family language policy and planning, languageconducive pedagogy, grouping of language learners and heritage language children, teacher agency, and parent agency and beliefs.

Heritage Languages Montrul (2016) included in her definition of Heritage Languages (HL) those “that are National Minority Languages: Irish in Ireland, Welsh in Wales, Basque in Spain and France, Catalan in Catalonia, Frisian in Netherlands and Germany” (p. 15). Valdés (2000) highlighted the variable proficiency among young HSs, noting that they include those “raised in a home where a language other than English is spoken, [those] who speak or merely understand the heritage language, and [those] who are to some degree bilingual in English and the HL” (p. 1) The term “Heritage (language) Speaker” (HS) serves to remind us of the commonalities of experience across some minority language groups, drawing attention to the needs of children raised as home-generated speakers of heritage languages, and helping to distinguish them from majority language children acquiring the HL in educational settings only, who are referred to as heritage language learners (HLLs).

Heritage Language (HL) Immersion in the Early Years Internationally, HL immersion settings encompass both those which operate only through a heritage language, and those where the HL is used in combination with the majority language(s); thus they include both monolingual and dual-language immersion (for discussion of the diversity of models see Hickey 2013; Hickey and de Mejia

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2015; Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). In Ireland, as in other countries such as Wales, the Basque Country, and Aoterea/New Zealand, monolingual heritage language preschools are part of language revitalization movements aiming to develop bilingualism through consolidating the heritage language in young HSs, and helping HLLs to acquire the language. The need to support threatened home languages arises because of erosion of domains of use, limited numbers of speakers outside the home, and variations in parental proficiency and input. These pressures can affect children’s cognitive and academic language proficiency, and preschool education through the HL offers important support to help HSs to develop their mother tongue and cognitive skills, and also to form peer networks through the HL, which help to prevent marginalization and low self-esteem.

High-Quality Early Years’ Education High-quality early years’ education is characterized as having clearly defined aims and objectives; a central role for play and talk; a developmentally appropriate curriculum for physical, social, emotional, and intellectual development with regular curriculum review; well-trained teachers working under knowledgeable supervision; small groups with a low pupil–teacher ratio; and meaningful participation by parents as educational partners (see Gammage 2006; Lim-Ratnam 2013).

Family Language Policy King et al. (2008) argued that instead of viewing family language policy (FLP) as a binary choice between languages, it should be seen as “a much more dynamic, muddled, and nuanced process” in need of further investigation. Since then there has been a burgeoning international literature on the topic (e.g., Schwartz 2010; King and Fogle 2013; Curdt-Christiansen 2018; Spolsky 2012a, b), examining families’ language ideologies and practices, including how children’s performance in each language changes dynamically in response to changes in input (De Houwer 2017).

Language-Conducive Pedagogical Strategies Edelenbos et al.’s (2006) review of effective early years’ pedagogical practice in teaching foreign languages identified factors that contribute to successful language learning in young learners, such as well-trained, resourced, and supported teachers with expertise in the target language and in language pedagogy. Language-conducive pedagogical strategies view every learning activity of the early years’ curriculum in terms of the opportunity it offers for language learning. Such a pedagogical approach sees classrooms as “contexts rich in multisensory activities with a wide array of semiotic resources and diverse teacher-child and peer interactions, encouraging the child’s engagement in. . ..language learning” (Schwartz 2018, p. 6). In such

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an approach, every routine of the normal day can offer valuable language learning opportunities if suitably adapted to a child’s language level.

Grouping Heritage Speakers (HSs) and Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) in Early Years’ Immersion This occurs where resources are limited, or where the numbers of HSs are too low or dispersed for dedicated provision. In some cases, grouping of HSs and HLLs together is deemed desirable for promoting community development. However, it poses particular challenges for teachers in early years’ immersion settings, and for staff training, as will be discussed in a later section here.

Teacher Agency and Beliefs Schwartz and Yagmur (2018) discussed the role of teachers, parents, and children as agents in early language education, adopting Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998, p. 971) definition that agency refers to “the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations.” Building on the proposals of Biesta and Tedder (2007), Biesta et al. (2015) proposed an ecological model of agency, in which agency is influenced by past experiences, future aspirations, and present circumstances, and all of these are mediated by individuals’ underlying beliefs. They argue that agency is something that people do, rather than something an individual possesses. Schwartz and Palviainen (2016) highlighted the significance of agency among teachers, parents, and children in early language education. Research on teacher agency has fostered closer examination of the explicit and implicit beliefs that are a component of teacher agency (e.g., Schwartz 2018; Schwartz and Deeb 2018; Priestley et al. 2015; Lambirth et al. 2019). Lyster and Tedick (2014) noted that everything that teachers do is filtered through their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions, as well as their prior experiences and knowledge. Research shows that teacher beliefs influence their pedagogical practices and their resistance to, or acceptance of, new approaches and teaching strategies (Arocena Egaña et al. 2015). Teacher beliefs are the bedrock on which pedagogy and curriculum implementation are built in high-quality early years’ immersion education.

Parent Agency and Beliefs An ecological perspective on language-conducive settings also requires recognition of the agency of parents (Schwartz 2018), and parents’ beliefs about immersion in the early years are a relevant consideration for research in this domain. Parents may choose immersion preschooling based on their belief that there are social, cultural, or economic benefits in exposing their child early to learning a language. Some parents may view early years’ immersion as a vital preparatory step toward the model of

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immersion primary education they have already chosen for their child. Other parents may view early years’ immersion as a relatively low-risk trial of immersion (see Hickey 1999b), to see how their child fares in this setting at a time that they see as relatively unacademic. Consideration of the Irish-medium preschool context requires consideration of theoretical issues that are highly relevant to other settings, such as heritage language immersion education in the early years, high quality early years’ education, family language policy and planning, language-conducive pedagogy, grouping of HSs and HLL children, teacher agency, and parent agency and beliefs.

Major Contributions Research will be presented here first regarding the outcomes of the Irish State policy as assessed in terms of Census data and educational practice. Following this there will be an analysis of the contribution of Irish-medium early years’ immersion in terms of its role in building L2 proficiency and support for immersion primary schooling for heritage language learners (HLLs), as well as providing vital support for the maintenance of Irish among heritage language speakers (HSs) in some districts. The current role and functioning of the Irish early years’ context are outlined before an examination of outcomes from this sector, and its contribution to informing discussion of issues such as the development of language-conducive pedagogical strategies in early years’ immersion. Related issues are the consideration of language change and concern about attenuation or incomplete acquisition in heritage language settings. Finally, the decline of intergenerational transmission of Irish will be considered in the context of the challenges this poses for the sector.

Research on Outcomes of Irish Language Policy Currently, Irish remains an obligatory subject for all pupils at primary and secondary level in the Republic of Ireland (although there is ongoing debate about this approach). Despite the significant state support for the language through the education system, it remains a minority language. Irish has become further marginalized as a result of its almost exclusive association (for many pupils) with school settings; nationally, only 1.7% (73,803) of the population (Census, 2016) reported that they speak Irish daily outside of school. This highlights the classic difficulty seen in minority language contexts of moving L2 learners toward becoming regular speakers of a language (see Cenoz and Gorter 2017). Census 2016 also confirmed that Gaeltacht areas have experienced rapid decline in their density of daily speakers: Only 21% of the Gaeltacht population described themselves as daily speakers of Irish, a drop of about 11% since 2011. This supports studies (Mac Donnacha et al. 2005; Ó Giollagáin et al. 2007) showing contraction in the communities where Irish is still spoken daily, with more than half of children entering schools in Gaeltacht areas now being English monolinguals. This means

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that HS children from Irish-speaking homes are, from the beginning of their education, in high contact with English speaking peers, even in officially Irish-medium settings. Thus, despite the growth nationally in the numbers claiming to have (some) ability in Irish, daily use of the language (outside of schools) is declining, and Irish is under severe pressure in its heartland. Given mounting concern regarding the decline in the numbers of HSs and daily Irish use, it is somewhat paradoxical that the language has also seen significant gains in official status in recent decades. The Official Languages Act (2003) put the state provision of public services through Irish on a statutory footing for the first time, aiming to increase public service provision through Irish. Recognition of Irish as an official language of the European Union in 2005 further increased its status. The Official Languages Act led to the establishment of an independent statutory office of Irish Language Commissioner (An Coimisinéir Teanga), operating as Ombudsman to monitor compliance with the Act, to make public services accessible through Irish. Despite such boosts, there is evidence of a decline in political commitment and service provision through Irish in a period of severe economic austerity. The Language Commissioner noted that “for every one step forward in the promotion of the Irish language in the public sector, there appear to have been two steps backwards” (An Coimisinéar Teanga 2013, p. 4). In 2014, the first Irish Language Commissioner resigned over government failures to promote the language and implement its use by public bodies, and the new appointee commented on the “peripheral position [of Irish] in society” (An Coimisinéar Teanga 2015, p. 5). Although there are clear problems with Irish language policy implementation, language planning has recently become a growth area, given the requirement that Gaeltacht communities develop language plans to access supports. However, O’Rourke and Walsh (2020) queried the actual commitment of state bodies to Irish and were pessimistic regarding the likely success of these community planning efforts with modest resources. The “20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010– 2030” (Government of Ireland 2010) set out ambitious objectives to treble the number who speak Irish daily outside of the education system (from 83,000 to 250,000), and to increase by 25% the numbers speaking Irish daily in the Gaeltacht, targeting areas for action in education, legislation, and status. Significantly, it includes measures to support home use of Irish, both within and outside the Gaeltacht, and changes to educational policy in the Gaeltacht, with initiatives to offer more support in Gaeltacht schools for HSs from homes where Irish is spoken. Such initiatives require training and resources, some of which are currently being put into place, but it is not possible yet to assess how effective they will be in halting the decline of Irish in the Gaeltacht. These areas have seen rapid social change, along with the rest of the country, and such changes can have a significant impact on childrearing practices, with negative consequences for heritage language transmission. For example, as the proportion of women who work outside of the home has risen even in rural areas, childcare provision has needed to expand to offer crèche facilities and after-school care. However, there are difficulties in finding trained staff with Irish proficiency for such facilities even in Gaeltacht areas in order to support parents raising children as Irish speakers.

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Current Role and Functioning of Irish-Medium Preschools (Naíonraí) Currently, the naíonraí are coordinated by two different bodies, depending on their location. Naíonraí in English-speaking areas are coordinated by Gaeloideachas, the coordinating body for Irish-medium schools, and they report data from 160 naíonraí serving 4980 children in such areas (Gaeloideachas 2020). Among these children, they note that 3% come from Irish-speaking homes outside the Gaeltacht, 94% from English-only homes, and 3% (140) have special educational needs. In Gaeltacht (officially Irish-speaking) areas, naíonraí are coordinated by Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta [Association of Gaeltacht Naíonraí], who reported another 75 naíonraí serving approximately 1,200 children in Gaeltacht areas in 2016/2017 (personal communication, Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta). Regardless of location, the naíonraí adopt a total immersion approach whereby a Stiúrthóir (Leader) engages children in stimulating age-appropriate and enjoyable tasks through the medium of Irish. They emphasize the importance of learning through play and of acquiring the target language through context based learning. Naíonraí are required to meet national Early Years’ Education regulations. This includes the implementation of the national curriculum for early years’ education entitled Aistear: Early Childhood Curriculum Framework (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2009) which was designed to be used in the range of early childhood settings including children’s own homes, with private childminders, in full and part-time day-care settings, and sessional services, including Irish-medium preschools, as well as the infant classes catering for 4- to 6-year-olds in primary schools. The Aistear curriculum highlights the critical role of play, relationships, and language for young children’s learning and aims to promote strong foundations and seamless progression from home, crèche, or preschool to school, through implicit and explicit links to the primary school curriculum. The values of the Aistear curriculum framework are much in accordance with the values of the naíonraí, but it is important that its implementation should allow some adaptation in these heritage language immersion preschools to cater for diverse proficiency among HLLs and HSs. A significant challenge regarding adoption of a single national curriculum is that it is not clear that it allows for implementation in some settings through children’s L2, or through an L1 with restricted domains of use. Responding appropriately to the diverse needs of HSs and HLLs requires the development of specialist modules on language enrichment during teacher education, adapted curricula, and work organization, as well as extra resources. It appears to be particularly important in these settings to engage in pedagogical adaptation in order to maximize differentiated input and a balance of individual play, pair work, and small/large group activities (Hickey 2001; Mhic Mhathúna and de Siún 2015). Overall, for parents who have chosen to raise their child as a HL speaker, immersion preschools offer important support for their family language plan (Schwartz 2018; Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). For majority-language parents interested in promoting their child’s bilingualism, immersion preschools offer

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the opportunity to see how their child responds to immersion education. Positive experience of immersion in preschool helps to grow the numbers choosing immersion primary schooling, thereby expanding demand for immersion education.

Evaluation of Outcomes from Irish-Medium Preschooling A national evaluation of outcomes from the naíonraí was carried out by Hickey (1997), who collected data from a representative sample of 225 children attending naíonraí in both English- and Irish-speaking districts. These 3–4 year olds were individually tested using child-friendly criterion-referenced tests based on the language objectives of experienced naíonra personnel regarding expected levels of Irish comprehension and production, whereby it was judged that a success rate of 75% on each test indicated mastery of the stated language objectives, and a success rate of 40% was deemed to show minimal progress toward the stated language objectives (see Harris 1984). After attending for less than a year, almost all children in naíonraí were able to answer at least 40% of the comprehension questions correctly, showing progress in this early years setting. Significant differences between children’s achievement reflected differences in their exposure to Irish: All of the children from Irish-speaking homes reached mastery levels (75% correct), compared to over half (54%) of the children from homes where English and Irish were spoken, and only one-third (35%) of the children from English-only homes reached mastery on the production tests, but 96% made at least minimal progress in Irish comprehension. Given that production tends to lag behind comprehension in the early stages of acquisition, it was found that the production scores were more discriminating: half (53%) of children from English-only homes, and two-thirds (67%) of those from Irish-English homes made at least minimal progress (40% correct), while almost three-quarters (72%) of the children from Irish-only homes reached mastery level. These results point to significant development in children’s Irish comprehension and production in the naíonraí, but insightful interpretation of their progress must be informed by data on their exposure to the target language at home. The evaluation showed that ab initio L2 learners in naíonraí gained mainly in terms of their comprehension of the language, with some lower levels of production, whereas children who have at least some home exposure showed greater gains in productive ability (Hickey 1997, 2001). The dissemination of these results highlighted the need to raise parents’ awareness that effective language learning takes time, in order to encourage them to choose Irish-medium primary and secondary schooling for their children. Conversely, the recognition of the valuable role of the naíonraí (as discussed by Ó Duibhir 2018) was evident in the requirement by most Irish-medium primary schools that prospective pupils from Englishspeaking homes attended a naíonra before entry; however, recent national changes regulating school enrollment in the interests of social equity now pose difficulties for such requirements.

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Parents and Early Immersion: The Impact on Home Language Use Schwartz (2018) emphasized the importance of early years’ education as the first systematic experience transitioning from home to the wider social environment. An ecological perspective on language-conducive settings also requires recognition of parents’ agency. Parents may opt for immersion preschooling based on their belief that there are social, cognitive, cultural, or economic benefits in exposing their child early to learning a language. However, as Schwartz (2018, p. 3) argued (citing evidence from Kersten 2014), exposure to the target language in the educational domain alone is likely to produce outcomes that fall short of parents’ expectations. Such inflated expectations may be based on commonsense (or “folklinguistic”) beliefs about the naturalness of young children’s language learning, which confuse ease of acquisition with speed. It is therefore of great importance that the early years’ sector informs and educates parents about what to expect regarding their children’s progress and the vital role that they play in actively supporting their child’s learning. Hickey’s (1997) national evaluation of naíonraí collected data from 1,807 parents and identified some differences in their social profile and Irish proficiency compared to contemporaneous data on parents with one or more child aged 4 years or less. Both fathers and mothers of children in naíonraí were significantly more likely to have higher occupational status than was predicted from the general parent population at the time, and almost twice as many had a third level qualification than the general population of parents of preschool children. Thus, highly educated parents were significantly better represented among the parents of children in naíonraí than in the general population of parents. Nevertheless, it was also the case that about one-third of fathers and one-quarter of mothers of children in naíonraí had the lowest educational qualification, while another 5% of each had no qualification later than primary school. Thus, it is important for early heritage language immersion programs to recognize that members of the parent body may have different motivations and resources and need outreach that is tailored to subgroups of parents, rather than treating them as a homogenous group (see Kavanagh and Hickey 2013 regarding primary school immersion parents). Looking at the Irish proficiency of parents choosing Irish-medium preschooling, Hickey (1997) found that a higher proportion of naíonra parents had moderate to good Irish ability than a sample of adults from the general population with a similar age distribution1. Nevertheless, over 80% of naíonra parents living in Englishspeaking areas and 40% of naíonra parents living in Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) areas still reported that they had no Irish or only very weak ability. This shows that even parents who are not themselves proficient in the language see the experience of early immersion as worthwhile for their child in terms of maintaining this endangered heritage language, and this pattern has been seen also among the parent body of Irish-immersion primary schools (Ó Duibhir 2018; Kavanagh and Hickey 2013). To sum up, while it appeared that choice of early Irish immersion is linked with high

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Ó Riagáin, special tabulations from ITÉ 1993 Survey of Attitudes to Irish.

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educational and occupational parental status (although not exclusively), it did not appear to be as strongly linked to parents’ own Irish ability, since the majority of parents were not proficient in Irish. It was noteworthy that parents reported increased use of the HL at home during their child’s attendance at naíonraí (Hickey 1999b), benefitting from teachers encouraging and modeling ways to support language learning. Surveys and interviews with parents in Irish-medium early years settings showed that early years’ education offers a unique opportunity to shape educational partnership with parents in heritage language contexts. Kavanagh and Hickey (2013) identified the challenges to improving parental involvement in immersion and the need to help parents to construct their role in supporting their child’s education particularly when they have limited HL proficiency. They noted that many immersion parents need practical guidance regarding how to support their child’s language and learning across subject areas, if this opportunity to build a real educational partnership in the early phase of their child’s education is to be optimized. The contribution of such engagement with parents is also seen in Ciriza’s (2019) study of parents in Karmelo Ikastola in the Basque Country, where parents with low proficiency in Basque were found to benefit from information on resources and techniques from the Basque-medium school that helped them to normalize use of the HL outside of the classroom.

Pedagogical Strategies in Early Years’ Immersion and Teacher Beliefs Edelenbos et al.’s (2006) review of effective pedagogical practice in teaching foreign languages to young learners noted the critical importance of well-trained teachers with expertise both in the target language and in language pedagogy, with adequate resources and supports. Unfortunately, assumptions about the “naturalness” of young children’s language learning can lead to underestimating the need for fluent, well-trained early years' teachers with understanding of the role of play and talk in early education, and specialist knowledge of language pedagogy. An adequate response to the needs of heritage language speakers and learners requires the development of appropriate teacher education, curricula, and work organization. The experience of the Irish early years context contributes to the discussion of theoretical issues such as the development of language-conducive pedagogical strategies in early years’ immersion. The delivery of high-quality early years’ education to preschool heritage language learners poses particular challenges for teachers charged with promoting social, cognitive, and physical development through a language that many of these young children are only beginning to acquire. Providing a language-conducive context requires specialist teacher preparation to select pedagogical strategies to support learners appropriately using a repertoire of mime and gestural supports as well as linguistic adaptation and elicitation. Mhic Mhathúna (2008) carried out an ethnographic study of pedagogical strategies in a Dublin naíonra catering mainly for HLLs, looking at the impact of different types of input to children. She demonstrated that the teacher’s use of story-telling was a particularly effective method of promoting children’s Irish acquisition over a

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6-month period. She found that repeated reading of the same stories helped HLL children to acquire formulas and formulaic frames (see Hickey 1993) which offer learners the potential for later segmentation and analysis. A significant pedagogical benefit was noted when the teacher elicited children’s use of the phrases from stories during routines such as snack-time, preventing fossilization and promoting transference of these formulas into productive use. Mhic Mhathúna found that it was children who had some exposure to Irish at home and experience of being read to in Irish who benefited most from Irish input in the naíonraí, showing the value of parental support. Teacher beliefs about the relative needs of different learners can influence their level of pedagogical adaptation, curriculum implementation, and discourse strategies (Lyster and Tedick 2014). Hickey (2001, 2016) found that it was a strongly-held belief among teachers in naíonraí that the HLL children who were just beginning to acquire the target language had more urgent language needs than heritage speakers in the group. As a result, input was tailored to the beginners’ language level, without differentiation for heritage speakers in the same class. Instead of giving corrective feedback to HS children producing grammatical errors or showing gaps in their Irish vocabulary, teachers tended not to offer feedback, and instead offered simplified input that was more suited to beginner language learners. Lyster and Mori (2006) showed that any type of corrective feedback is more effective than no feedback, and that the most common feedback type is a recast of the child’s error. However, as Thomas et al. (2014) argued, recasts are not enough and run the risk that they may even be interpreted as accepting the error. Instead, teachers need to be aware that young HSs need more appropriate feedback such as a prompt that pushes them to actively self-repair, and a recast to help to focus their attention on reformulating their error. Hickey et al. (2014) explored how teacher beliefs impact on teachers’ target language use in a study of Welsh-medium preschools (cylchoedd). As with naíonraí in Gaeltacht areas, Welsh-medium Cylchoedd Meithrin in some areas of Wales are attended by both HLLs and HSs. Some of the teachers of these groups reported their belief that a total immersion approach would cause discomfort to young language learners, and as a result they normalized regular English translation rather than adhering to the total immersion approach. More experienced Welsh-immersion teachers disputed the need for frequent translation, arguing that it is neither necessary to children’s comfort nor conducive to their L2 learning and also has the disadvantage of exposing the minority HSs to English in the Welsh-medium setting (Hickey, Lewis and Baker 2014). Teacher beliefs also affect how a group is organized. Sheets and Hollins (1999) noted that allowing children to work in same-language or same-ethnic groupings brings social and cognitive advantages, as well as self-empowerment. However, they argued that, whereas majority-language children tend to be grouped together in the classroom, minority language children are often dispersed, to serve as “cultural carriers,” rather than having their own needs addressed. Similarly, interviews with teachers in naíonraí (Hickey 2001) indicated a tendency to view the Irish HSs as “carriers” of the language to the HLLs; this belief resulted in fewer opportunities

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being offered to heritage speakers to interact with other fluent HSs, which, in turn, led to a drop in Irish output from them, rather than them modeling the language to learners. In effect, teachers’ beliefs that dispersing the young HSs as “mini-teachers” among groups of HLLs would help the latter to acquire the language actually contributed to the HS children using more English in the naíonraí. Research on Irish in education in Ireland allows consideration of revitalization efforts that are well established and supported in the state educational system, but which struggle to get most learners past low or moderate stages of proficiency, while the number of HSs decline rapidly. Early years’ immersion in naíonraí has played an important role in offering preschool Irish-medium education to HLL children from English-speaking homes, and also in helping language maintenance for heritage speakers of Irish. Research shows that parents tend to increase their use of the heritage language at home to support their child’s language learning, and that many parents need practical guidance from teachers on how to be active educational partners in immersion education. Despite the important role it plays, this sector is under-funded compared to immersion primary schooling, and teachers’ expertise in early years’ pedagogy is undervalued. Teachers in this sector would benefit from greater job security and recognition, and specialist training opportunities.

New Projects There are recognized challenges in assessing bilingual children, but assessment becomes even more challenging when a child speaks a heritage language with limited domains of use and is exposed to varieties diverging significantly from the standard language. The limited availability of standardized tests in many minority languages poses difficulties in identifying children at risk of language impairment or delay, since bilingual children should be assessed in both of their languages (O’Toole and Hickey 2013). Even when appropriate tests are available in both/all of the languages spoken by a child, they tend not to recognize that a bilingual child’s linguistic knowledge is affected by the quality and quantity of exposure to each language. Test development in Irish is an ongoing project addressing this need: an Irish-English version of the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory allows young bilingual children’s early acquisition of Irish and English to be tracked and compared with studies using equivalent measures in other languages (e.g., O’Toole et al. 2018). Other tests are currently being developed for Irish (e.g. O’Toole at al. 2020) and tests based on the LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT), a cross linguistic tool of vocabulary assessment, to address some of the difficulties noted where measures are lacking (Müller et al. 2019). Young heritage speakers face challenges that can impede their acquisition of complex structures. Irish has a highly opaque gender system marked by plurifunctional inflections, and young HSs experience variability in the grammatical consistency of adult input in Irish as well as early exposure to English, a language which does not mark grammatical gender. Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey (2019) developed new measures of receptive and productive use of Irish grammatical

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gender to test 306 Gaeltacht children aged 6–12 from homes which were Irishdominant, bilingual, or English-dominant. While home language was the strongest predictor of accuracy in Irish gender assignment and agreement, overall levels of accuracy were very low, even among children from Irish-dominant homes, pointing to rapid change in everyday usage diverging from the standard language. Similarly, Müller et al. (2019), noting that a feature of Irish, the initial mutation system, is now used inconsistently by some young adult Irish heritage speakers, attempted to identify developmental norms for children’s declining usage of initial mutations. The implications of these significant changes in current spoken Irish among Gaeltacht speakers need to be discussed among educators in terms of the need for enrichment and for support for heritage speakers and highlight the need to reconsider the status of new varieties of the language (Ó Murchadha and Ó hIfearnáin 2018). Recent studies also show the need to support parents toward family language planning that is more supportive of Irish. O’Toole and Hickey (2018) noted subtle shifts in parents’ input patterns over time that negatively affected young children’s HL vocabulary development. Recent research (Palviainen 2020; Curdt-Christiansen 2018) reconceptualizes FLP away from a focus on explicit planning in static family units, to explore dynamic changes over time as family members grow. In HL situations particularly, this needs to encompass family language policy based on unconscious decision-making: Gathercole and Thomas (2007) found that when parents are both from Welsh-speaking backgrounds, their decision to transmit Welsh to their child was likely to be an unconscious decision, whereas parents with non-native proficiency in one or both partners based such a strategy on explicit planning. New initiatives to support parents are in development under the 20-year strategy for Irish, but Ó Murchadha and Migge (2017) stressed the importance of offering parents horizontal support as well as top-down advice.

Critical Issues and Topics Some of the critical issues considered here include addressing more effectively the different needs of heritage speakers and heritage language learners in education programs, the harnessing of parental support for the intergenerational transmission of heritage languages, and the more effective promotion of all parents’ involvement as educational partners in immersion, even those with low proficiency in the target language.

Quality Provision for Early Years’ Heritage Language Immersion: Addressing Different Needs A survey of attitudes to Irish (Kantar Millward Brown 2018) showed continued strong support for Irish-medium education, with 78% of a nationally representative sample agreeing that every child should have access to Irish-medium schooling. While statistics are not available concerning demand for Irish-medium preschooling

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specifically, the Irish-immersion primary school sector continues to grow, with 145 Irish-medium primary schools in 2018/2019 serving almost 38,000 children (Gaeloideachas 2020); waiting lists show that the demand for Irish immersion for language learners continues to exceed supply. However, the situation of heritage speakers in Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) districts is less positive. Concerns based on a body of research in the last decade led to the development of a new Gaeltacht Education Policy (DES 2016) which recognizes the need to make appropriate provision for children being raised in Irish-speaking homes, with accredited Gaeltacht schools required to address the differentiated language needs of HSs and HLLs. This has led to a greater recognition of the needs of these HSs (Ó Duibhir and Ní Thuairisg 2019), but it is unclear whether sufficient resources and training will be available to cater for their needs. Most Gaeltacht schools are small with multigrade classes, and as with many Gaeltacht naíonraí, the children attending include those from Irish-only, bilingual, and English-only homes. The new Gaeltacht education policy affords greater recognition of the important role of the naíonraí in preparing children for Irish-medium schooling, and this recognition offers the promise of some welcome improvements in provision. Nevertheless, crucial distinctions between best practice in preschool and school must be remembered. A large-scale study (Osborn and Milbank 1987) of (Englishmedium) preschool settings in the UK showed better outcomes from preschools not located in primary schools that were more “home-like” than “school-like.” Hickey (1997) also showed higher levels of Irish achievement among children in smaller naíonraí operating in nonschool premises, and postulated that naíonraí based in primary schools might be operating in a more formal manner. These results were not due to differences in pupil-teacher ratio (PTR): it was noted both in the UK study and in Hickey (1997) that, even when the PTR of the larger school-based preschools was similar to that in smaller groups (through extra staffing), their outcomes were still less positive. It may be that factors such as higher noise-level in larger groups of preschoolers make it harder for children to attend to input in the target language, even when more adults are added to maintain the ratio. Thus, it is important that in implementing educational reforms in Gaeltacht areas, due recognition needs to be given to the distinct needs of the naíonra sector in terms of the ideal group-size, colocation, and pedagogical needs of an early years’ heritage language preschool. Seminal research on quality early years’ education showed that preschoolers benefit more from working in pairs and small groups than the larger class groups found in primary schools (Sylva et al. 1980). However, when the teacher is the main source of input in the target language, and/or when children who are heritage speakers have limited opportunities to speak that language to each other, consideration needs to be given to achieving a balance between different activities in order to maximize input. Hickey (2007) examined the language learning opportunities afforded by different types of grouping in the naíonraí, ranging from children playing alone, in pairs, in small groups of three or four, in larger groups of six or seven, and in the whole class group, and showed how the dynamics of each of these is altered when the leader/ teacher participates. Carrigo (2000) found that when Spanish-speaking and English-

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speaking children were together in an immersion setting, the Spanish-speaking children were significantly more likely to speak Spanish together when engaged in activities with other Spanish-speaking children, but much less likely to speak Spanish when they were mixing with English speakers. On the other hand, the English speakers maintained only a low use of Spanish with other children regardless of whether they were mainly Spanish or mainly English speakers. Similarly, Hickey (2001) showed that Irish HS children in naíonraí were influenced by the composition of their group: Where HLLs dominated, the HSs produced significantly less of the target language (their own home language) than when they were in groups with a majority of children from bilingual or Irish-only homes. The HLL children from English-speaking homes, on the other hand, were not influenced by the mix in the group, but maintained a fairly low level of output in the target language regardless of whether they were in groups dominated by HLLs or HSs. Grouping HSs and HLLs together always in preschool and school may impede the formation of peer-group networks of HS speakers using the language. Such an outcome was seen in a comprehensive linguistic survey of teenagers in the Gaeltacht by Ó Giollagáin et al. (2007). They found that by the teenage years, heritage speakers of Irish tend not to speak Irish even with similarly fluent peers. Thompson (2000) showed that peer networks among heritage language speakers help to prevent marginalization and low self-esteem as well as being a crucial link in language maintenance. However, such peer networks need to be promoted actively in endangered language contexts, and immersion preschools must give active consideration to maintaining young heritage speakers’ use of the language with each other, as well as supporting their (ongoing and incomplete) HL acquisition. Otherwise, despite the best efforts to teach a heritage language to young learners and support young heritage language speakers, where endangered languages are threatened by a highstatus majority language, situations of high contact such as the preschool may in fact resemble unofficial English submersion (Hickey 2001). Thus, it is vital that teacher education for such contexts accords equal importance to promoting HL use among young heritage speakers as it does to teaching heritage language learners. Delivery of pedagogically and linguistically appropriate provision in a minority language or through a child’s L2 poses significant challenges and requires teacher education and planning in order to integrate language teaching/enrichment effectively with the rest of the curriculum (Schwartz 2018; Hickey and de Mejia 2015). Björklund et al. (2014) stressed the importance of training to support high-quality teacher input in the target language in all contact time with children, regardless of whether the activity is explicitly didactic or routine caretaking. They argue that early years’ pedagogy must be adapted to provide the ideal input to children, so that teachers can verbalize actions or feelings that are relevant to what the young child is focused on in the immersion environment. Specific language plans, syllabi, and methodology need to be put in place for the needs of different learners, with due regard to promoting the use of the language among those already fluent. Good practice in heritage language early years’ immersion requires ongoing evaluation of children’s different needs, and teacher education and resourcing to identify and serve those needs appropriately.

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In conclusion, heritage language early years' settings need to consider the types of groups children are likely to experience over the course of their session, given the finding that young HSs are more likely to speak the target language if they are playing in a pair or small group with another HS than with one or several HLLs. The evidence also shows that HLLs benefit less from being mixed with heritage speakers than is often assumed, unless adults also participate in such groupings to support use of the target language. This consideration of group size and mix adds to the complexity in heritage language immersion preschools and requires specialist teacher education to ensure appropriate provision both for L2 learning and for effective HL maintenance and enrichment. When the majority of children in a group are in the initial stages of L2 learning, the teachers are the primary sources of target language input, particularly at the outset. Such learners need appropriate adult input and language scaffolding in order to acquire the language relevant to their activity when they are working alone, in pairs or in small groups (Mhic Mhathúna 2008) in an approach that recognizes the agency of children and teachers (Schwartz and Palviainen 2016). On the other hand, HS children can benefit from a different balance of activities, including activities such as story time with an adult offering challenging input to enrich the HS child’s language, as well as pair and small group activities with other HS peers. Because the heritage language is vulnerable to the ubiquity of the higher-status majority language, HS children need discreet support from teachers in interacting with other HS children, to promote their use of the HL. Such an approach is more likely to help them to establish a target-language-speaking network and to help them to continue to develop their HL proficiency as fully as possible in the early years’ setting.

Intergenerational Transmission Concern about declining intergenerational transmission of Irish in the home in Gaeltacht areas is not new (e.g., Hindley 1990), but there is now evidence showing that more Gaeltacht parents are opting to speak English in the home. Ó hIfearnáin (2007) argued that his data showed that the decisions made by Gaeltacht parents regarding their patterns of home language use were not always made in a “fully informed climate” (p. 527). He found that some Gaeltacht parents who were proficient in Irish attributed their decision to speak English at home with their children to a desire to ensure that their children “be bilingual” in English and Irish, with the assumption that they would acquire Irish in education contexts. They professed a desire for their children to be bilingual, while they themselves spoke only the majority language with them, the language that their own experience showed was more necessary in economic terms. In relying on education to promote bilingualism, they appeared unaware that a threatened HL requires more than school support to ensure children’s acquisition (Gathercole and Thomas 2009). Currently, Irish has limited domains of use for adults and children even in Gaeltacht areas and such erosion of domains of use, limited numbers of speakers outside the home, and variations in parental language proficiency and levels of input impact on children’s

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Irish acquisition (Péterváry et al. 2014), with consequences for their cognitive and academic development. Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey (2019) showed that HL children need targeted intervention in preschool and school to support their ongoing acquisition of the threatened language if “dominant language takeover” (Gathercole and Thomas 2009) is to be avoided. In particular, acquisition of the more complex aspects of morphosyntax requires supports for Irish-dominant families and the implementation of appropriate focus-on-form approaches (Ní Dhiorbháin 2014) developed for Gaeltacht schools. Some hope of improved provision is contained in recent initiatives to implement the new policy for education in the Gaeltacht (DES 2016). These offer somewhat more possibilities for the provision of language enrichment and targeted intervention for home-generated speakers of Irish, but it remains to be seen whether this will be realized. Such educational reform needs to be accompanied by enhanced provision of early family language support to Irishspeaking families (from child’s birth) and throughout the primary school years, in order to address children’s ongoing language needs, and to inform parents of the benefits of progressing acquisition of the minority language as far as possible before exposure to English begins. Furthermore, Gaeltacht parents who are proficient in Irish but currently choose to raise their children as English-speakers need more information to raise awareness that acquisition of the majority language is not at risk, whereas their children’s acquisition of the HL is likely to show significant effects of limited, inconsistent input, conferring fewer cognitive benefits of bilingualism. The Irish spoken by the current generation of HS speaker children diverges from the standard grammar (Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2019), and they are described as speaking a “posttraditional” Irish without due recognition that the input to them and conditions around them have also changed significantly. Instead of criticism, they need the differentiated language support too long overlooked by an education system that took home-generated heritage speakers for granted while prioritizing L2 Irish learners. Heritage language children such as those acquiring Irish in Irishdominant/bilingual homes now are in urgent need of coordinated action to enable their families and schools to provide the enriched input, literacy resources, and language supports throughout the school years to promote their linguistic and cognitive development, and to foster their identity and authority as Irish speakers (Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2018).

Future Research Directions Future research needs to consider the promotion of educational partnership with the parents of Irish speakers and learners, promotion of continuity between immersion preschools and primary schools, and enhanced support for educators in creating language-conducive contexts. Research also needs to continue to focus on teacher education in the provision of differentiated input that adequately serves language learning by all children, whether mother-tongue speakers of varying degrees of proficiency or L2 learners. The belated provision of specialist pre- and in-service

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education for teachers in Irish-medium primary schools in 2019 is a most welcome development, and it is vital that this sector promotes action research by teachers. Areas that urgently need to be addressed include the facilitation of home-school partnership in the Irish-medium sector, the promotion of Irish use by children beyond the school gates, and the formation of strong peer networks through the language. Turning to supporting Irish in the Gaeltacht, there is an urgent need for research on the implementation and evaluation of recent policy changes aimed at offering language enrichment and support to young heritage speakers of Irish. Some recent initiatives are designed to encourage and support parents in transmitting the language in the home, but these efforts may be “too little, too late.” The urgency of this topic is evident in recent commentaries in the Irish online paper Tuairisc about native-speaker parents choosing to raise their children as English-speakers while relying on the educational system to teach them Irish (Ó Drisceoil 2019; Ó Murchadha 2019). Exploration of more appropriate ways of empowering parents toward developing and pursuing an Irish family language plan is required in the Irish context. In particular, the connection between the home and the early years’ setting needs to be reviewed to help build a comprehensive community support package for families capable of transmitting the language, and ensuring that they know about such supports even before their children are born. Peer-led educational outreach is needed to raise parents’ awareness of the need to support the minority language in the home if they want their child to be a bilingual with high proficiency in both languages. Such outreach to parents will only be effective if the concerns expressed by parents about heritage Irish-speaking children’s hitherto unmet language needs (Ní Shéaghdha 2010) are adequately addressed by recent educational reforms. Improved support for parents that recognizes the role of parent and child agency in particular is vital in order to arrest the decline of Irish as a language of the home in Gaeltacht areas, and to increase use of Irish outside of educational settings in the rest of the country. Ongoing research that includes children’s voice in discussions of FLP (Smith-Christmas 2020) enables children to be seen as active participants whose reactions and attitudes shape the family FLP. It would also be beneficial to include the grandparent generation in efforts to support FLP, either in their role as carers for children, or through research exploring the feasibility of involving fluent grandparents in naíonraí as has been studied in the kohanga reo in New Zealand (see, e.g., Mutu 2005). Finally, there is a tendency for concerns about endangered languages to lead to a focus on oral language skills, and this can obscure the importance of promoting literacy in the language, since literacy plays a vital part in promoting vocabulary and language enrichment. High levels of literacy in the heritage language contribute to a greater sense of ownership and authority in the language (Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2018); thus it is important to ensure that literacy-supportive activities in Irish begin in the home and continue to be offered in the naíonra, where children are given rich and satisfying experiences of books to empower them to become active readers in Irish. This is particularly relevant in light of the evidence that teaching Irish reading poses significant challenges given its different orthography

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(see Stenson and Hickey 2016) and currently shows poor outcomes in terms of reading habits. Stenson and Hickey (2019) explored why teachers urgently need more appropriate pre- and in-service education in how to teach Irish orthography, as well as education regarding the benefits of building authentic literacy activities into heritage language learning for all learners. Turning to other groups of learners, future research will need to continue to explore the teaching and learning of Irish among the Irish diaspora abroad, and among migrants to Ireland. Ireland has much longer experience of emigration than immigration, and both policy and practice in the teaching of Irish must adapt to a multiethnic state, as McCubbin (2010) argued, in discussing the contested “ownership” of Irish among indigenous and nonindigenous speakers and learners. Little and Kirwan (2019) examined how one Dublin primary school approached effective teaching of English and Irish to a large and multiethnic group, while also seeking to support their home languages. Devine (2011) discussed the views of migrant children regarding learning Irish as their third language in English-medium schools, while Kabanoff (2012) studied the motivation and experience of migrants learning Irish in Dublin, and how those efforts were viewed by the indigenous population. Research on the teaching and learning of Irish among different groups of migrants, as well as among the Irish diaspora abroad, will help understand the place of Irish in identity formation and contribute to the provision of learning materials for different groups of learners.

Conclusions Irish has seen waves of revitalization efforts over the last century, and the Irishmedium preschools known as naíonraí have played – and continue to play – an important role in those efforts. For the majority of children raised in Englishspeaking homes, Irish-medium education in preschool and school offers an opportunity to acquire a higher level of proficiency in Irish than in mainstream schools teaching it as a single subject. Currently, Irish has limited domains of use for adults and children even in Gaeltacht areas, and children raised as Irish speakers need help to support their heritage language. Until recently, despite the efforts of parents raising their children with Irish as the primary language of the home, the unique needs of children from Irish-dominant and bilingual homes have been largely unrecognized by national entities or have been deemed less urgent than those of L2 learners of Irish. Recent changes in Gaeltacht school policy offer the chance to provide better language enrichment and targeted intervention for home-generated speakers of Irish than had been available heretofore. Such educational reform needs to be accompanied by language planning discussions in communities that aim to deepen and extend Gaeltacht parents’ understanding of bilingualism in a minority language context. Ideally, this would be accompanied by enhanced provision of systematic and specific family language support to Irish-speaking families from birth and throughout the primary school years, in order to address these children’s particular and ongoing language needs and to inform parents of the benefits of

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progressing and consolidating acquisition of the minority language as far as possible in the early years. Furthermore, Gaeltacht parents who are proficient in Irish but currently choose to raise their children in English-dominant homes need more support and information on which to base their family language planning, to develop greater awareness among this group that acquisition of the majority language is not at risk, whereas the outcomes in terms of their children’s proficiency in the minority language are likely to be significantly lower, conferring fewer cognitive benefits of bilingualism. Most parents in Ireland raise their children as English speakers, but there is still strong interest in Irish-medium preschooling and schooling. The naíonraí have played a vital role in helping to build parents’ interest in immersion education, inducting generations of parents into the Irish-medium sector, forming a strong lobby in support of the language and helping to produce a constant supply of potential “new” speakers. The success of Irish-medium preschool and primary education would be enhanced by more effective harnessing of parents’ support for the language to shape them as educational partners who are empowered to take a more active role in supporting the language in the home, rather than “leaving it to the teachers.” Only a fuller appreciation among other educators, parents, and educational planners of the value of providing high-quality, effective early years’ education through Irish, in its varied forms and formats, will lead to the level of recognition and investment that this sector needs for optimal future development.

Cross References ▶ Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education

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Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland

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Karita Ma˚rd-Miettinen, Stephanie Arnott, and Marie-Jose´e Vignola

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Immersion in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Immersion in Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diversity in the Early Immersion Learner Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supporting Early Immersion Learners with Learning Exceptionalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Immersion Teacher Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter discusses early immersion in a minority language in two bilingual countries, Canada and Finland. In Canada, immersion in the minority language, French, has been implemented since the mid-1960s and Finland introduced

K. Mård-Miettinen (*) Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: kahamard@jyu.fi S. Arnott · M.-J. Vignola Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_12

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immersion in Swedish in the mid-1980s. As the core features of immersion education evolve in tandem with second language education theorizing (particularly as it relates to the interdependence and hybridity between and within languages), so too does the need to revisit the relevance of these core features across different contexts. In this vein, this chapter compares how changing sociopolitical realities in the two contexts have influenced program development in relation to three emergent areas: learner diversity, learning exceptionalities, and teacher training. It further highlights critical points of convergence and divergence in program development in the two contexts, showing that Canada and Finland have contributed to the field of early language education with complementary research findings related to a common guiding principle in both contexts – immersion for all. The two contexts, thus, have much to learn from one another in order to reach collective gains. The chapter ends with a call for ethnographic research to decipher how relevant policy statements are put into practice in early years classrooms, as well as continued empirical attention to the evolving reconceptualization of the prototypical immersion learner and teacher. Such consideration will work to optimize the universal access to immersion that is desired in Canada, Finland, and other minority language immersion contexts. Keywords

Early immersion education · Core program features · Linguistic diversity · Cultural diversity · Learning exceptionalities · Immersion teacher training

Introduction Immersion education is a form of bilingual education that aims for learners to achieve additive bilingualism and biliteracy, that is, learning a second language while maintaining the first language (Lambert 1975; Fortune and Tedick 2008). Fortune and Tedick (2008) divide immersion education programs into three branches or program types: one-way immersion, two-way (dual) immersion, and indigenous immersion. One-way immersion typically targets children who are dominant in a majority language and who want to learn a foreign or a second language through immersion. Conversely, two-way (dual) language immersion is for majority and minority language children who want to learn each other’s languages. Indigenous immersion programs enroll children with Indigenous heritage with the goal of revitalizing their endangered languages and cultures. This chapter compares two programs of one-way second language immersion – early French immersion (FI) in Canada and early Swedish immersion (SI) in Finland. We begin with a brief description of the history of immersion programming in each context. Then, we move to outlining the main theoretical concepts associated with each early immersion program, leading to a discussion of the similar and different ways in which early immersion has evolved amidst changing socio-political realities in both contexts. Finally, the chapter addresses some critical issues and topics where the two contexts could learn from each other.

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Early Immersion in Canada French immersion programming began in the province of Quebec (Canada) more than 50 years ago. Canada is a country with two official languages (English and French), both allocated equal status throughout the federal administration and Canadian society (see Government of Canada 2005). French is often considered a minority language in terms of numbers of speakers throughout the country (i.e., 10.4 million Canadians speak French compared to 30 million who speak English – see Statistics Canada 2018a). In Canada, the majority Francophone community is associated with the province of Quebec, while minority Francophone communities are found in other provinces and territories throughout Canada. FI is a type of French as a Second Language (FSL) program where half or more of the subjects (mathematics, social sciences, visual arts, etc.) are taught in French to learners for whom French is not a first language (L1). Throughout the chapter, we distinguish between research focusing exclusively on FI and findings from studies of FSL programs that included FI stakeholders. In the 1960s, the province of Quebec was undergoing significant changes, one of which was the increasingly important place occupied by French in sectors once dominated by English. This created a socio-political environment conducive to the development of more intense FSL programming. English-speaking parents concerned about these societal changes and their children’s disappointing results in the regular FSL program (i.e., Core French [CF] – daily 20–40 min classes) decided to take action by asking their school board to have their children taught French differently. FI was created in response to the disappointment of many English-speaking parents living in an environment where French was a majority language. According to these parents, the performance of their children enrolled in CF programs was not sufficient enough to integrate effectively into Quebec society in general and eventually into the labor market. And so, in 1965, the first early years FI class in Canada was created in a kindergarten class (children of ages 4–5) – an experimental project conducted under the supervision of university researchers (Lambert and Tucker 1972). Since then, FI has rapidly spread to other areas of Canada where French is a minority language (unlike in Quebec, where French is the majority language). At present, FI programs are offered in all Canadian provinces and territories (except Nunavut) in a context where English is the majority language. Enrollment in FI is on the rise – at present, over 11% of all eligible Canadian children are registered in the program (CPF 2018). Furthermore, FI is no longer aimed only at children whose L1 is English; in principle, it is open to all students regardless of their L1. FI formats vary across Canada – it can be one-way total immersion (if all subjects are offered in French – which was the case when FI first started in Quebec) or oneway partial immersion (if some subjects are taught in French). The age when children begin immersion also varies – “early immersion” begins in kindergarten (ages 4–5 years old), with learners accumulating up to 7000 h of French by the end of high school, whereas “middle immersion” designates a Grade 4 start (ages 9–10 years old), with students accumulating up to 5000 h of French by the end of high school. Finally, “late immersion” denotes a Grade 6 or 7 start (ages 11–13 years old) and an accumulation of approximately 3500 h by the end of high school.

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FI in Canada has been the subject of much research since its inception in 1965 and several studies have demonstrated the linguistic, academic, and cognitive benefits (Bournot-Trites and Reeder 2001; Lazaruk 2007; Turnbull et al. 2001). It has been characterized as a “quiet language revolution” (Stern 1984, p. 506) and an innovative and successful way of learning FSL. While the studies above link to FI programming more broadly, it is still relevant to discuss early immersion programming specifically. In line with the focus of this book on early years’ education, we have purposefully included research on the early FI program. Remaining references across different FI formats are integral to our overall analysis of early immersion programming in both contexts. In summary, more and more Canadian school boards are offering FI as an option for children to learn French in contexts where it holds both official- and minoritylanguage status. This immersion language education program format has been evolving in Canada, while also being adopted in other language contexts, such as Finland, which we describe in more detail below.

Early Immersion in Finland In 1987, immersion education was introduced in Finland. Like in Canada, sociolinguistic reasons were fundamental to its introduction. Finland is a country with two official languages (Finnish and Swedish), both with equal status (Constitution of Finland, 731/1999); however, Swedish is often considered a minority language in terms of numbers of speakers only being 5.2% of the total population in the country (Official Statistics of Finland 2019). The use of the two languages in the Finnish society includes linguistically different geographical areas where the balance between the majority and minority language varies regionally. The Finnish-Swedish bilingual municipalities are situated in the western and southern coastal areas of Finland and many of these municipalities offer Swedish immersion (SI) programs for Finnish-speakers. A recent survey on immersion education shows that SI has remained an educational program offered only in these bilingual municipalities (Sjöberg et al. 2018). It is worth nothing that while SI is the focus of this chapter as it is the main immersion program in Finland, some Swedish-dominant municipalities also offer Finnish immersion for Swedish-speakers. Immersion in the three Sami languages spoken in Finland (most often labeled “language nests”) is also offered in the northern part of Finland for language revitalization purposes (Sjöberg et al. 2018; Äärelä 2016). In an effort to optimize the bilingualism of Finland in educational contexts in the late 1980s, Professor Christer Laurén (Professor of Swedish at the University of Vaasa) initiated the importing of Canadian immersion to Finland. Prior to that time, Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking children were educated monolingually in separate schools. Laurén pushed for the implementation of immersion in his own bilingual municipality and his initiative was supported by local politicians and parents. Later on, SI programs spread to other bilingual municipalities in Finland at the particular urging of parent advocates looking to maximize early Swedish

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learning opportunities beyond what regular language arts teaching was providing. These parents felt that the children needed to know both languages well, particularly for their future studies and the job market (Björklund et al. 2014). Today, SI is offered in 7% of all municipalities, most of which are bigger cities that populate about 60% of inhabitants in Finland and which all are bilingual municipalities. SI has approximately 4500 students, representing about 0.5% of the total eligible student population; in some specific municipalities, immersion students make up 10–50% of the student population (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011; Sjöberg et al. 2018). In many municipalities, the demand for immersion is greater than the supply. Research has shown that SI is a program that renders good results, both in terms of multilingual skills, content learning, and multilingual awareness, as will be shown in this chapter (Björklund et al. 2007; Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011). The immersion model implemented in Finland is one-way early total immersion that starts with 100% of instruction time in Swedish, beginning in preprimary education (ages 3–6 years old). In primary school (Grades 1–6; ages 7–12 years old), Finnish is gradually introduced from Grade 1 onward, reaching a proportion of 50% of instructional time by the end of Grade 9 (14–15 years old). Starting in Grade 2 (ages 7–8 years old), children are exposed to at least one additional foreign language (e.g., Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011). Notably, in Finland, the preprimary years of immersion have received considerable attention among researchers (especially in the early 2000s) to describe and develop preprimary pedagogy in SI. This research focus has resulted in several studies highlighting linguistic and pedagogical issues important in preprimary SI (e.g., the quality of strategies implemented to elicit consistent student use of the target language). Also, connections between research and in-service teacher training have led to several action-research projects completed by preprimary immersion staff (e.g., Björklund et al. 2005; Ikäheimo et al. 2010). Findings from both sources have contributed considerably to the improved quality of preprimary SI, resulting in Finnish immersion children entering primary school SI with strong language skills (Björklund et al. 2014). In summary, research results pointing toward enhanced multilingual awareness and good multilingual skills from an early age have made SI programs popular in the bilingual parts of Finland where early Swedish learning opportunities are important for children belonging to the Finnish-speaking majority. The extent to which this compares with FI in Canada will be discussed below, after identifying the main theoretical concepts guiding our analysis of early immersion programming in both contexts.

Main Theoretical Concepts Over 20 years ago, Swain and Johnson (1997) articulated a list of eight core features distinguishing immersion programs from all other bilingual education models. These characteristics were meant to denote the uniqueness of an immersion program’s overall objective (i.e., additive bilingualism), context (i.e., L2 exposure confined to the

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classroom; classroom culture is that of the local L1 community), anticipated pedagogy (i.e., L2 as the medium of instruction; overt support for students’ L1), curriculum design (i.e., immersion curriculum parallels local L1 curriculum), and profiles of typical teachers (i.e., proficient in students’ L1 and the L2) and students (i.e., similar/limited levels of L2 proficiency upon entrance to the program). While several features have recognizable links to existing theory on second language acquisition, including maximized use of the target language (e.g., Krashen 1981; Krashen and Terrell 1983) and additive bilingualism (Lambert 1975), others are more explicitly linked to the socio-political context in which immersion programs are implemented, including the status of the target language being acquired in the immediate community and the prototypical teachers and students implicated in its implementation. In 2005, Swain and Lapkin revisited the overall integrity of these core features in light of the changing Canadian FI student population in particular, concluding that while some remain true, “others need to change to reflect the changing demographic of large cities in North America and in multilingual, multiethnic nature of many immersion programs” (p. 181). In response, they advocated for the reconsideration of the original, uniform portrait of the FI learner as being a monolingual anglophone. Instead, they argued that the core features of any immersion program must acknowledge that the immersion language might not be students’ L2 (but rather their third or fourth language), and consequently, that the classroom culture and pedagogy must recognize immersion students’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and more overtly support the development of their home languages (and not just the language of schooling). Certainly, these changes are supported by recent developments in second language education theorizing that advocate for more interdependence and hybridity between and within languages (e.g., Canarajah 2011; García 2009). Still, while these types of changes to the core features of FI remain relevant in the Canadian context, consideration of their applicability to the Finnish SI context is what motivated the following discussion of other areas where the two countries converge and diverge around immersion program delivery and overall pedagogy, particularly in the early immersion context. In the sections that follow, we outline three central areas where early immersion education has changed – or needs to change – in order to respond to changing sociolinguistic and socio-political realities in both contexts.

Major Contributions The following sections elaborate on the realities across three specific areas of FI and SI (i.e., diversity in the immersion learner population; supporting immersion learners with learning exceptionalities; and immersion teacher training) to offer an overview of how socio-political realities in Canada and Finland present themselves in similar and different ways across both minority language early immersion education systems. Figure 1 provides a snapshot of the main similarities and differences that will be discussed in more detail in this chapter.

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Fig. 1 Comparative Thematic Map on main similarities and differences across French immersion in Canada and Swedish immersion in Finland concerning learner diversity, learning exceptionalities, and immersion teacher training

Diversity in the Early Immersion Learner Population Differing rates of growth in learner diversity in Canada and Finland have led to divergent pedagogies related to the integration of children’s linguistic and cultural repertoires in immersion education. In Canada, updated statistics show that the 2005 recommendations put forth by Swain and Lapkin are still relevant to this context, with 21.9% of the Canadian population being comprised of immigrants and over 70% of immigrants reported having a mother tongue other than the two official languages (referred to henceforth in both Canadian and Finnish contexts as “allophones”) (Statistics Canada 2018b). The proportion of immigrant children is also on the rise across Canadian school boards, which has implications for FI education. Canadian research has shown that allophone children and their families are motivated to learn French and that children can achieve high levels of French proficiency in FSL programs, including FI (e.g., Dagenais and Jacquet 2000; Hart et al. 1988; Mady 2013, 2014, 2015). In terms of early FI in particular, Reyes and Vignola (2015) synthesized existing research in order to shed light on the diverse dimensions of the allophone learner experience in FI. For example, studies conducted with elementary school allophones enrolled in FI programs have shown that their L1

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knowledge (defined here as the family language[s] commonly used before entering the school system) has a very significant influence on their acquisition of additional languages. Specifically, the presence of L1 literacy skills in reading and writing would appear to facilitate the acquisition of L2 and L3 (Swain and Lapkin 1991; Bild and Swain 1989). On the other hand, the absence or gradual loss of L1 proficiency would appear to result in the loss of knowledge and strategies that are useful for additional language learning and may limit the chances of crosslinguistic transfer that could fill gaps in individuals’ language systems (Herdina and Jessner 2002; Cenoz et al. 2001). Allophone FI children also face a complex, yet unique, learning situation – they are integrated into a language education system in a kind of double immersion when they have to learn Canada’s two official languages almost simultaneously (Taylor 1992). This can pose a challenge for those in early language education contexts in particular – for example, allophone children in early FI have to wait 3 or 4 years, in some programs, before they can take English classes in school. Essentially, allophone learners in early FI seek to achieve an appropriate level of French proficiency (commonly their L3) for professional and educational purposes within a bilingual program that does not necessarily seek to support additive trilingualism in any official way (Reyes and Vignola 2015). In Canada, allophone students do not always benefit from the same level of access to FSL programs as their Canadian-born peers, particularly when it comes to FI. Research has uncovered a tendency for allophone children of all ages to be excluded from FI programs (e.g., upon entry into school or when struggling in the FI program), primarily because of their lack of English language proficiency (Mady and Turnbull 2012; Taaffe et al. 1996; Roy 2015). Reyes and Vignola (2015) speculate that their exclusion could be due to FI teachers perceiving allophone students’ L1 as an obstacle to learning French (Cook 2001; Cummins 1981). Such a nonencouraging attitude towards the L1 risks immersion teachers contributing to allophone learners’ “subtractive trilingualism,” that is, a progressive loss of the L1 (Olshtain and Nissim-Amitai 2004). This attitude is contrary to findings from Dagenais, Day, and Toohey (2006) showing the benefits over the long-term (from age 7 onward) of FI teachers openly promoting allophone reliance on L1 linguistic and cultural resources to optimize additional language learning. With regards to Finland, the landscape looks somewhat different from Canada when it comes to the diversity of children in early immersion program. While the proportion of allophones in Finland (i.e., citizens with mother tongues other than Finnish, Swedish or the three indigenous Sami languages spoken in Finland) has increased from 0.2% in 1980 to 7.1% in 2019 (Official Statistics of Finland 2018, 2019), survey findings show that the SI learner population closely resembles what it was when immersion was introduced in the 1980s (Björklund et al. 2014). SI education still typically addresses monolingual Finnish-speaking children with no previous knowledge of Swedish prior to entering immersion at the age of 3–6 years old. In summary, the two countries with minority language immersion programs have a slightly different policy and practice regarding immersion programming in relation to the growing linguistic and cultural diversity in the country. Despite Canadian research documenting the potential for positive results when integrating allophone

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children in FI, exclusionary practices are still prevalent. In Finland, the practice of limiting allophone children’s access to SI by way of language-based selection criteria is widespread. In the following, we will discuss the inclusion of children with learning exceptionalities to SI and FI.

Supporting Early Immersion Learners with Learning Exceptionalities As to children with learning exceptionalities, inclusionary policies are similar in the two contexts, but analysis of practices in immersion education in Canada and Finland reveals a noteworthy divergence. In Finland, inclusion is strongly supported and there is an obligation for all education providers to meet every child’s right to receive support (EDUFI 2011). SI is often characterized as a program for all types of learners, meaning that support for learners with learning exceptionalities is integrated directly into the program (e.g., Bergroth 2016). Consequently, the drop-out rate in SI has always been very low. Despite this explicit commitment to inclusion in early immersion, research on learners with learning exceptionalities in SI is lacking and researchers, like Bergström (2002), encourage enrollment decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis. Existing immersion researchers in Finland, like Bergström (2002), emphasize that teaching methods used in immersion may be favorable for children with learning exceptionalities. For example, an immersion teacher ought to ensure learners’ understanding rather than taking it for granted when planning and delivering instruction, which may sometimes happen in L1 instruction. Bergström believes that “it is above all the selection of teaching methods – independently of program – that can help pupils with different qualifications to cope” (Bergström 2002, p. 304). For example, her research findings showed that learners with reading and writing difficulties benefit from early oral communication-based introduction to Swedish offered by the SI program rather than a focus on writing and overall accuracy as is the tendency in regular language-arts teaching starting in school. Also, the method of working with multidisciplinary thematic modules in immersion, which integrate development of content and language knowledge, may help children with learning exceptionalities to grasp the content. Another factor often highlighted in SI literature is that the early introduction of Finnish literacy in the SI program helps to identify if the source of possible language-related problems is Swedish-based or not (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011). In Finland, both SI researchers and practitioners highlight the importance of treating SI learners as bilinguals when identifying and supporting children with possible learning exceptionalities (Bergström 2002). Drawing on her experience as a special education teacher in SI, Eklund (2007) found that early intervention and testing in both languages (Swedish and Finnish) helps to identify the source of learners’ challenges and to provide subsequent individualized support. Biliteracy is systematically promoted in early SI, where kindergarten teachers support children’s emergent reading and writing with various language awareness activities in Swedish, and parents are encouraged to facilitate similar activities at home in Finnish.

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In Canada, inclusion in FI is widely supported in principle. On a national level, the advocacy group Canadian Parents for French (CPF) (2018) has long promoted universal access for students to learn French via the specific FSL program that meets their individual goals and needs. Provinces have also identified inclusion as a central principle guiding FSL curricular reform and professional development (e.g., Ontario Ministry of Education 2015; Alberta Education 2009). Provincial efforts in this regard have tended to focus on ensuring that children with learning exceptionalities can access FSL programs and identifying the specific supports they need to succeed once enrolled. Although research to date on inclusion in Canadian FSL programs (including FI) is not necessarily lacking, the extent to which research findings are informing everyday practice in early FI programs still has yet to be determined. In terms of access, studies have documented the trend of children with learning exceptionalities being systematically counseled out of FI out of “fear of compounding their problems” (CPF 2012). In fact, despite policies advocating for inclusion across the curriculum, excluding children from French class (including immersion) is permitted in practice, making it the only school subject with such status (Arnett 2013). In this regard, Arnett (2013) documents the potential influence of educational leaders and parents on ending and/or perpetuating exemption and transfer policies in FI specifically and FSL generally. For example, she claims there is great diversity in the beliefs and practices of educational leaders in the absence of official policy promoting inclusion in FI – “some insist upon its practice, others may go against it, even if the teacher is in favour of it, and others may leave the decision up to the parents” (p. 112). Such variance was also reported by parents – some were shown to seek enrollment in FI as a way to separate their children from others with special needs who are often moved to the English stream. The FI context is also seen by parents as an environment where the teacher is less challenged by a wider range of needs, meaning their child may receive more attention. In Mady and Arnett (2009), after beginning the early FI program at age 6, a parent unwillingly ended up transferring their child with special needs out of FI to protect them from teachers who held unfavorable attitudes toward their inclusion. The majority of research on inclusionary practices in FI has focused broadly on teachers at all levels and documents how children of all ages with learning exceptionalities can succeed and thrive in FSL when provided with appropriate teacher support (e.g., Arnett 2010; LeBouthillier 2015). In the case of early FI in particular, Wise (2011) described what she characterizes as a typical occurrence in early FI programs – inclusionary practices that are deemed to be sufficient to support an early FI student (between the ages of 4–6 years old) with learning exceptionalities are only made available in English but not in French. In fact, FSL teachers have identified the provision of such support in the French language as being a major challenge given their lack of professional learning opportunities related to inclusionary practices in FI (Lapkin et al. 2006). Essentially – the aforementioned research provides evidence that learning strategies used in inclusive classrooms are useful for all FI students, and not just those with special needs. However, teachers’ beliefs and their ability to implement such strategies determine their ability to effectively include children with learning

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exceptionalities in FSL. For example, Arnett (2013) observed a reluctance on the part of FI teachers in early FI to provide cross-linguistic support to learners with learning exceptionalities. In summary, Canada and Finland have approached the inclusion of children with learning exceptionalities in early immersion in different ways. Finland has explicit inclusion policies that have led to supporting inclusionary practices and positive attitudes among SI teachers, despite the lack of research in this area. Canada, on the other hand, has research supporting the inclusion of learners with exceptionalities in FI but this is not reflected in practice. Inclusion policy tends to focus on access to immersion, and there is also inconsistency across stakeholder groups in terms of beliefs about inclusion in FI. In the following section, the two early immersion contexts are contrasted as to early immersion teacher training.

Early Immersion Teacher Training Teacher training offered in Canada and in Finland has not been able to meet the need for qualified teachers for early immersion programs in the two contexts. In Canada, teacher training programs fall under provincial jurisdiction and are grouped into two categories: concurrent and consecutive (Ullman and Hainsworth 1991). Program content typically has two components: a theoretical part (university courses) and a practical part (practicum). In the concurrent model, students are enrolled in both an undergraduate program (e.g., B.A. or B.Sc.) and a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) program. This type of program can last 4 or 5 years. At the end of the program, they receive two diplomas. In the consecutive model, students enroll in a B.Ed. after completing their undergraduate program. In this case, the B.Ed. program usually lasts 1 to 2 years. When applying to Faculties of Education, they must decide whether they want to become an elementary (which includes kindergarten) or high school teacher, which dictates the teacher training program they select. This type of program can last 5 or 6 years. In Canada, future FI teachers are enrolled in FSL teacher training programs preparing them to teach not only in FI, but also in other FSL programs like CF and Extended French (i.e., where French serves as the language of instruction in at least one other subject). The programs address native speakers of French as well as nonnative speakers with high level of proficiency in French. Testing prospective students' French proficiency is a practice that is left up to the discretion of Faculties of Education, both in terms of timing (e.g., upon admission) as well as the test itself (e.g., in-house, standardized certification like the DELF). FSL teacher training programs commonly offer courses that address a wide range of topics, including theories of L2 instruction, FSL instruction in Canada and in the province where the candidate will be certified (including analysis and familiarity with Ministry of Education policies and curriculum documents), L2 methodology and evaluation, among others. Generally, the language of instruction in FSL teacher training programs is English, since candidates are being prepared to teach in English school boards; however, French is ideally used for the component that deals with FSL instruction itself. According to Ullman and Hainsworth (1991), there are significant

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differences in the length of practical placements across Faculties of Education, but the average length is approximately 8 weeks per academic year. Since future FI teachers are trained for all FSL programs, they can do their practicum placement in different combinations of FSL programs as well as in the regular English classroom. Since the turn of the century, Ontario school boards have faced significant challenges recruiting and retaining FSL teachers (Karsenti et al. 2008). According to Lapkin, MacFarlane, and Vandergrift (2006), there is a chronic shortage of qualified FSL teachers in Canada, coupled with a worrisome trend of attrition of FSL teachers within 5 years of entering the profession. The shortage of FI teachers in particular results in significant pressure on boards to hire enough teachers to reach the necessary targets to sustain their optional FI programs (Veilleux and BournotTrites 2005). Several reasons have been offered to account for the shortage of FI teachers in particular. FI programs in Canada require many more teachers than other FSL programs, with at least 50% of class time spent in French. In terms of supply and demand, there has been a steady increase in demand for FI programming (CPF 2017). In Ontario, the majority of school boards offer FI programs – since 2012, FI enrolment has increased by almost 15% in several suburban school districts (Ontario Public School Boards’ Association [OPSBA] 2018). There is also a gap between the supply of teacher candidates trained to teach in FI and the demand. One of the reasons for this gap is the difficulty in attracting candidates who have the level of French proficiency necessary to teach in FI (CPF 2018). The shortage of qualified immersion teachers is also apparent in Finland, affecting the spread of SI in the country. The shortage was highlighted in the Governmental National Language Strategy in 2012 (Valtioneuvoston kanslia 2012) as well as in the stakeholder interviews for national immersion surveys conducted in 2011 and 2017 (Kangasvieri et al. 2012; Sjöberg et al. 2018) and in other reports and articles dealing with immersion teacher training (Peltoniemi 2015). Several reasons have been offered to explain this shortage – intermittent availability of teacher training programs for immersion, universities not having offered training for teachers of all levels of immersion education, and graduates of immersion teacher training starting to work as teachers in mainstream rather than in SI (Peltoniemi 2015; Sjöberg et al. 2018). In terms of the availability of teacher training, the development of a permanent preservice teacher training program for SI has proven to be challenging. Since 1998, five programs were launched in succession; only two remain active (i.e., Åbo Akademi University – see Sjöberg et al. 2018). Finland has separate teacher training programs for kindergarten teachers (a three-year Bachelor’s degree program), primary school (classroom) teachers (Grades 1–6), and secondary school (subject) teachers (Grades 7–9) (a five-year Master’s degree program). One of the two existing immersion teacher training programs is for kindergarten teachers and the other one is for primary school teachers. The kindergarten teacher training program includes general courses on kindergarten pedagogy as well as specific courses preparing them for immersion (i.e., courses on individual multilingual development, multilingual pedagogy, and immersion pedagogy) and several periods of practicum in immersion kindergarten classrooms. However, it remains difficult to meet the demand for qualified immersion kindergarten teachers with only one training program in the country.

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Since their inception – and in order to recruit a broad range of candidates – preservice immersion teacher training programs in Finland have mainly addressed the majority-speaking population and recruited nonnative speakers of Swedish with good Swedish skills, while also accepting L1 speakers of Swedish (Björklund et al. 2007). This has presented challenges both in terms of admission policy as well as programming. Prior to 2018, candidates’ language skills were tested before they entered the program. Now, language skills are no longer tested before admission due to the changed national admission policy to Finnish universities to avoid admission examination. Instead, universities are encouraged to base admission on the Finnish national matriculation examination certificate earned at the end of upper-secondary school. Presently, the level of competence needed to enter immersion teacher training is therefore based on the results of the language exams of the Finnish and Swedish exams of this matriculation examination. Minimum admission in this respect is equivalent to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level B1 (Council of Europe 2001, 2018a). Efforts are made to further develop candidates’ language skills both inside (i.e., the language of teaching in the program is Swedish and Swedish language courses are offered within the program) and outside the classroom (i.e., students are encouraged to actively participate in Swedish activities organized in the highly bilingual city of Vaasa during their studies). Furthermore, in the existing programs, all the studies are completed in Swedish. In summary, teacher training for early immersion in the two contexts follows the national system. Canada recruits both native and nonnative speakers of French to French immersion teacher training and trains them mainly in English in a general teacher training program for teachers in all levels and for all programs with French. In contrast, Finland explicitly recruits nonnative speakers of Swedish, trains them mainly in Swedish, and provides a separate training program for kindergarten teachers in immersion with a number of immersion-specific courses. Both contexts share a challenge of educating enough teachers for immersion education to respond to the increasing demands of program expansion and to maintain the quality of the programs as will be shown in the following sections.

New Projects The following sections highlight recent developments within Finland (SI) and Canada (FI) connected to each of the three areas described above (i.e., diversity in the learner population; supporting learners with learning exceptionalities; and immersion teacher training).

Finland Diversity and inclusion as well as availability and training of teachers are addressed in some of recent Finnish research and policy documents in SI. The national core curricula for preprimary and basic education were renewed in kindergartens and

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schools in 2014 (preschool and basic education) and 2016-2018 (early childhood education). The notion that there is diversity among learners as to their abilities and linguistic and cultural backgrounds in Finland is supported in the national curriculum guidelines by obliging education providers to define the target SI population and describe selection criteria for immersion (EDUFI 2016). In her research on the writing of the bilingual education section (including SI) of the new national core curriculum, Bergroth (2016) reported that curriculum designers addressed issues of a prototypical immersion child from at least two different angles: learners with learning exceptionalities and multilingual backgrounds. As to learners with learning exceptionalities, Bergroth (2016) reinforces the discourse of SI being a program for all. The national policy document also emphasized the need to consider the bilingualism of the SI learner when deciding upon support: “the working group added a short paragraph [to the national curriculum] stating that the right to receive support for growth and learning extends to those in bilingual education and that bilingual language acquisition needs to be taken into account when determining the need for support and the implementation of supportive measures” (Bergroth 2016, p. 98). This indicates that inclusion and the model of three-tiered support for learning (general support, intensified support, special support) (Thuneberg et al. 2013) used in Finnish kindergartens and schools is also supported in the policy-level documents dealing with SI. Notably, curricular guidance about the suitability of SI to all types of learners is implied, but not explicit: “Leaving the issue of testing with regard to immersion unexpressed was our [¼the group that designed the curriculum for bilingual education in Finland] strongest way of communicating that in early total immersion, testing for language skills, language aptitude, intelligence, social skills, or other characteristics in an attempt to close doors to possibly struggling students is not recommended” (Bergroth 2016, p. 99). This might be due to the lack of research on this issue in Finland. The lack of explicit guidelines, together with the lack of research on this issue, might be some of the reasons why municipal immersion stakeholders (teachers, principals, administrators) expressed conflicting views about the suitability of immersion to all types of learners in the 2017 national immersion survey (Sjöberg et al. 2018). Some municipalities communicated that they welcome all learners to SI, whereas others do not accept children with learning exceptionalities (Sjöberg et al. 2018). Bergroth (2016) further demonstrates how the changing population structure in Finland was addressed when designing the new national curriculum guidelines: “Diversity in the immersion student population was discussed briefly, but at the moment the immersion population in Finland is not yet so diverse that immersionspecific adjustments are needed in the curriculum” (p. 98). A recent survey shows that the immersion population in Finland is not exceptionally diverse: language skills in Finnish and lack of them in Swedish are used as overall selection criteria to the majority of the SI programs in Finland (Sjöberg et al. 2018). This means that a child with immigrant background needs to know Finnish prior entering most of the SI programs in Finland. However, stakeholder interviews indicated that in most municipalities, enrolment decisions for SI are made on an individual basis, meaning that despite the existence of overall selection criteria, even individual children with other

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language backgrounds may be accepted to SI (Sjöberg et al. 2018). Furthermore, in some municipalities, the interviewed stakeholders expressed a possible need to revisit this particular enrollment criterion due to the changing linguistic reality in the municipality (Sjöberg et al. 2018). One reason why allophones are becoming more prevalent in the context of SI might be that they tend to live in bigger cities and, thus, live in those municipalities with SI. Despite the current absence of children with multiple language backgrounds in SI, the program as a whole is characterized as having a multilingual orientation (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011; Nissilä and Björklund 2014). In Finland, children are obliged to study at least two additional languages during their schooling (e.g., English, Swedish, German, French, etc.), which commonly results in multiple languages being present even in the SI context. In this way, a multilingual orientation in SI refers to the introduction of multiple languages within the program and research on multilingualism in SI, thus, deals with majority-language children learning and using multiple languages that they have learned during early immersion. Even though SI learners have been shown good results in all the languages they study within the program and to use their languages even outside immersion (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011; Mård-Miettinen and Björklund 2019), Nissilä and Björklund (2014) found that each language within the program tends to be “evaluated separately and language-specifically with a monolingual native speaker as the norm” (p. 298), leading them to call for more cross-linguistic perspectives for early immersion programs in Finland. As indicated in the previous section, the challenges in offering consistent teacher training programs for SI has led to a significant shortage of qualified immersion teachers in Finland. In the recent immersion survey from 2017 (Sjöberg et al. 2018), stakeholders explained that the teacher shortage is not only preventing them from expanding their immersion programs, but it is also jeopardizing the quality of the program. The stakeholders reported, for example, that most of the unqualified teachers were neither able to deliver or develop high-quality immersion teaching due primarily to a lack of language skills and/or knowledge of appropriate immersion pedagogy for SI identified in research (e.g., Björklund et al. 2014). This had burdensome implications for qualified teachers who were then responsible for mentoring their unqualified peers while developing the program on their own. Furthermore, even though there is an obvious need for in-service SI training in Finland, not all teachers reported being able to participate due to tough economic situations in the kindergartens and schools and the restricted availability of substitute immersion teachers.

Canada A recent research synthesis found that since 2000, the vast majority of research conducted in K-12 FSL contexts has focused specifically on the FI program (Arnott et al. 2017; Masson et al. 2018). New projects in this regard have yielded noteworthy findings related to each of the three areas of FI focused on in this chapter, with specific mention of implications for early FI where applicable.

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Although trends show a promising increase in the physical inclusion of allophones and students with learning exceptionalities in FI (e.g., Toronto District School Board 2015; Mady 2017), ongoing research documenting stakeholder beliefs continues to highlight the evolving nuances of this apparent shift toward inclusion. For example, Mady (2016) found that while Canadian kindergarten teachers did not promote the exclusion of allophones from FI, they still felt it was a “less desirable program” for this child population (p. 261). Administrators have also been shown to consider “home language maintenance as the responsibility of the home” (Mady and Masson 2018, p. 82). Interestingly, Canadian FSL teachers, among them FI teachers, seem to be more supportive than their English mainstream counterparts of including allophones and students with learning exceptionalities in their classes (Bourgoin 2016; Mady 2016). Still, teacher candidates report their initial teacher training programs as still lacking in this regard (Mady and Arnett 2015). This is despite the realities they are presented with during their practicum placements. New projects are expanding our understanding of how allophones and children with learning exceptionalities are performing when included in FI programming. In the case of allophones, research continues to show their ability to outperform Canadian-born students, not only in French, but also in English (Mady 2013, 2017). This trend has been noted at Grade 6 (Mady 2015), but it has yet to have been examined at the kindergarten level. Possible explanations for this trend include motivation linked to the desire to develop their Canadian identity via French learning as well as a strong belief in the Canadian education system (Mady 2018). In regard to inclusion in FI, research has highlighted the potential for crosslinguistic transfer to be a central feature of inclusionary practices for children with learning exceptionalities in early FI. Some encouraging work in this regard can still be found, namely, that of Wise and Chen (2015) who presented evidence for crosslinguistic transfer of phonological awareness, and subsequent findings showing that the gains experience by these same early FI students were maintained for 2 years thereafter (Wise et al. 2016). Another theme of interest to researchers has been that of FI teacher training. Recently, the Association canadienne des professionnels de l’immersion (ACPI) conducted a pan-Canadian consultation with 887 professionals working in FI (teachers, administrators, university professors, etc.) to identify the reality, strengths, challenges, needs, and perceptions of professionals working in FI (ACPI 2018). Findings highlighted two issues specific to FI teacher training across both elementary and secondary levels, namely, the generalized scarcity of qualified teachers and the variability in the teachers’ level of French proficiency. In this regard, ACPI recommended that a targeted national promotion campaign be conducted with high school and university students to bolster consideration of FI teaching as a career choice, while also suggesting a teacher recruitment campaign across Canada and in French-speaking countries. With the increasing number of Canadian school boards offering early immersion in particular, empirical attention has yet to be paid to the distinct nature of L2 teaching at this level when considering teacher recruitment (Schwartz 2018). In response to the variability in French proficiency – which has been identified by other researchers as an area requiring empirical attention (Arnott and Vignola 2018;

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Bayliss and Vignola 2007; Day and Shapson 1996; Flewelling 1995) – ACPI proposed 15 suggestions for consideration. Suggestions implicating teacher training take the form of proposed certificates (one in the L2 and the other in immersive teaching) to validate student teachers’ efforts to develop their language skills in tandem with their FSL specialization. Another suggestion was to facilitate language skill development during initial training, which could take different forms (e.g., more courses delivered in French or a remedial course during which student teachers improve certain proficiency skills [i.e., writing], as documented in Bayliss and Vignola 2007). Along these lines, Arnott and Vignola (2018) highlighted the importance of “continued development of FI teacher candidates’ language proficiency” (p. 322). They proposed the use of a professional language portfolio adapted from the European Language Portfolio (Council of Europe 2018b) – a tool inspired by the CEFR. Findings showed that FI student teachers who completed a portfolio reflected on their own language skills and developing pedagogy, while also proposing ways to develop their autonomy and metacognition and establishing a plan of action for their continued language proficiency development (Arnott and Vignola 2018). Such continued attention to language proficiency development is relevant considering updated data showing that the majority of FI teachers self-identify as nonnative speakers of French (ACPI 2018). Also, since statistics are showing that FI graduates are becoming FSL teachers, then the diversity of FSL teachers should also evolve to resemble the reality of the school population. As a consequence, the increase of nonnative speakers of French among the student teachers’ population seems obvious. In summary, recent developments within Finland (SI) and Canada (FI) connected to diversity in the learner population in immersion education show a gradual move toward more inclusive policy and practices. In Finland, children with learning exceptionalities have long been welcomed into SI; but current research shows that the immersion population in Finland is still not linguistically and culturally diverse. Still, linguistic and cultural diversity among SI learners is supported – albeit implicitly – in the new national curriculum guidelines for SI education. In Canada, promising new research results have resulted in a shift towards inclusion of both allophones and students with learning exceptionalities in FI. In both contexts, however, stakeholder views remain conflicted in regard to the suitability of immersion for all types of learners, meaning that even more research is needed on these issues. As for teacher education, recent research in both contexts continues to foreground the challenge of educating enough teachers for immersion education in order to maintain the quality of the programs. In Canada, research has called attention to the variability in FI teachers’ level of French proficiency underlining a need to include continued language proficiency development as part of their immersion teacher training programs.

Critical Issues and Topics Points of convergence and divergence that emerge from the research presented above highlight critical topics where Canada and Finland could learn from one another’s experiences and research findings, as well as noteworthy theoretical and empirical developments in other contexts. First, as shown in the previous sections, FI and SI

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programs were originally initiated as programs providing access to national minority languages (French in Canada and Swedish in Finland) when such access was not available to them in their homes. Traditionally, this referred to majority language speakers of English or Finnish in designated areas of each country. Immersion programming in both contexts started as local initiatives, growing quickly to national-level programs. Such expansion has resulted in debate around the suitability of immersion for all types of learners, and consequently, challenges to the original linguistic and cultural profile of a prototypical child in immersion education. Despite similar starting points, FI and SI programs have encountered distinct socio-political realities, resulting in different realizations of the concept “immersion for all” across Canada and Finland. In Canada, significant immigration and general education policy promoting inclusion across all educational programs (including early years programming) has led to an emphasis on ensuring universal access to FI programs. In Finland, inclusion in SI has referred primarily to children with learning exceptionalities, as linguistic and cultural diversity has only recently become evident in the municipalities offering SI. This emphasis in the SI context in Finland has yielded noteworthy findings on biliteracy and cross-linguistic transfer as being central to inclusive pedagogy in immersion. Similar findings have only recently emerged in the Canadian context related to children with exceptionalities, but have been at the forefront of research on linguistic and cultural diversity in FI. Valuing the entire linguistic repertoire of FI students has emerged as an important inclusionary practice in Canada, while the practice of identifying majority language knowledge (Finnish) as a criterion for inclusion in SI in Finland is only now being questioned in light of the diversifying population in urban centers offering SI. In Finland, existing research on multilingualism within SI focuses on majority-language SI children learning and using multiple languages within the immersion context, whereas corresponding research in Canada deals more with the emergent variety of linguistic backgrounds of immersion learners (both majority- and minority-language children). Certainly, research conducted in Canada showcasing that immigrant learners without majority language knowledge (English) can succeed in FI warrants the need for reconsideration of this criterion in the Finnish context. This could work to avoid the random nature of inclusionary practices that has been documented for years in Canada. Overall, the areas of convergence and divergence around inclusionary practices in immersion show that Canada and Finland have much to learn from one another – particularly for SI on how to optimally integrate allophones in immersion and for FI on how to introduce multiple languages within immersion to best support children with learning exceptionalities. Research in both contexts converges around the benefits of cross-linguistic transfer and overtly encouraging children to draw from linguistic and cultural knowledge in their repertoires while learning the target language. Such promotion aligns with recent theoretical and empirical work in the field of language education more broadly in regard to translanguaging (e.g., García 2009) and plurilingualism (e.g., Council of Europe 2001, 2018a). However, this area of convergence in our analysis brings about the critical topic of target language status in early immersion, given recent warnings against the promotion of increased majority language use at the expense of minority languages in immersion programs (Ballinger et al. 2017). This is particularly relevant to our

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analysis, where cross-linguistic transfer seems to be promoted differently with allophones (often drawing from a minority language to learn another minority language), whereas language status does not matter as much when advocating for such transfer with learners with exceptionalities. Much of the research summarized earlier highlights the potential for crosslinguistic transfer to be facilitated by linking as much to minority as majority language knowledge (i.e., English in the case of FI; and Finnish in the case of SI). If the ultimate objective of both SI and FI is to enhance the development of proficiency in the minority language (Swedish and French, respectively), then such socio-political issues need to be taken into account when realizing the principles of “immersion for all.” At the very least, the analysis presented here aligns with Ballinger et al.’s (2017) call for immersion programs to simultaneously contextualize and weigh the risks and benefits of cross-linguistic transfer when both the target language status and the needs of the learner are taken into account. As has been addressed above, another, common critical feature between the two contexts is the shortage of qualified immersion teachers, including those destined to teach in early language education programs. In Finland, this shortage has resulted in municipalities not initiating new immersion programs and a considerable number of families wanting immersion for their children not getting access to it (Sjöberg et al. 2018). In Canada, more and more school boards are offering – and sometimes mandating FI during the early years, despite the shortage of FSL teachers (e.g., Ottawa-Carleton District School Board 2019). These developments in both contexts highlight how ensuring universal access for all students to immersion education comes with challenges. Generally, when immersion programs are made inclusive to all children, the content of teacher training programs should reflect this mandate. Canadian research has shown that at the moment, such information is lacking from existing education programs. Also, maintaining high-quality immersion programs requires there to be enough qualified teachers specialized in immersion education. Debate around what constitutes a “qualified” immersion teacher is ongoing in the Canadian context, particularly in terms of the required level of French language proficiency. In this respect, there is an apparent convergence across Canada and Finland – teacher training in both contexts addresses mainly nonnative speakers of the immersion language. However, Canada could learn from the Finnish teacher training context, particularly in terms of a specific focus on early FI and by offering more if not all courses in French to future FI teachers. It is something that had been highlighted by FI student teachers who participated in a study in which they stated that the increase of courses in French during their training program would “more closely match their responsibilities for teaching the entire curriculum” (Bayliss and Vignola 2007, p. 390).

Future Research Directions The above section highlights a number of critical issues regarding the development of minority language immersion education in Canada and Finland. One potential area of future collaboration identified in this chapter links to the field of inclusion. As shown in the above sections, Canada and Finland have contributed to the field with

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research on slightly different aspects of inclusion (i.e., inclusion of allophones vs. inclusion of learners with exceptionalities), meaning that comparative research projects could be built around gaps in each individual context for the purposes of collective gains across both. Furthermore, areas remain within the field of inclusion where new research in both contexts could be initiated. For example, there is a need for ethnographic research focusing on both allophones and children with learning exceptionalities to find out how relevant policy statements are put into practice in classrooms across both contexts and to identify best practices to support immersion teachers, teacher educators, and immersion program decision-makers. This type of research could optimize equal access to minority language immersion education within as well as across both contexts. Finally, research attention should be paid in both contexts to the extent to which the changing socio-political situation in immersion education has affected the prototypical immersion learner and teacher profiles. Discussion of the implications of reconceptualizing the prototypical immersion language learner (e.g., not always Canadian-born or speaker of English – see Waterhouse and Arnott 2016; not always children with Finnish as mother tongue or home language – see Sjöberg et al. 2018) and the prototypical immersion language teacher (e.g., no longer native-speakers of target language – Salvatori 2007) is ongoing and certainly warrants continued empirical attention across both contexts.

Conclusions This chapter has presented comparative points highlighting how changing sociopolitical realities in Canada and Finland have influenced early immersion programming in a minority language (French and Swedish, respectively) in both contexts. The comparison has been made across three specific areas that emerge from the research in the two contexts: diversity in the immersion population; supporting children with learning exceptionalities; and immersion teacher training. Critical points of convergence and divergence highlight areas for potential collaboration, particularly centered on what emerged as a common guiding principle in both contexts – immersion for all. This principle has presented significant challenges and insights that are crucial to ongoing immersion program development in Canada, Finland, and other minority language immersion contexts.

Cross-References ▶ Multilingual Children with Special Needs in Early Education ▶ Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education

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Russian as a Home Language in Early Childhood Education

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Ekaterina Protassova, Anna Golubeva, and Ilze Mikelsone

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sources of Russian as a Diasporic Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of the Former Soviet Republics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variety of Existing Approaches to Early Language Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maintenance, Transition, or Learning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Family Language Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Models of Russian Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variety of Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Models of Early Russian Education in Estonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Window on Latvia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . France: Balanced Bilingualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Germany: Expanding the Offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plurilingualism in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Several Types of Russian Preschools in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structured Communication in Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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E. Protassova (*) Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: ekaterina.protassova@helsinki.fi A. Golubeva Narva College, University of Tartu, Narva, Estonia I. Mikelsone University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_17

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Abstract

Russian is a pluricentric language with several statuses, a situation that challenges the teaching of it as a home (first, heritage) language in different countries. The Russian authorities support early Russian language teaching, while the growing diaspora relies on the ties it maintains within the transnational community of Russian speakers to promote the use of the language. The main features of the Russian language that exist in different countries are explained by historical factors. The old Russian-speaking communities have been joined by newcomers who have differing views on education. This chapter demonstrates how the communities of the Russian-speaking diaspora maintain the language and coexist with ordinary early years education in various countries. It describes language situations in the old and new contexts of Russian language teaching in Europe and elsewhere and presents a variety of pedagogical approaches. The Russian language programs devised in Russia play a limited role in this process. This chapter exemplifies diverse models of early bilingual education worldwide. The question arises whether the existing methods of language instruction will survive in the future, and what kind of Russian culture will dominate outside the nation. Furthermore, who will determine the curriculum content? It will be useful in the future to research the ultimate attainment in first-language Russian among those who attended different kinds of bilingual educational institutions before school age and determine which model of early bilingual education has the best long-lasting results for either language. Keywords

Soviet linguistic legacy · Russian-speaking diaspora · Russian transnational community · Language maintenance · Home language education

Introduction Sources of Russian as a Diasporic Language The presence of Russian as a world language is apparent in every country of the Earth (Yelenevskaya and Protassova 2015). It is spoken by those who learned it as a foreign language, those who studied it in the Former Soviet Union (hereafter FSU) or in one of the countries that appeared after its collapse, and those who married interculturally. Furthermore, it may still be spoken by the people who left the country in one of the waves of emigration, which began with the Old Believers, (Eastern Orthodox Christians who were opposed to reform of the official church and often had to flee from the country) and continued with the Russian Jews who fled the Pogroms, and the white emigration after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Additional speakers may be found among other diasporic groups, such as those displaced persons after World War II, or as a result of other Soviet and post-Soviet migration

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for various reasons. For example, there may be those who have repatriated from Russia to the countries of their historical origin, including Bulgarians, Finns, Germans, Greeks, Jews, and Poles, along with other immigrants from Russia who might have made attempts to study, open a business, marry, or simply learn the language. Nowadays, many young professionals emigrate and maintain ties with their native country and relatives, wishing to preserve the Russian language for their children. Moreover, Russian speakers of different ethnicities and with different dialects, regiolects, and statuses are encountered outside Russia (Ryazanova-Clarke 2014; Noack 2021). Thanks to modern global connectivity, these speakers form a transnational community and often organize international projects collectively. In the educational institutions for small children where Russian is taught, all these backgrounds come together (Protassova and Yelenevskaya 2020).

The Case of the Former Soviet Republics Russian-speakers everywhere are ethnically heterogeneous minorities (Hogan-Brun et al. 2009). About 200 Indigenous languages were spoken in the USSR, and when people move abroad from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, they keep alive the Russian language that once united them. Armenians, Jews, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, Udmurts, and Yakuts are examples. In Soviet times (there were 15 republics, including the Russian Federation), all the languages besides Russian were called national, and Russian was the language of inter-national communication. In the national republics, there were two types of education in a preschool context (for children aged 3–7): (1) national (in the local language), with a low-frequency exposure to Russian, and (2) minority preschools, a kind of immersion or submersion program where Russian was used as a medium of education, usually multinational. Families could choose between the two if they were both available at their location. In the first type, Russian was taught twice a week in a program of familiarization. In the second type, it was the medium of instruction. All or some children knew Russian before entering preschool. Others spoke different languages at home, and for those children, it became a submersion or immersion program in Russian. In minority education in some regions, even three languages (a minority language, the national language of the respective republic, and the Russian language) were used (cf. McLaughlin 1985, pp. 50–57). In Uzbekistan, for example, up to 50 and more children with a dozen home languages were taught in the same group, where one teacher and one assistant teacher gave instruction. The study of Russian continued in school and in higher education. It was compulsory in all the regions. Depending on the educational level, Russian was taught as a subject or as a medium of instruction. For various political and economic reasons and as a result of an exchange of population, Russian was and remains spoken as L1 and L2 on the territory of the FSU (Aref’ev 2020). The symbolic power of Russian language knowledge may either support or hamper its acquisition. To illustrate this, in each of the three Baltic states that formed part of the USSR after the Second World War until 1991, there were historical

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Russian-speaking minorities (e.g., Ramonienė et al. 2017). However, since the Russian language is also associated with the perceived occupational socialist regime, current state policies tend to support the dominance of the state languages (Bergmane 2020). Russian speakers still live in these countries today, although state policies tend to diminish the role of Russian, in particular because it is believed to facilitate Russia’s influence. On the other hand, knowledge of the language is important for commerce between the Baltic States and the FSU. In other states that emerged after the dissolution of the FSU, the role of Russian is regulated by local laws. For example, in Kazakhstan, it remains compulsory at the school level (Mynbayeva and Pogosian 2014), but the role of English is becoming increasingly important. In Kyrgyzstan, despite the possibility of changing the status, Russian is still compulsory and taught in schools because parents frequently believe that an education in Russian is of a higher quality (Deyoung 2008; Gul 2019), and if their children know Russian, they will be better prepared for further education.

Variety of Existing Approaches to Early Language Teaching The variety of approaches to early bilingual education is limited by resources and children’s potential, because teaching must not be overly rigorous; children must be able to play freely without being overburdened by adults’ instructions; and there are not enough trained language teachers who are also preschool specialists (PPRC 2010). (As well as bilingual education, there is also multilingual education (cf. Abello-Contesse et al. 2013, Cenoz 2013).) McLaughlin summarized the tendencies in second language acquisition in 1984, based on language separation, individual differences, linguistic environments ranging from the home to the neighborhood to educational institutions, psychological issues, language combination and distribution based on time and place, silent period, productive language stimulation, and the role of understanding. Since then, bilingual early years education has become almost the norm, and multilingualism is gaining momentum (see Tabors 1997; Thompson 2000; Bligh 2014; Lourenço and Mourão 2015; Murphy and Evangelou 2016; Schwartz 2018 for broad instructions, and Gort and Sembiante 2015; Mavilidi et al. 2015; Vogt et al. 2017; Coyle and Férez Mora 2018 for specific directions). The best results in the early acquisition of two languages are achieved through more input, devoted parents and educators, financial support, strict rules of language use, and a true continuity of bilingualism as a goal in all stages of child development, although the current tendency is to be more flexible in language use and to apply responsible code-switching, which denotes adequateness when emphasizing a certain notion, repeating the same statement in both languages, and explaining or clarifying a concept (cf. Philp et al. 2008; Mehisto 2012; Hickey and de Mejía 2015; Baker and Wright 2017; Romanowski and Jedynak 2018). In addition, the different effects of the various approaches to bilingual education may lie not only in the language itself, but also in its political and economic power (Muth 2017), and the cognitive effects of an early start (Barac et al. 2014). For example, during the Soviet era, Russian was frequently seen as an international communist

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language, although before to WWII, German served in similar capacity in the USSR. In the Soviet Union, knowing other languages could be interpreted as suspicious, and the proper ideology needed only the reading of technical and scientific materials in foreign languages. This chapter is an overview of the existing types and methods of multilingual preschools operating in Russian as one of their languages, highlighting the influence of educational policies and procedures. The study focuses on qualitative data derived mostly from case studies, with additional quantitative survey findings obtained through a combination of methodologies. The methodology is based on an on-site analysis of documents and preschool linguistic landscapes, field notes, discussions with principals, teachers, and parents, surveys, conversations with children, and classroom observations. Interviews were conducted with experts from the ministries of education, national boards, and universities involved in the elaboration of bilingual programs in the respective countries (cf. Lichtman 2012; Delamont 2013; Taylor et al. 2016). Without getting into methodological specifics, we would like to call the attention of the readers to the fact that the combination of research techniques served the purpose of understanding similarities and differences in Russian language instruction and improving its quality. The aim of the chapter is to show how different types of preschools respond to the needs of parents, and how they change with time in order to update their practices to modern circumstances and state/national language policies. It begins with two cases of preschools in the FSU and continues with some typical models of Russian language education in Europe and beyond.

Main Theoretical Concepts Maintenance, Transition, or Learning? If a minority language is learned by either Indigenous or immigrant children at home, it risks not being fully developed because of insufficient input and the lack of schooling. It is called a home or heritage language. The language of the wider social environment often becomes the dominant language and is given more support by the educational system. Nevertheless, with the growing success of various bilingual projects, more and more parents are deciding to bring their children up bilingually and multilingually (e.g., Cabrera and Leyendecker 2016; Eisenchlas and Schalley 2020; De Houwer 2021. Existing research into preschool Russian-language education outside Russia has focused on early Russian education within a context of first-language maintenance, home-language learning, or second-language acquisition (Nesteruk 2010; Bauckus and Kresin 2018; Gagarina and Klassert 2018; Polinsky 2018; Ringblom and Dobrova 2019). Instruction in the home language may be incorporated into the curriculum through various types of bilingual programs, from minimal “shower” (when something is regularly said or taught in the target language for the purpose of introducing foreign languages in early childhood education, to create positive

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language learning experiences in preschool) to full language support, and dual language programs (Sohn and Merrill 2008) that promote competence in an additional language, for example, two-way immersion (Christian 2008), when children of two different linguistic backgrounds are alternately immersed in both languages. Concerning the Russian language programs, it is notable that their definition is related to the status of Russian in the respective country. Thus, Russian is an official minority language in such European countries as Lithuania and Slovakia. In other regions, Russian is governed by a “first language first” policy in bilingual preschools (as in Israel and the United States, cf. Altman et al. 2014; Schwartz 2014, 2017; Schwartz et al. 2015), where the minority language is maintained as L1 for as long as possible. In these contexts, however, the teaching of Russian is mostly a private initiative that is licensed, but not defined as part of the state-educational system. Children studying Russian as their L1 are often in the company of those whose parents want their offspring to have an opportunity for Russian immersion. In extracurricular activities, like weekend activity groups and afternoon clubs, parents pay for and can choose between different activities in Russian: language, literature, history, science, mathematics, arts, crafts, dance, gymnastics, and chess, even on the preschool level (as in the Russian Gymnasium No 1 (russiangymnasium.com) that operates in many countries. They invite successful Russian-speaking immigrants to give lessons to children in the subjects of their competence, making them informal and intensive, and at the cutting edge of art and science).

The Family Language Policy The Family Language Policy (hereafter FLP) presupposes that the use of language in interactions with a child is planned explicitly and overtly, and this contributes to multilingual education because parents make decisions about the type of educational institution that the child will be entrusted to, as well as their future (Schwartz and Verschik 2013; King and Fogle 2017; Dewaele et al. 2020). It is worth noting that recent research highlights differences in FLPs among Russian-speaking families in different countries, for instance, in Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, and Sweden (Ringblom et al. 2017; Solnceva and Protassova 2017; Viimaranta et al. 2019). Depending on the context, parents may wish to support as many languages as possible. Thus, they may prefer Russian as L1 only, or Russian as L1 and another societally dominant language as L2 and/or English at home. Families take the available institutional offering into account, as well as organize some extra activities and suggest encounters with other people in different languages. The outcomes of this family language management usually depend on the cultural-economic level of the family and parental competence in matters of multilingual upbringing.

Models of Russian Language Education Diverse models of Russian as L1 at the preschool level outside Russia reflect the respective language policy of each country and parental beliefs. In some cases, early

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years education with Russian as L1 is a transitional period for children who receive their L2 in smaller doses than in the case of full immersion, and parents choose this option because it is psychologically more comfortable. We cannot categorize the following examples strictly as first-language maintenance, home-language learning, or second-language acquisition because everything often happens in the same classroom. The Swedish model of preschool education, which involves maintaining Russian as a home language, offers the opportunity for a 45-minute session with a Russian language teacher per week, paid for by the local authority if it has sufficient financial resources. In actual fact, how long and how intensive this individual lesson will be depends on the teacher’s personality and the child’s behavior. Teachers are centrally organized and receive in-service training in pedagogy, the educational system, and second language teaching, specifically Russian. The model is based on the principle that the better the first language is developed, the better the second will be, and the goal is the development of the Swedish language (interviews with responsible persons in administration and teachers, 2020–2021). In Thailand, the licensed preschool Seven Flowers (7flowers-pattaya.com) has opened in Pattaya for children aged 2 years and older. Its specific feature is that both locals and tourists may place their children in a preschool operating mostly in Russian according to Russian programs. English is introduced as an international language through lessons and tasks, and Thai during everyday activities through conversations with the staff, who speak it as their mother tongue. There are 60 children divided into age groups, with no more than 12 children in each. Logopedic consultations in Russian are offered (Novikova 2017). In Vienna, Austria, various pedagogical concepts have been tried out. For example, preschool (Multika) used to offer lessons for children of different ethnic backgrounds, among them Russian, by native speakers of the respective languages. There were also common activities in German. This preschool has been closed. In addition, some preschools in Vienna currently have activities in two languages, Russian and German, depending on the teacher, who works with the children and organizes activities to support the language use and general development of the children. Some complementary classes for the Russian-speaking children operate several times a week, and all lessons are given in Russian. The Umka Children’s Academy offers creative activities in three languages, represented by their native speakers. For ages 0–3, groups are bilingual (German-English, German-Russian), and for ages 3–6, they become trilingual, German, Russian, and English (kinderakademie-umka.com) (interviews with stakeholders, principals, and teachers). In Bulgaria, Russian is taught as a foreign language (Birova and DeyanovaAtanasova 2014), but increasingly there is an option for its learning as a mother tongue (Ivanova 2018). Most Russian-speaking early years educational arrangements are made for children who attend an after-school club or Saturday or Sunday activities based on the Russian-language preschool methods combined with the teachers’ own inventions. This option of Russian as L1 maintenance and enrichment is typical in Canada, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom as well (cf. Kliuchnikova 2015; Ivashinenko 2019; Makarova et al. 2019).

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Although various models of bilingual preschool education with L1 Russian are offered, they do not guarantee a high level of bilingualism without a corresponding family language policy and support from the environment, because more motivation is needed throughout the life span, and the language develops far beyond preschool age (Grosjean 2021). Preschool education aims to achieve a diversity of goals and prepares children for varying degrees of bilingualism.

Major Contributions Variety of Approaches In this section, Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, French, and German experiences provide some examples of preschool education involving Russian. These are countries with a sizable Russian-speaking population and a long history of teaching Russian. Here, we conducted surveys and numerous interviews at all administrative levels of the educational system. The cases in question illustrate how the results of bilingual preschool education vary as a result of different attitudes toward Russian, the history of its presence in the country, and the views of parents. Importantly, the outcomes of this type of education demonstrate that not only Russian is developed, but the L2 also becomes a real skill of children.

Three Models of Early Russian Education in Estonia Estonian is the only state language of Estonia, and most preschools operate in this language. For the Russian-speaking minority (about 30% of the population, including 25.2% Russians), there are Russian-language preschools. At the end of the 1990s, the Estonian government, conscious of the low proficiency in Estonian among the Russian-language school leavers, launched the Language Immersion Program. This program regulates the use of the Estonian language and the contents to be acquired through it, whereas Russian remains the responsibility of the family. In 2000, the Language Immersion Centre opened and launched total early immersion program at school and partial immersion program (50/50) at the preschool level aimed at the integration of the Russian-speaking linguistic minority into mainstream society. Its ideas came from Canada, and the Embassy of this country supported its implementation financially; it coordinated activities and research in the field. In 2003, the first preschool groups of total early language immersion in Estonian appeared for Russian-speaking (L1) children. In 2008, the partial immersion programs were added in accordance with the wishes of parents to support the mother tongue and enhance general education in all directions. Since 2015, the two-way language immersion-alternative preschool has been offered to both population groups (Estonian and Russian), who learn each other’s languages in order to gain equal access to early bilingualism and the labor market, where the Russian language

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is needed. The aim of all of these models is to enhance functional bilingualism and prepare children for further schooling (Teichmann et al. 2014). In reality, 106 out of 552 municipal and 57 private preschools currently operate partly in Russian in Estonia. Seventy of these preschools use the immersion approach to the Estonian language. All children whose home language is not Estonian should study Estonian during preschool years, beginning at the age of three. This can be done in the form of separate language learning activities, in the two-way language immersion groups, or through partial language immersion, where language and educational activities are integrated. The total immersion groups for Russian-speaking children not younger than five last for 2 years. In each group, two teachers and one assistant teacher speak only in Estonian. Teaching is supported by visual aids, play, everyday communication, and positive attitudes toward the use of any Estonian words (Ministry of Education haridussilm.ee, State Law on Education riigiteataja.ee/akt/114032011006). In the partial immersion program, which is the most popular model (80% of all cases) with children aged older than three, there are two teachers in the classroom: One teacher speaks Estonian, the other Russian. They work half the day, or one whole day, and then switch over (they may be separated, depending on the teacher, circumstances, time, and space, cf. García 2009). There is no translation between them, but they support each other and reinforce the content of the teaching in either language. With regard to the two-way immersion model in Estonian classrooms, the children in these groups can be Estonian-speaking, Russian-speaking, and bilingual. Attempts are made, where possible, to have a balanced number of children from different backgrounds. The composition of the pedagogical staff is the same as for partial immersion, but teachers teach their languages both as the first and the second language and pay equal attention to them (Golubeva 2018). All programs are revised every 5 years and have added social and educational value. They have been evaluated as successful, i.e., children learn both languages and show higher levels of general development. Children are also well prepared for school because the programs are “national, planned, supported and financed by the Ministry of Education and Research in all of the program’s aspects, including in-service teacher training and study materials” (ibid., p. 45).

A Window on Latvia The official language of Latvia is Latvian. Around 25% of the population are ethnic Russians, but most of the inhabitants speak both languages to different extents (Jurs and Samuseviča 2019). The government’s policy on bilingual preschool education means preparing children of minorities to study at least bilingually in Latvian in school. Amendments to the Education Act, which were made in 2018 and entered into effect in 2019, stipulate transition to Latvian as the sole language of instruction in schools. Some Russian-speaking parents want their children to attend Latvianspeaking preschools, and others prefer Russian-speaking preschools, where Latvian

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is taught as a subject during the lessons, which are organized at least twice a week, and last between 30 and 45 min. If the principal wishes and has the opportunity to do so (for example, if teachers speak Latvian well enough and the parents agree), he/she may promote additional activities in Latvian. The government has introduced two programs: one for the Latvians and one for the Russian minority group, both written in Latvian, and all the documentation is in Latvian. Enrolment in the minority program means that children have Russian as their first language and should be ready to start the first grade in a Russian-speaking school once they have acquired literacy in Russian. Indeed, at the end of preschool education, some children can read and write in both languages, which have different alphabets and writing systems (Cyrillic vs. Roman). To support the Russian (and Latvian) language, teachers use materials published in Latvia and in Russia, provided they are ideologically neutral and approved in Latvia (interviews, field notes, and information from the Ministry of education). To illustrate early Russian learning in Latvia, we present the Pasaciņa (“Fairytale”) preschool (lpii-pasacina.lv) as an ordinary preschool situated in Liepaja, a town close to the sea in western Latvia. This was a very international city in former times, thanks to its port, military zone, and various industries. However, the number of inhabitants has diminished dramatically in recent years due to the emigration processes. This information comes from our personal observation and interviews with teachers. Pasaciņa is a state preschool. Four classes are Latvian-speaking and four classes Russian-speaking, with children of different ethnic backgrounds. Bilingual education is implemented in the latter group. There are 252 children and 60 adults, of whom 28 are teachers, 2 are speech therapists (for Latvian and for Russian), and 2 are music teachers (again distributed according to their languages). They also use technology for teaching (a computer is provided in every group, and there is a special room for different activities on the smartboard). There is also a Latvian language teacher for the Russian groups, who gives lessons in a separate classroom. From the age of three until the age of five, children have lessons three times a week, and the last 2 years before school, five times a week for 30 min. They are divided into smaller groups for the lessons. Officially, the preschool does not have bilingual classes, but attempts are being made to implement this approach in the preschool: half of the day mostly in Russian, half of the day mostly in Latvian. The sports teacher gives the lessons in Latvian only, because it is very simple: “To the right,” “To the left,” and “Let’s go.” These lessons are held twice a week. The Russian classes accept children from the age of three. Thus, if parents wish to put their child into early learning education earlier (from the age of 18 months), they must accept immersion into the Latvian language. The waiting list is long; there are not enough places for everyone. There are parents who are motivated to bring their children to the Latvian-speaking class and to make them learn Latvian as early as possible, even though they continue to speak Russian at home. In the Latvian classes, about 20% are from Russian homes. At the age of three, a child may change to a bilingual class if parents believe this is better for them emotionally, or the child will attend a Russian school in the future.

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There are many bilingual families whose members are competent in both languages, but the family language can be either Russian or Latvian. Families have the right to choose the linguistic model for their children. A group is chosen according to the family language. The family’s perception of the language situation is also an important factor. Up to 30% of Russian-speaking parents (according to preschool records) believe that their children will never need the Latvian language. Parents complain that their children do not receive enough teaching in Russian, and that they have learned more Latvian than Russian. Parents think that children will acquire Latvian anyway in school, whereas the principal tries to persuade them that Russian will still be their language. This situation is more or less representative of the Russianspeaking families in Latvia, according to the language composition of the milieu. In order to demonstrate to the Russian parents that they respect Russian traditions (in addition to Latvian traditions, which are observed in different ways), the principal invites the Russian drama theater from Riga to give a performance for the children, who enjoy the Russian atmosphere and culture. All the traditional festivities are celebrated by all the groups together (Easter, National Day), and children communicate with each other on the playground as groups are so close to each other. During a morning activity, for example, teachers decide among themselves whether they will give instruction in Latvian or in Russian. There is no consistency; however, the languages are mixed. Teaching staff have found that the best way to get attention is to give information in Latvian slowly and wait to see whether the children understand; if there is someone who does not understand, only then do they switch to the Russian language. If an immediate response is needed, then teachers almost always use Russian. Knowledge of Russian and Latvian was not tested previously (Tomme-Jukēvica 2014), but the new project is now helping children to develop the necessary tools for Russian as L1 and Latvian as L2, as it had been established that only few children attain a balanced bilingualism (Markus et al. 2019). Teachers prepare annual reports for parents, describing the skills that the child has already acquired or is supposed to have by that age. Parents are not involved in planning the program, but they can ask how the process is progressing, and how it will be evaluated. They are always informed about the topic their children are studying, and what they learn in the subjects they are taking. For practical reasons, the old Soviet preschool architecture, with isolated classrooms and an outdoor playground assigned to each age group, is not really conducive to children’s contact with each other during the day, because each group remains in its own premises, inside and outside. The majority of the time, children play in small groups and share a common language; therefore, they seek out speakers of the same language, allowing the play to be more elaborated and intensive. They learn a small number of simple words from each other. Latvian children watch some TV programs in Russian; thus, they do understand some Russian. If Russian speakers form a subgroup of 4–5 children, they switch to Russian for communication within this subgroup, even if surrounded by Latvian speakers. In learning activities, children must speak Latvian, but in their free time, they can speak whichever language they choose.

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Teachers use a translanguaging approach (Creese and Blackledge 2010; Wei and Hua 2013; García et al. 2016), although they might not be aware of it. This means that both languages are integrated in their communication system, and they might alternate between them depending on situation and subject. Cultural awareness is also important. Teachers use everyday situations and organized activities to stimulate development in both languages, as well as the general development of the children.

France: Balanced Bilingualism France is known as a centrist country with one official language: French. The use of French is required in mostly all social activities, including the private sector, as well as individual publications. To give a very brief idea of the language policy, the government promotes the use of French abroad, especially in the Francophonie, and does not approve of Anglicization. Vernacular languages are recognized but struggle for promotion (cf. Hawkey and Kasstan 2015; Reutner 2017; Haque 2020). The Russian language may be taught privately, and also as part of reciprocal language learning schemes (for instance, French is taught in bilingual and multilingual preschools in Russia under the auspices of the French Embassy), and as a part of French heritage (emigration from Russian-speaking countries has left a significant cultural legacy in France) (e.g., Kor Chahine 2019). The state preschools (called écoles maternelles – “mothers’ schools”) take children from the age of two and are free of charge. It has been difficult, therefore, to start a full-day bilingual program in these preschools; the majority of such preschools are private. In response to criticism of the quality of state education and the growing popularity of early bilingualism, in 2017/2018 the private preschool Alye parusa (“Scarlet Sails,” Paris) opened three groups for children with Russian as a home language. The number of children has grown each year (here and later, according to interviews with the headmaster, principal, and teachers of the preschool). Some children come from bilingual homes (their parents speak different languages), with either French or Russian as the dominant language. Others come from transnational Russian-speaking nomadic families who change countries according to their workplaces. They want a gradual transition to French and strong Russian skills for their children. A smaller-sized class, with 10–12 students instead of the usual 30–40, attracts some French-speaking parents, who prefer good teaching, a strong curriculum, and comfortable facilities for their child. From the pedagogical viewpoint, there are no differences between this school and regular state preschools in the French part of curriculum, and the Russian part is added. In this preschool, the pedagogical approach to language teaching presupposes that students speak Russian and French either 50% of the time, in turns, in the morning (a busier time) or in the afternoon (more relaxed). Teachers swap groups and try not to code-switch. Otherwise, the staff follow the pedagogical guidelines that apply to preschools in France. Russian-language teaching takes teachers’ own pedagogical experience into account, as well as materials used in Russia. Literacy in both

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languages is taught from the age of five (personal sessions, interviews with teachers and parents). For bilingual children coming from families where the parents speak separate languages, it is entirely natural that other people also address them in different languages. Other children copy this tactic. This model is dynamic, and it celebrates two pedagogical systems: French and Russian – it uses the full potential of teachers and takes account of the children’s and parents’ resources.

Germany: Expanding the Offer The twenty-first century has seen a tremendous growth in the number of bilingual preschool institutions in Germany. They are designed to support immigrant (e.g., Greek, Spanish, and Turkish), minority (e.g., Danish, Frisian, and Sorbian) languages and foreign language teaching (Gogolin et al. 2011; Niklas et al. 2011). In all major cities, there are a number of variants of Russian preschools. In Frankfurt, for example, the Nezabudka preschool (operating on a full-day basis since 2006) offers places for 178 children aged 1–6 in four localities. These preschools provide tuition for Russian-speaking, bilingual, and also German-speaking children from families who are interested in the Russian culture. The idea is to first solidify the home language (e.g., during the first year) and then gradually increase the L2 input (the ratio is regulated by the amount of communication in the respective language). Teachers are Russian- or German-speaking, and they always use only one language. The structured timetable allows for alternation of activities, free play, and teaching, with relaxation periods throughout the day. The focus is on language, exercise, music, dramatic expression, and preparation for school. The goal is to foster the multisided development of the children, build up their personalities, and strengthen their social skills, to enable them to successfully integrate into society. An interesting methodological approach is the involvement of grandparents who come to read books and dramatize them with the children. In order to unite teachers, parents, and children in their wish to be competent in many languages, they participate annually in the “run for multilingualism” (nezabudka.de, personal visits and observations). Perhaps the most well-known is the Mitra system of preschools, which focuses to a significant degree on collaborative work with parents (mitra-kindergarten.de; Protassova 2018b; Burd and Chirkova 2019). There are ten bilingual preschools in Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, and Potsdam, located in four different Länder (provinces) with their own legislation. Each Land decides upon the core curriculum, and the teacher decides upon the program. More than 1,000 children aged 8 weeks to 6 years attend the preschools. These institutions differ in size (from 33 to 232 children), location, and group structure (mixed-age or same-age groups). Parents are of various ethnic backgrounds, but families are predominantly Russian-speaking. In three preschools, Jewish groups offer lessons according to the Judaic traditional year (children attending them come from Jewish families who have come to Germany as contingent refugees from the FSU). Three of the preschools also

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have centers for families with additional activities (such as dance, music, theater, and parental consultations). Education is arranged in the proportion 50/50 in both languages in the following spheres: speech; alphabet; communication; personal and social development; system of moral values; basic mathematics; nature; technical skills; musical development; exercise and sports; the human body and health; and the environment. Native speakers or bilingual teachers observe the OPOL (one person one language) principle, sharing responsibilities within a co-teaching model. A representative of each language is almost always present in the group. Children are free to choose the language to use to address the adults or their peers. The input is regulated: Children from Russian-speaking homes are increasingly more exposed to German than Russian. There are systematic and consistent language lessons throughout the week and the year, based on play, teaching content, and children’s interests. During these activities, children concentrate on one language and use all their senses, while listening to, pronouncing, and repeating the most linguistically challenging expressions in chorus. They also have projects, hold child conferences, and involve parents in common activities (everything occurs in two languages). Questionnaires, evenings, excursions, events, lectures, etc. for parents help to ameliorate the atmosphere, and sculpt the curriculum. Children are regularly tested in their L1 and L2 in accordance with the regulations of each Land. The federal authorities invite preschools to participate in programs like “Language and Integration” for families with children under 3 years, and in its continuation “Language Kindergarten: Because Language is the Key to the World,” which is conducted with the same children when they grow older. Their objective is to demonstrate how important it is to have a strongly developed L1 for the future of the L2 and other languages, to support the well-being of the families who speak a language other than German, and to support inclusion (sprach-kitas.fruehechancen.de). In Berlin, teachers keep “developmental diaries” and use them as a basis for meetings with parents (twice a year). A pedagogical conference of all the preschools is held at the end of the year; the best projects are presented, and partners from other bilingual institutions are invited to attend. An evaluation of the preschools is arranged by external experts. It includes the organization of everyday life and how it enhances the children’s development, how teachers and children initiate projects and implement them, how the rooms and equipment influence all-sided child development, how educators observe and document children’s development, how collaboration with parents is progressing, how the transition from preschool to school is organized, and how they collaborate with the founders. Difficulties experienced include problems of staff turnover and an increase in the number of children with special needs. Close collaboration with families and meticulous regulation of input, continuation of bilingual education in school, which guarantees consistency of approach, and competition between preschools with different timetables and profiles all help to ensure satisfactory results.

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Plurilingualism in Turkey Turkey has a complex language policy (Küçükoğlu 2013) as well as a Russianspeaking minority (Antonova-Ünlü et al. 2015). Despite occasional political tensions between these two countries, Russians are investing in Turkish real estate due to its affordability (housing and living costs, rentability), the warm climate, exciting food, old culture, active lifestyle, nature, gardens, easy way to obtain citizenship, and the ability to start businesses. Thanks to commodification processes (cf. Muth 2017), Russian is an attractive language in Turkey, and it is increasingly studied at universities. (Commodification means here the role of the language on the market. There are many economic and ideological dimensions to using and teaching languages.) In the capital, Ankara, there are several weekend schools that provide lessons for preschool children in Russian. There are also full-day preschools in Ankara, Antalya, Alanya, and Istanbul (Sabitova 2019). In this chapter, we present the Mod koleji Bodrum preschool, located in the resort town of Bodrum, which operates on a plurilingual basis. The preschool serves both the international and the local communities. The town is home to large numbers of mixed Russian-Turkish families in which one of the parents (usually the mother) is Russian-speaking. Tourist destinations have their own special requirements for language learning, and in order to satisfy the families’ needs, preschools must offer the languages that are most in demand. The early start of a semi-immersion in English combined with an active acquisition of Russian ensures employment in the future (Tortumlu 2019). This preschool currently accommodates 90 children aged 2–5 in seven groups, and 31 children in classes for 6 and 7-year-olds. The staff comprises 25 teachers and 6 teaching assistants. The preschool is open 6 days a week. In each group, one teacher speaks English and another speaks Turkish. They remain with the children at all times and organize all activities in their respective tongues interchangeably. The groups move from one classroom to another, according to the subject, and receive lessons in art, music, natural science, and Russian. The structure and content of the Russian lessons depend on the audience and vary between L1 (for those who speak it at home) and L3 (for those who are already Turkish-English bilinguals). All materials needed for teaching in the Russian classroom are designed in the Russian style (folklore and design tendences) and are not used for other subjects. All children have the opportunity to communicate with each other in Russian as well (Tortumlu 2019). Forty-minute Russian lessons start from the age of three, are conducted three times a week, and continue with children aged 4–7 five times a week. Two teachers of Russian follow the content of the Turkish and English programs but with a delay; they present the same topics when they are already firmly acquired in the other languages. To start with, teachers use Turkish to explain their purposes, and gradually diminish the use of Turkish. Children with Russian as a home language are given special roles as team leaders, who work with the others to teach them pronunciation, vocabulary, and communication formulas. Parents receive information about their children’s achievements and the teachers’ objectives, as well as links to videos that can be used to demonstrate what was done during the lessons. In

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addition, the preschool offers lessons of 90 min once a week for bilingual children who do not attend the preschool daily, in order to maintain their Russian. The program comprises three blocks of 11 topics, which are repeated at a higher level, and include previously acquired material developed into new themes. The main methodology includes plays, games, and problem-solving based on communication and activity. Different mnemotechnics and visualization aids help children to retain and reproduce poems, fairytales, and songs. Many memo-schemes are used to analyze material learned during the lesson (a poem, a song), and the results are posted on the walls. Children display their talents by staging interactive shows for their parents several times a year (“Goodbye, Fall – Hello, Winter!”, “New Year Adventures,” and “March 8 – International Women’s Day”). Once a year, the whole preschool celebrates “The Week of Russian Culture” in spring, when everybody eats and plays in a Russian style. In addition, Russian markets, exhibitions, and music recitals are organized. Children move through the room in small groups, from one activity center to another. The meaning and grammar of poems and songs are explained (Tortumlu 2019). Thus, this model reproduces the languages needed in the near environment.

Several Types of Russian Preschools in the United States Many Russian-speaking families in the United States, both immigrants and expats, want their children to grow up in a Russian-speaking environment, where the “first language first” approach is used, that is, Russian is the main medium of instruction in the preschool, whereas English is taught during lessons organized several times a week. Parents prefer to have first-line quality care (for example, how food is prepared, how sleep is organized, what children can do outside, and how much music they can listen to; cf. Gapova 2004). In addition, parents would like their children to enjoy the same traditions as they had in their childhoods: New Year festivities and Women’s Day, as well as Maslenitsa (traditional Russian festival of Pancake Week). The most common and an easy-to-open type of early learning institution is a playgroup for 12–14 children, which is located in the teacher’s home. In such institutions, the educational side is usually not so important. For Russian-speaking parents, however, a solid program, bringing back their childhood memories of reading, learning by heart, drawing, dancing, singing, and similar activities, and including Content-Based Instruction/Content-Based Language Teaching/Content and Language Integrated Learning must be assured (Cortina-Pérez and Pino Rodríguez 2021). This means that all activities are also language-development oriented. Elderly educators have usually acquired their degrees in one of the FSU countries, whereas younger teachers may have attained their qualifications in the United States. All should also complete courses for day care in the United States. Preschools devise special features and activities to make their pedagogical missions more attractive. In San Fernando, the Little Stars preschool (littlestarskids. com) offers an encyclopedic hour, foreign languages, choreography, and tempering

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with cold water. The Little Bee (littlebeechildcare.com) favors the psychological approach of Russian experts (applying methods proposed in Russia, cf. Protassova 2021). Materials in the Russian language come mostly from Russia or other countries where publishing houses print in Russian, and other materials are bought in the United States from educational firms. Some institutions are confessional (Orthodox, Jewish, and Protestant of various denominations); others are not. Many offer night and weekend care (interviews with teachers and parents, personal observations). Once teachers have completed their extended education, they are allowed to open bigger institutions for more children. Thus, the Happy Notes preschool (happynotes. org) in Los Angeles specializes in the Russian language, literature, and culture and offers an abundance of music, song, theater, and dance activities. English and Hebrew lessons are provided. There are 30 children aged 18 months to 6 years in a special building with the grounds adapted to the children’s needs. Materials are arranged for each lesson and each day of the curriculum on which lessons are planned. Food is prepared and served at the center. Older children may come in the afternoon and on weekends for music and Russian language lessons (personal observations, interviews with teachers). The weekend Russian School of Orange County, California (rusoc.com), takes children aged 18 months to 5 years, among others. Children under age three may attend, together with their parents, weekly club activities, including active listening, observation, role play, sensomotoric games, Soft School, and broadening of the cognitive horizon. Children feel secure as they try to express their will, interact with others, acquire verbal skills, and become independent. The presentation of Russian folklore creates an authentic atmosphere (personal observations, interviews with teachers). The Bright Minds Center in New York City (brightmindsnyc.com/day care_preschool) creates a program for 2–5-year-old children. Children follow a timetable prepared for each group and meet with teachers of different subjects who always speak to them either in Russian or English; they do not mix the languages. By the age of four, children can already read, write, and communicate in two languages. They are also engaged in various art projects, using modeling clay, finger painting, and paper and textures (personal observation, interviews with teachers and parents). According to our observations, although school premises in the big cities are not always ideal, families seek to put their children in a form of preschool which provides development of the home language and offers introductory lessons in English. It is critical for Russian-speaking parents to organize their children’s intellectual and creative activities in the form of lessons.

Structured Communication in Finland The traditions and legacy of the past continue to shape contemporary approaches to language teaching and maintenance. The history of Russian early years education in Finland starts with the opening of a preschool at the Finnish-Russian school, which was created in 1955 out of the remainder of the émigré Russian schools, which had

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previously been schools in the Russian Empire. Initially, teachers were descendants of the local or émigré Russians. Finnish teachers were also employed. Later, some teachers were sent from the Soviet Union and implemented the programs that were familiar to them, focusing on Russian language maintenance and development. Other teachers spoke Finnish and regularly translated for those who did not understand Russian. Since the late 1980s, Russian or bilingual preschools opened in Turku, Vantaa, Kuopio, and elsewhere. In around a dozen Finnish preschools, for children aged from about 18 months to 6 years, Russian is taught as a foreign or a home language (also for children of bilingual families and families with more languages at home). The reasons for the success of Russian-Finnish bilingual education may lie in the economic ties between Russia and Finland, and in the number of Russian-speaking inhabitants (approximately 2% of the population). Teachers are usually speakers of Russian who received their education in Finland. They employ teaching materials and methods from both countries. Native speakers of Finnish are not always available, and therefore, the principle of the Finnish preschool program that children should learn Finnish in everyday communication, while the maintenance of the home language should be a family matter, is invalidated. Besides preschools, a variety of clubs and play groups offer activities in the Russian language (musikantit.fi, perhekeskusmaria.fi, cf. Viimaranta et al. 2018). In Helsinki, the Kalinka preschool operates as a charter preschool (cf. Protassova 1992, 2018a; Protassova and Miettinen 1992; Palviainen et al. 2016; Nenonen 2020) where teachers and children are originally Russian-speaking, Finnish-speaking, and bilingual in equal proportions. Every preschool draws up its own program based on government guidelines, and in Kalinka’s program, functional bilingual education and a child-centered approach are fundamental principles. Different types of activities are organized, which is typical of all immersion situations (cf. Henderson and Palmer 2015; Hernández 2015; Young 2016; Young and Tedick 2016), like sand, water, dough, construction, imaginative plays, music, dancing, singing, drawing, and fairytale projects with a lot of communication. Teachers support children’s ideas about what they want to learn next, in the way it is worded in the program. There are also special lessons and activities organized by bilingual teachers, who explain difficult contents to all children by means of translanguaging. In the following examples (from the video recordings by Protassova), we will illustrate the process of everyday communication employed when Finnish children learn Russian at the discourse level. Example 1. A Russian teacher (RT), who for the moment is responsible for ensuring that children wash their hands, uses words derived from the same stem, and repeats the forms of the future imperfect and past perfect tense, and the imperative forms: RT: A s mylom budesh’ myt’? (“And are you going to wash with the soap?”) Davaj, moj. (“Come on, wash.”) Pomyla? (“Did you wash?”) Idi, moj. (“Go on, wash.”) The RT brings another child to wash her hands, jumping and singing: Top-toptop... – (“stamp, stamp, stamp”). Davaj ruchki! (“Give me your hands!”) Smotri,

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rukava! (“Look, your sleeves!”) Vse? (“Is that all?”) Tak bystro? (“So quickly?”) Posmotri: pal’chik grjaznyj, ladoshka grjaznaja. (“Look: your finger is dirty; your palm is dirty.”) After washing the child’s hands, the teacher recites a Russian nursery rhyme while playing with the child’s hand. Example 1 shows how repeated everyday routines are adapted to the individual level of each child and continuously amplified by the RT, who uses short phrases, a variety of constructions, and includes short rhymes in her speech while talking to the children. Example 2. There are some minutes to go before lunch. Children are sitting at the tables, waiting for food. The RT asks: RT: Kto xochet moloko? (“Who wants milk?”) Finnish child (FC1): Ja! (“Me!”) RT: Ja xochu! (“I want some!”) FC1: Ja xochu! (“I want some!”) Another Finnish child (FC2): Ja xochu! (“I want!”) RT. I ty xochesh’? (“And you want some too?”) FC2: Ja xochu moloko! (“I want milk!”) RT.: A kto xochet kefir? (“And who wants kefir?”) FC2: Net ja kefir. (“Not I kefir” – an erroneous use of negation, borrowed from the Finnish construction.) RT: Sami, u tebja est’ vilka? (“Sami, have you got a fork?”) Chto, pokazhi, gde vilka. (“What, show me where the fork is.”) The child searches for his fork; other children want to help him. FC3: Ei vilkaa! (“No” – in Finnish – “fork” – in Russian, probably with a Finnish flection of the partitive case.) RT: Netu vilki? (“Is there no fork?” – A genitive form is used in Russian.) Vot ona, vilka! (“Here it is, the fork!”) Example 2 illustrates how differently children react to the Russian discourse of the RT. They understand everything and use various answers: Some produce accurate phrases, short or slightly longer, and some combine Finnish and Russian words and morphemes, which is typical of bilingual speech practices. Example 3. The RT often uses a book made by the children themselves, illustrating the story of a marriage between a fly and a mosquito, a poem by Korney Chukovsky that all Russian children aged 3–5 know by heart. RT: Nu chto, Pasi, budem chitat’ knizhku? (“So, are we going to read the book, Pasi?”) FC: Da. (“Yes.”) RT: A gde ona? (“But where is it?”) FC: En mä tie. (“I don’t know.” In Finnish.) The teacher starts reading the lines; the child finishes them, showing what they are speaking about.

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RT: Muxa-muxa... FC: Cokotuxa! RT: Pozolochennoe... FC: Brjuxo! (and so on) Example 3 confirms that reading a poem in a L2 can provoke plausible contributions from children with a different L1 in the same way as with children who acquire it as L1. Example 4. A bilingual teacher (BT) is playing with airplanes, helicopters, and dolls with Finnish children in Russian (a Russian language play lesson). First, he names and explains the situation in Finnish, then he continues in Russian and only switches to Finnish if children cannot understand him. BT: Eto u nas mal’chik ili devochka? (“Is it a boy or a girl we have here?”) FC: Mal’chik. (“A boy.”) BT: Mal’chik. Eto malen’kij mal’chik ili bol’shoj mal’chik? (“A boy. Is he a little boy or a big boy?”) FC: Malen’kij. (“Little.”) BT: Malen’kij mal’chik. (“A little boy.”) FC: Malen’kij. (“Little.”) BT: Chto malen’kij mal’chik delaet – on sidit. (“What is the little boy doing – he is sitting.” The BT shows what he is speaking about.) FC: Sidit. (“Sitting.”) BT: Ili stoit? (“Or standing?”) FC: Stoit. (“Standing.”) The boys then run toward the table, playing with their planes and helicopters, flying at different heights. After the lesson, the RT plays with two Finnish girls individually, using the same objects: RT: Ty xochesh’ igrat’, Sonja? (“Do you want to play, Sonja?”) FC: Da. (“Yes.”) RT.: Ty xochesh’ byt’ vertoletom ili samoletom? (“Do you want to be a helicopter or a plane?”) FC: Samoletom. (“A plane.” – The case form is repeated.) RT: Samoletom. A ty xochesh’ letat’ vysoko ili nizko? (“A plane. And you want to fly high or low?”) FC: Nizko! (“Low!”) RT: Nizko. Nu, poleteli nizko. Zhzhzh. Letim na stol. Teper’ kuda? (“Low. So, let’s fly low. Zhzhzh. We’re flying onto the table. Now where?”) Example 4 shows how the lexis presented by the BT is practiced and expanded by the RT during play sessions with toys. Example 5. A bilingual teacher has filled two wash basins with warm and cold water. He organizes a playing session with different objects swimming in warm and cold water. He begins:

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BT: Jouni, eto xolodnaja ili teplaja voda? Xolodnaja? (“Jouni, is this water cold or warm? Cold?” – in Russian) FC: (touching the water): Xolodnaja. (“Cold” – in Russian.) BT.: A eto? (“And this?” Rus.) FC: Kuuma. (“Warm.” In Finnish.) BT.: Teplaja voda. (“Warm water.” Rus.) FC: Teplaja. (“Warm.” Rus.) In such situations as Example 5, children learn from the teacher and from each other how to employ lexis and combine words with each other. Language is adjusted for learning purposes. Children’s contribution, even during the one-word period in second language acquisition, is great, and they understand and identify much more than they can say. The teachers teach their languages as mother tongues and as second languages, they divide the group in order to organize the most useful activities for the children, and the bilingual teachers explain content for those who need it or arrange special lessons for language teaching. They do not support Russian without teaching Finnish, and vice versa. Most of the time, children play and learn together. This section proves that a substantial quantity of specially adjusted input presented in motivated situations that appeal to children’s interests can support the learning of both L1 and L2 (sometimes even taking the first steps into L3). The results depend on the amount of language that is relayed to the child and their chances to use familiar words and phrases functionally.

New Projects There are a number of international projects currently ongoing concerning the early diagnostics of the linguistic achievements of Russian-speaking bilinguals (within Bi-/Multilingualism and Specific Language Impairment, bi-sli.org actions, e.g., lexical development Łuniewska et al. 2016). The research group under the leadership of Natalia Gagarina compares language development in Russian and Turkish language preschools in Germany (publications appear on the website bivem.leibniz-zas. de/de/forschung/publikationen). The group shows what linguistic results can be obtained on average. Dace Markus in Latvia studies the acquisition of Latvian at preschool level in the Latvian Language national research program (2018–2021) (Markus et al. 2021). In Estonia, Anna Golubeva conducts her research into teachers’ education for bilingual immersion preschools, also in the Language Immersion Network for Early Childhood (LINEC, linecweb.wordpress.com). The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly increased the volume of online preschool teaching in numerous countries. This also applies to lessons of L1 and L2. Educators are developing totally new materials and refreshing the digitized material already available. These include interactive ways of drawing, playing, instructing, and discussing what has been demonstrated, seen, done, said, etc. It is not easy to retain

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the close attention of 2–3-year-olds for long periods of time and to make them understand what to do. Therefore, physical activities and valuable help from the family are needed. In addition, educators organize courses for parents (e.g., rosinkatokyo.com/biligvy-doshkolniki, vikaraskina.com) and exchange experience of online-teaching. There are electronic materials and collections of online resources for early teaching (e.g., rus4chld.pushkininstitute.ru/#/, pushkininstitute.ru/videos/ 486, russianstepbystepchildren.com, petralingua.com, russianforfree.com, dinolingo. com/learn-russian-for-kids).

Critical Issues and Topics Research into the teaching and learning of Russian as a heritage language is still in its incipiency. In practice, there is a large spectrum of functioning language models. Children are usually assessed in each country in accordance with general regulations, and mostly in the dominant language of the environment, not in the home language. Researchers try to persuade the authorities that both languages should be tested, otherwise the stakeholders may be given a one-sided picture of a child’s development and skip or overlook achievements or problems the child experiences in the second language due to the lack of input (e.g., bi-sli.org). However, personal bilingual development covers a longtime span and cannot be completed in childhood. Some studies of the family language policy have shown that parents who decide on educational trajectories for their children are usually more interested in a psychologically comfortable childhood and all-sided development than in balanced bilingualism (e.g., Schwartz and Verschik 2013; Nicoladis and Montanari 2016; Haque 2019). They prefer to start with an intensified teaching of the L1 and a low-profile teaching of the L2, as they are afraid that two languages at the same time would be too much. Yet, in a bilingual situation, both are equally important. Quite a few publications are reports on teaching practice and advise how to deal with various problems of thematic content and children’s behavior (e.g., Hugentobler and Sorvacheva 2012). There are not many specially designed didactic materials at the preschool level for children studying Russian as a foreign or home language. Sergeeva (2014) suggests teaching Russian as a foreign language in the traditional method of planned lessons, including games and play, while Protassova and Rodina (2011) propose a more structured approach to addressing children’s unique developmental needs in early childhood. Until now, it seems that any materials were used for teaching, and anyone who appeared to be a native speaker of Russian could start to give private lessons. When the new regulations take effect, it will gradually change. Some educators use logopedic materials, and others begin to teach the alphabet and literacy as early as possible. Most teachers combine educational materials from various sources (published in Russia or locally) and design their own lessons and activities. Different foundations in Russia have discovered ways to contact educational institutions

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abroad and try to influence curriculum content, which is not always suitable in every country. There are opportunities for teachers to meet, exchange ideas and experience, analyze their pedagogical work, assess new trends, and discuss points of interest or concern. Transnational online conferences have grown into regular events (e.g., Russkij mir “Russian World” russkiymir.ru/en, Rossotrudnichestvo rs.gov.ru/en, Pushkin State Russian Language Institute pushkin.institute/en). Some organizational tendencies seem to emerge repeatedly in different countries. In countries with recent Russian-speaking immigration, a critical mass of children with Russian must be reached, and then a preschool emerges because there are already play groups for children or a functioning school. The principals are often mothers who are keen for their children to maintain Russian, and who treat this as educational entrepreneurship. The Russian emigrants from the previous waves of migration support the foundation of such centers juridically or financially. Existing bilingual preschools with other combinations of languages serve as models. With growing immigration, preschools split into branches and develop into networks. Many parents overestimate the opportunities for gaining splendid results immediately and fail to understand how bilingual education works. The Russian-speaking teachers often consider themselves highly qualified with inherent individual standards and personal dedication, and the results of their work are the children’s achievements, which they showcase to the parents during festivities (Rybickaja 2016). As we see, in one country, bilingual education is an easy way for parents to temporarily free themselves of their children; in a second, it is a state policy to convert all citizens to the state language; and in a third, it supplements the family language policy or ideology by ensuring the same cultural approach as in the country of origin, or by providing a safe environment.

Future Research Directions Under the cultural and geographic diversity of a country that straddles east and west, the Russian tradition propagates an integrated perspective or synthetic approach to knowledge, combining humanities and experimental sciences. Ideologies influence the composition of preschool institutions and children’s achievements. In the case of Russian preschools, parents often prefer a Russian-style type of education over the others (e.g., Meng 2006; Ryazanova-Clarke 2014; Menter 2021). The increasing amount of Russian language teaching at the preprimary level globally provides an important opportunity to study cross-culturally the influences of different ideologies on bilingual children’s ultimate attainment of language proficiency, especially if the results can be checked again later in school. In immigration, preschool teachers get a second chance to implement their views on an ideal childhood. Therefore, it is important to analyze what kind of pedagogical attitudes can be observed, and how teaching materials can represent the Russian culture. In addition, it would be interesting to measure parents’ satisfaction with regard to our overview of parental engagement or disengagement and interactions with teachers in Russian-operating preschools in different countries. Another direction

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may be an exploration of the role of children’s beliefs and attitudes toward their bilingual development in the light of families’ educational beliefs.

Conclusion Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, bilingual early years education has changed its character and objectives in the post-Soviet diaspora communities. Education involving bilingual teaching has become more accessible and needed. We believe that successful teaching means satisfied children and parents – their decision to continue bilingual education after preschool. Evaluation of competence in the home language can be carried out on the level of communication as well as in different psycholinguistic experiments. Examples of the successful teaching and learning of two and three languages at preschool age are many, and in the big cities or using Internet, each family can choose what works best for them. This chapter is based more on the personal observations of the authors and related studies. It shows that bilingual preschools are state, private, and community initiatives. They vary between full-time, after-hours, and weekend formats. Teaching models are influenced by state/national language policies and the language policies of the educational institutions, as well as micro-/local community initiatives and the aspirations of parents as Russian-speaking community members. This results in a diversity of models and their flexible transformative nature. In some models, Russian is the language of instruction, the language of everyday communication, with immersion in another language, an additional foreign language, a minority language, transition to the dominant language, or simply a first language. It is mainly taught in a structured way, and in some models in mixed two-way classrooms. The “first language first” principle is popular in Russian preschools in the United States and Israel, with the dominant language of the surroundings being taught as a subject to various degrees. Sweden has a transitional model of teaching. In Latvia, the goal of the government is to have Latvian-speaking preschools, whereas Russian-speaking parents prefer their children to remain predominantly Russian-speaking and acquire Latvian gradually. In Estonia, immersion programs invite preschoolers to three types of language teaching. Early language learning is gaining popularity. Young immigrant professionals, the main source of the growing Russian-speaking population abroad, are interested in keeping Russian as the home language because they join the Russian-speaking transnational communities all over the world. For those who work from home, any country with a good climate may be the right place, and Russianspeaking communities are growing around the world. Countries with Russians as historic minorities may already have an established system of language maintenance, and modernize it, for example, by teaching online. The results show that the greater the discipline and positive attitude among teachers, the better the children’s achievements. In the long run, however, a flexible enthusiastic attitude may produce good achievements as well. The proportion of the time and money invested may vary from country to country, and thus affect the outcomes.

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Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education in Australia ▶ Early Language Education in Israel ▶ Grammatical Development Within a Context of Early Bilingual Education and Language Support Programs ▶ Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada ▶ The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education

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Dual Language Education Models and Research in Early Childhood Education in the USA

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Language Policies and Dual Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Educational Outcomes of Children in DL Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Program Type: Amount of Exposure to English/Target Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instructional Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Involvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

With the ever-increasing population of young diverse children in the USA who enter preschool speaking a language other than English, there has been concern about developing effective educational models. Dual language models can be effective if they are conceptually grounded on a foundation of bilingualism across all components of a dual language model (e.g., vision, design, curriculum, assessment, and staff) and if they adhere to the principle of additive bilingualism, which means that all children can acquire a second language at no cost to their first language. Research in dual language models shows that young linguistically and culturally diverse children who participate in dual language models are more likely to develop bilingual and biliteracy skills, to develop stronger socio-emotional skills, and to achieve at levels that are at least comparable to, and usually K. Lindholm-Leary (*) San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_11

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higher than, their comparison peers who are educated in English mainstream classes. However, it often takes several years to detect these greater benefits of dual language over English mainstream instruction for linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse children. While research indicates that dual language education is effective, there are a number of critical issues that must be addressed in designing effective programs for young culturally and linguistically diverse learners, including programmatic, instructional practices, language diversity, and family involvement issues. Considerable research is needed with young diverse children in the areas of model design and instructional practices, and bilingual language and socio-emotional development. Keywords

Dual language · Bilingual education · Bilingualism · Early childhood education · Achievement · Diverse learners

Introduction In the USA, preschool attendance is optional and begins at age 3 or 4, though there are various infant and day care programs beginning as early as 6 weeks of life. There are a variety of public and private preschool models providing educational experiences throughout the USA, serving about 40% of 3-year olds and 65% of 4-year olds (US Department of Education 2019). Mandatory school attendance at the elementary level begins in kindergarten, at age 5. Though there are public preschool and elementary programs that even exist within the same school, there is a major chasm between the two worlds of preschool education and elementary education, with different sets of policies, administrators, and education standards, curricula, and assessments. Preschoolers may vary substantially in important ways that can impact decisions about education models for the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic development of children in the USA. In the USA, children are classified by educators as they enter school into one of two major groups based on language use at home: (1) monolingual native English speakers who are from homes in which English is primarily spoken, and (2) potentially multilingual children who are from homes in which one or more languages other than English are spoken. The major reason for this classification is to determine who is proficient in English and who needs English language services at school. Educational policies assume that children from monolingual homes are proficient in English, but the policies require assessment in English language proficiency for children from multilingual homes. The National Center for Educational Statistics shows that 12.1 million (or 23%) of school-aged children (ages 5–17) spoke a language other than English at home (The Annie E. Casey Foundation 2019). Yet, it is not clear how many preschool children speak a language other than English at home before school entry, though there are estimates of between 20% and 25% of preschoolers. These children are referred to as dual language learners (DLL) in the preschool literature in the USA,

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though they are referred to as English learners once they enter elementary school. In 2016, one-third of children enrolled in the Head Start program, which is a preschool program serving low-income children, were dual language learners (US Department of Education 2016). DLLs are the fastest growing population in the USA, and they are a diverse group varying in terms of ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds (National Academies 2017). In terms of the nativity status of DLLs, about 23% were foreign born and 77% US born; however, about 85% of children are DLL despite being born in the USA (Zong and Batalova 2015). The top five languages spoken by about 80% of the population of DLLs in the USA include Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Hmong (Zong and Batalova 2015). Furthermore, research in the USA shows that DLLs from economically disadvantaged families or parents with low formal education score lower on tests of academic achievement or readiness skills (Halle et al. 2009). Another important factor impacting entering preschoolers is their level of English language proficiency assessed by both oral language proficiency and preliteracy skills. One significant study conducted by the California State Department of Education (2011) examined the English listening, speaking, reading, and writing proficiency at school entry of 5- to 6-year-old DLLs compared to native English speakers (NES). Results showed that most 5–6-year old DLLs start kindergarten at beginning levels, though surprisingly many NES begin school with low levels of proficiency in their one and only language of English. These findings are important for two reasons. First, not all NES have full proficiency at a level considered appropriate for school entry even in listening and speaking, and second, DLLs are far behind their NES peers in kindergarten and even more so in preschool (Lindholm-Leary 2014). As mentioned previously, DLLs in the USA are diverse, but NES children are also diverse in terms of their ethnicity, language variety/registers spoken, and socioeconomic status and/or parental education. Thus, some preschools include a diversity of economically advantaged and disadvantaged (low-income) European Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, while other preschools are more homogeneous in their populations of children. The great majority of DLLs are Hispanic Spanish-speakers, who are typically low income and have parents with lower levels of education (Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2016), which is likely why most research on DLLs in the USA is focused on Hispanic Spanish-speaking children. As a consequence, DLLs from other cultural and language backgrounds, or socioeconomic groups, are poorly represented in the research literature in the USA, especially in the early childhood education literature.

National Language Policies and Dual Language Education In the USA, there is no legislation that provides for any national language, though there have been many efforts to make English the official language. The USA has gone through time periods of supporting bilingual education for immigrant groups

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(e.g., German for German immigrants, Spanish for Cuban immigrants), such as during the Civil Rights era from the 1960s to the 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s when many bilingual programs were supported and funded by legislation, though largely for children in early elementary grade levels (K-2). At other times, largely during periods of immigration and national economic strains, such as in 2000–2010, there were state and national policies promoting English as the language of instruction, with little or no support for bilingual education. In this current age, there is increasing support for bilingual education. For example, The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC 2009) and the major preschool organization of Head Start (2015) both include position statements encouraging language and literacy development in the child’s first language and developing major concepts in the child’s first language (L1) and within a cultural context the children will understand. These position statements are very positive toward bilingualism and suggest that the national early childhood education organizations value bilingualism. However, to date, there is no overall policy statement about the value of bilingualism, or the importance of learning a second language for native English-speaking preschoolers. Instead, the L1 has been used to build foundational support in language and literacy, but largely to promote English language proficiency (National Academies 2017). So, even programs designed for DLLs to maintain their L1 are far more concerned with English language proficiency than with multilingualism, as demonstrated by the lack of accountability and assessments for L1 proficiency. That may change with the Seal of Biliteracy, which is legislation that has been passed in 40 of the 50 US states to provide students with a seal on their high school diploma when they demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English (https://sealofbiliteracy.org). The predominant goal for English language development is demonstrated by the services provided to DLL children at the preschool level. According to one of the few nationwide studies on services provided to DLL children (Zehler et al. 2003), about 59% of children received English instruction with varying levels (from none to considerable) of additional English language support services, and 40% received some instruction through their L1 with differing levels (from none to considerable) of additional English language support. In the years since that study, there has been change away from extensive DLL services and toward mainstream instruction and movement toward more instruction in English with little or no support in the L1 (Goldenberg 2008). Further, Spanish-speaking DLLs, the largest group of DLLs, are more likely to be provided with instruction through their L1; there are very few dual language programs that provide instruction through the L1 for other language groups, which means that most of these children receive English-only programs (Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund 2008). That is particularly true at the preschool level. Universal preschool, which provides all children the opportunity to attend preschool and is common in many other countries, has been hailed as a promising approach for promoting English language proficiency and for closing the large academic achievement test gap that divides children across ethnic, racial, linguistic, and economic backgrounds in the USA. While universal preschool for 3–5-year old

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children is a concept that is highly touted in the USA, it has not received much legislative or funding support, especially at a national level. However, this focus may change in the future with more educators noting the achievement gap in readiness skills in the preschool years for DLLs (Barnett and Hustedt 2003; Frede and Barnett 2011; Haskins and Rouse 2005). Whether or not US policies move toward universal preschool, the language of preschool is clear; that is, the language of instruction at the preschool and early elementary levels is primarily English for all children. Thus, the education model is English mainstream, which provides instruction only in English to both DLL and NES children with the objective of promoting English language development and academic achievement in reading and math as measured in English. Education models that include English and another language for instruction are typically referred to as bilingual or dual language (DL) models, though the preferred terminology is currently dual language. These models are available in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Hmong, Arabic, Armenian, French, and German. The major types of dual language models for discussion here include the following (to be described in more detail subsequently): • Developmental bilingual education (traditional bilingual, maintenance, or late exit bilingual) is a form of dual language education in which the L1 of a particular language group (e.g., Spanish) and English are used for literacy and academic instruction beginning in preschool or K (ages 4– or 5–6) and continuing typically through elementary school. These enrichment models are for DLLs only and aim for bilingual language proficiency in oral and written language in addition to academic achievement. In reality, many preschool models include some use of the home language for communicative exchanges, but no development of academic language or prebiliteracy in any systematic way. • Two-Way dual language (aka two-way bilingual immersion, dual language, and two-way immersion) is similar to developmental bilingual models in that children receive integrated language and academic instruction in a target language and in English beginning in preschool and/or kindergarten (ages 4– or 5–6) and continuing until the end of elementary school and, in some cases, into middle and high school. These models differ from developmental bilingual primarily in the population in the classroom; that is, two-way programs include both native speakers of a designated target language, who are usually DLLs, and native speakers of English, who are proficient in English and might or might not speak at least some of the target language. Because there are native speakers of each language in two-way DL, native-language models are available for both groups of L2 learners. (The DLLs do not include children who do not speak at least the target language or English.) – There are two main variations of the two-way models: 50/50 in which each language (English and target) is used for about 50% of the instructional day at each grade level; and 90/10 in which the target language is used for 90% of the instructional day in preschool/kindergarten and grade one; from grade 2, more

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English is added at each grade level until grade four or five, when each language is used for about half the instructional day. In many 90/10 Asian language programs (e.g., Korean, Chinese), the programs begin as 80/20 rather than 90/10 but are otherwise similar to 90/10 models. While these various models exist, English mainstream is the favored model from a policy perspective even though many educational organizations and educators recognize the value of at least some L1 instruction in preschool for DLLs. The pressure to promote English proficiency over L1 proficiency for DLLs is considerable, with some states developing English language arts standards at the preschool level, but no accountability or professional development for teachers instructing in L1. The accountability for English language development and lack of professional development in other languages mean that many DLL preschoolers experience English-only instructional models. In sum, while there is increasing enthusiasm for more government funding of preschool programs for all children 3–5 years of age, the USA has not yet embraced universal preschool. With the growing interest in universal preschool, there is increasing support for dual language programs for DLL and NES children. The next section will provide the major theoretical concepts underlying dual language programs and the research associated with the language and academic readiness outcomes for children who participate in dual language programs.

Main Theoretical Concepts There are two major principles underlying dual language models. The first underlying principle refers to the foundation of bilingualism across all components of a DL program. There must be a clear recognition of the relationship of bilingualism to achievement and socio-emotional development. For young DLLs, this foundation must include understanding that a strong first language can serve as an important underpinning for the second language and can lead to stronger achievement and second language development over time (e.g., de Jong and Bearse 2011; Espinosa 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014, 2018; National Academies 2017). In addition, development of the child’s first language and culture leads to stronger socio-emotional development and identity formation (Espinosa 2014; National Academies 2017). Within this concept of bilingual foundations is the theoretical notion of how two languages are related to one another. According to Cummins’ (1979) linguistic interdependence hypothesis, some features of the first language can be transferred to the second language during the process of second language acquisition. Thus, preschoolers coming to school with their first language can use their L1 linguistic knowledge to help them develop the L2, so it is important to promote strong L1 development within the DL program. The second underlying principle in DL programs entails the concept of “additive bilingualism” – that all children are provided the opportunity to acquire a second language at no cost to their home language (Lambert 1984). Considerable research over several decades demonstrates that additive bilingual programs are associated

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with content area achievement and proficiency in the second language and the home language (e.g., Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2001; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010) and improved self-esteem and cross-cultural attitudes (de Jong and Bearse 2011; Lindholm-Leary 2016; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). Conversely, subtractive bilingualism – meaning that a second language replaces the native language – has negative effects on the school performance of many DLL children (Lambert 1984). Research shows that native language loss is associated with lower levels of second language attainment, scholastic underachievement, psychosocial disorders, and communicative and socio-emotional intergenerational disconnection (Espinosa 2014; Hammer et al. 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014; Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; Montrul 2016; National Academies 2017). Overall, the two main conceptual principles of dual language are associated with a recognition of the importance of building a strong foundation in the L1 and with an approach supporting additive bilingualism or enabling children to learn a second language at no cost to their L1. As the next section on major contributions indicates, the DL programs based on these two conceptual principles promote higher levels of language development and academic readiness.

Major Contributions There is considerable research on outcomes in DL programs, though much of this research focuses on academic achievement outcomes at the later elementary or secondary levels (grades 4–8) and the majority of the research is targeted toward DLLs, since there is concern in determining whether these children should be placed in DL programs or whether they would be better served in English mainstream programs. This section will address two major research findings related to children in DL programs.

Educational Outcomes of Children in DL Programs Overall, research, including large-scale reviews of the research literature on DLLs, indicates that research and evaluation studies conducted in the early years of a program (Preschool – grade 3, or age 8–9) typically reveal that children in DL programs score below grade level (and sometimes very low) and perform either lower than or equivalent to their comparison group peers (Genesee et al. 2006; Jepsen 2009; Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010, 2014; Oller et al. 2007). In contrast, almost all evaluations conducted at the end of elementary school and in secondary school showed that the educational outcomes of bilingually educated children were at least comparable to, and usually higher than, their comparison peers (Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; LindholmLeary and Genesee 2010, 2014; Steele et al. 2017; Thompson 2015). These findings would suggest that it might be difficult to detect any advantages of DL at early grade levels, though there are a few studies that show differences favoring preschool children educated in DL over English settings (Barnett et al.

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2007; Espinosa 2013). Three possible reasons that stronger positive effects for the emergent bilinguals may be more difficult to identify at early grades are that: (1) Many DLL children are from homes where parents have lower levels of formal education and do not engage in literacy activities that prepare them for the language of (pre)school (National Academies 2017); (2) children need to more fully develop their bilingual capacities in order to see the advantages of bilingualism on second language development (e.g., Oller et al. 2007); and (3) in the USA, the strong focus on assessment in English at all grade levels may not provide sufficient time for emergent bilinguals to acquire the necessary academic language skills to achieve at expected levels. Research clearly indicates that a strong first language can serve as an important foundation for the second language and can lead to stronger achievement and second language development at the preschool (Barnett et al. 2007; Espinosa 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014; Lopez and Greenfield 2004; National Academies 2017; Oller et al. 2007; Schwartz 2014) and elementary levels (Genesee et al. 2006; Goldenberg 2008; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010; Lindholm-Leary and Hernández 2011; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008; National Academies 2017; Thompson 2015). Further, these results have been noted both within the USA and in other countries as well with different language combinations (e.g., Genesee 2016; Paradis et al. 2015; Schwartz 2014). The assumption of many educators is that DLL and NES children need only to develop English proficiency in order to achieve at higher levels, and they do not even consider L1 proficiency for DLLs or second language development for NES. It is true that English language proficiency is important as academic oral English proficiency correlates positively with English reading achievement (Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2001, 2016; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008; National Academies 2017). However, it is important to note two things. First, oral L1 (e.g., Spanish) proficiency is associated with L1 (e.g., Spanish) reading achievement (Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2001, 2016; Lindholm-Leary and Hernández 2011; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). Second, consistent with the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis, the stronger the children’s L1 (e.g., Spanish) and English, the stronger is their academic achievement. Thus, both in DL programs and in other educational contexts, studies have shown that more balanced bilingual Hispanic children tend to have higher achievement scores, grade point averages, and educational expectations than their English-dominant or Spanish-dominant Hispanic peers (e.g., de Jong and Bearse 2011; Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2016; Lindholm-Leary and Hernández 2011, 2018). This is an important finding because it demonstrates that oral English language proficiency is necessary, but not sufficient, for children to excel scholastically; that is, bilingual language proficiency is more likely to enable school success (Collins et al. 2014). Some have attributed this educational success to the positive impact of bilingualism on cognition and academic achievement (e.g., Collins et al. 2014; Genesee et al. 2006; Lindholm-Leary 2001, 2018). Although it is harder to document empirically, it may also be likely that how children are positioned in the classroom has an important impact on their socio-emotional development and achievement. In English

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mainstream programs, DLL children’s L1 is seen as a liability to be overcome, but in DL programs DLL children are positioned as “those who know” during L1 lessons, which can have a positive impact on their sense of ability, their engagement, and their learning. As Schwartz and Gorbatt (2018) have demonstrated, the role of DLLs as language experts occurs not only as “teachers” of the language of interaction, but also as language mediators and social mediators between ethnic or language groups. The topic of language loss or attrition has not received much investigative attention. However, it is an important topic as researchers have consistently reported the loss and/or attrition of the L1 among bilingual children who are instructed only or largely through English (Espinosa 2013, 2014; Hammer et al. 2014; Jackson et al. 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014; Mancilla-Martinez and Lesaux 2011). These results hold for young children in preschool through early elementary school, for Spanish and non-Spanish (e.g., Cantonese, Southeast Asian) speakers, and for oral and literate proficiencies. Furthermore, some researchers have even reported that some children who began as dominant or monolingual Spanish speakers suffered so much language loss that they were considered not proficient in their L1 according to oral language proficiency assessments (Lindholm-Leary 2014; Mancilla-Martinez and Lesaux 2011). Montrul (2008) has argued that preschool and elementary schoolaged bilinguals are at risk for L1 attrition because of the lack of support for the L1 in the (pre)school environment and because of the introduction of the L2 into the home environment which often impedes further development of the L1.

Program Type: Amount of Exposure to English/Target Language Some educators argue that DLL and low-income NES children need considerable English at preschool because research suggests that the English language abilities of children in kindergarten are predictive of their academic achievement trajectories through elementary school (Collins et al. 2014; Halle et al. 2012; Han 2012). In contrast, research shows that for young Spanish-speaking DLLs, proficiency in their home language of Spanish predicts the rate of English language growth; thus, children with low Spanish language proficiency show slower growth than children with average or high Spanish proficiency (Jackson et al. 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014). Furthermore, research also shows that many DLLs enter preschool and kindergarten with low levels of proficiency in their home language (Espinosa 2014; Lindholm-Leary 2014; Paez et al. 2007). These findings have important implications for discussions of appropriate dual language models in the USA, especially for young DLLs. Various researchers have studied whether more English in the instructional day is associated with higher levels of language proficiency and reading in English and/or whether more target language in the instructional day is associated with higher levels of language proficiency and reading achievement in the target language (for reviews, see August and Shanahan 2006; Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2013; LindholmLeary and Borsato 2006; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). Briefly, this research has compared programs with more or less

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English in the instructional day, for example, English mainstream (more English) vs. DL (less English) programs or 50/50 (more English) vs. 90/10 (less English) DL programs. This research is consistent in showing that children who spend less time in English in DL programs tend to score at similar levels as their peers who receive more English; this is true for level of English language proficiency (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), reclassification rates from nonproficient to fluent proficient, and reading achievement measured in English. Further, these findings are observed as early as preschool (Barnett et al. 2007; Lindholm-Leary 2014; Paez et al. 2007). Furthermore, as noted previously, differences between DL and non-DL children that appear to favor non-DL peers tend to disappear by later elementary grades, and some studies show that children in DL programs may outperform their peers in non-DL English mainstream programs in English (Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). Thus, these findings corroborate previous reviews of research in DL and in immersion education for NESs showing that greater amounts of instruction through English are not necessarily associated with higher levels of language proficiency in English or higher reading or math achievement in English (Genesee 2004; Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2013; Lindholm-Leary 2016, 2019; Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010, 2014; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008; Steele et al. 2017). These findings are consistent even controlling for child background characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status, ethnic background). However, with respect to proficiency in the target language, comparative studies show that children demonstrate higher levels of target language proficiency when they participate in programs with higher levels of the target language, that is, in 90/ 10 compared to 50/50 programs (Lindholm-Leary 2001, 2016, 2019; LindholmLeary and Borsato 2006; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). Similarly, in terms of literacy in the target language, studies show that reading achievement measured in Spanish is higher in 90/10 than 50/50 programs, especially for DLL children (Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2013; Lindholm-Leary and Hernández 2011, 2018; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). This research is consistent with research in Canada and elsewhere, showing that NES children in French total immersion programs have higher levels of language proficiency in the target language than children in French partial (or 50/50) immersion programs (Genesee 2004; Genesee and Lindholm-Leary 2013). Two comparative studies of children in DL vs. English-only mainstream preschools have shown similar results largely favoring those in DL programs. In one of the few studies of preschool two-way programs, Barnett et al.’s (2007) study comparing DLLs in 50/50 two-way DL preschool programs vs. English-only programs indicated that the DLL children demonstrated significant and larger gains in Spanish vocabulary and phonological awareness in English and Spanish compared to their peers in English-only instruction, though English vocabulary results did not favor one model over the other. Similarly, in comparing children who received DL vs. English-only programs across 3 years from preschool to grade 2, LindholmLeary (2014) reported two important findings. First, English language development was not negatively impacted by bilingual instruction; that is, children who were

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instructed bilingually across preschool-1 grade levels (i.e., 3 years) did not differ significantly in their English language development from children who received all English instruction during preschool for 1 year or children who received all English instruction during kindergarten and first grade (i.e., 2 years). Further, children who spent all 3 years in a bilingual model made more growth across the grades than their peers who were instructed only in English during 1 year of preschool followed by bilingual instruction for 2 years, in grades K-1. These results suggest for English language development that there is no disadvantage to being instructed bilingually and no significant advantage in English language proficiency to being instructed only through English. A second important finding was that among children who received bilingual instruction in preschool, those who scored as mostly proficient in Spanish on a Spanish language assessment test, scored significantly higher in English language development than children who scored as moderate proficiency, in Spanish on the same Spanish language assessment test. Such findings are congruent with other research on cross-linguistic transfer in showing that the level of competency in the L1 influences the level of L2 competency (for reviews, see Barac et al. 2014; National Academies 2017). In summary, overall, children in DL programs show good educational progress, especially when compared to their peers in English only mainstream programs. Also, this research is consistent with the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis in showing that: (1) Children who were instructed in DL programs were as likely to demonstrate progress in English language proficiency and (pre)literacy development compared to their peers instructed only in English or combinations of DL and English only in preschool or kindergarten/first grade; (2) children who scored as more proficient in their L1 scored at higher levels in both their L1 and English compared to children who had lower levels of proficiency in their L1; and (3) because their L1 was developed in DL programs, DL children were less likely to show signs of L1 attrition by second and third grades. While these studies have shed greater light on educational outcomes of children in DL programs, they have not been as informative about impacts on socio-emotional outcomes or on instructional components of DL programs.

New Projects Newer research has begun to examine socio-emotional development of DLL children, though research is sparse specifically in DL programs. There is increased evidence that the socio-emotional competence of DLL children in preschool and elementary school settings may be higher than those of their monolingual peers (National Academies 2017). This emerging research is showing that character skills, such as conscientiousness, grit, and self-control, may play an important role in shaping academic and longterm outcomes, beyond the role of IQ and cognitive ability, and that use of the home language by early childhood educators may have a positive effect on the learner’s socio-emotional development (National Academies 2017). For example, studies demonstrate that Asian DLL children, largely from Southeast Asian and East Asian

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backgrounds, show more positive emotional well-being and fewer behavioral problems than monolingual children (Han and Huang 2010). Collins et al. (2014) reported two important points that: (1) level of bilingualism significantly predicted dimensions of well-being and school functioning for young Latino immigrant children, primarily from Dominican Republic or Puerto Rican backgrounds, and (2) bilingual language proficiency was more important than other child, home, and school variables. However, though these two studies were not limited to children in DL programs, one could expect that these results would be consistent with DLLs in DL programs because they are developing bilingual language proficiency. In DL programs, because they have developed L1 language skills, DLLs are more likely to interact with grandparents and other extended family members than children in English mainstream programs (Lindholm-Leary and Block 2010). In addition, through the exposure to a different culture and peers of different backgrounds, DL also promotes socio-emotional competence by fostering a child’s ability to interact with other children who may differ from them in cultural and/or language background. Other research has begun to tackle issues of instructional characteristics with young bilinguals, with the recognition that language use and language development occur in sociocultural contexts. Several educators and researchers have focused on a cognitive-sociocultural perspective of language in developing the concept of translanguaging (Garcia 2015; Garcia and Wei 2014; Lewis et al. 2012), which refers to bilinguals’ use of all the linguistic resources available to them with no artificial separation of languages. This term first emerged in the context of Welsh/English bilingualism, in which the use of Welsh was at risk, and there was a push to promote its use as much as possible. The concurrent use of Welsh and English in the classroom began at the secondary level, which provided for the emergence of translanguaging as a pedagogy (Lewis et al. 2012). A number of educators have provided strategies that use these translanguaging pedagogies for literacy, language, and content instruction (e.g., Garcia et al. 2016; Hopewell and Escamilla 2015). However, there is no study to date on the impact of translanguaging on young children’s language development, but rather studies on interactions between teachers and children or among children. Other language development researchers have pointed out that these are strategies for maintaining and further developing bilingualism in children who already have at least some knowledge of both languages and are not optimal for two-way DL children who are new learners of a second language (Ballinger et al. 2017). Overall, research in the USA has begun to examine factors beyond educational outcomes (e.g., language development, early academic skills) in DLL children in DL programs with more focus on socio-emotional development and instructional practices in the classroom.

Critical Issues and Topics In the USA, education decisions about DL programs and DLL children are often driven by policies based on political inclinations rather than research. Thus, early education policies focus on practices that promote English language development

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and academic readiness as measured in English. This means that DL programs must be carefully designed so that children’s progress in both languages can be developed and demonstrated within strict accountability guidelines. Thus, critical issues are associated with research-based characteristics that enhance DLL children’s outcomes and that provide appealing socio-cultural environments for DLL children and their families. Within this socio-political-educational context, the following sections provide some critical issues and topics focusing on program design, instructional strategies, language diversity, and family involvement.

Model Design Considerable research has addressed dual language model effectiveness (for reviews, see Espinosa 2014; Howard et al. 2018). The importance of the following factors is evident from the frequency and consistency with which they are found in models that produce more successful outcomes in research with various diverse populations, especially culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse children (Espinosa 2014; Howard et al. 2018; Lindholm-Leary 2018): • Instructional design promotes bilingualism, emerging biliteracy, and academic achievement – The DL program promotes a vision of bilingualism, academic achievement, and socio-emotional and socio-cultural competencies. The curriculum should be standards based, and instructional practices and approaches ensure that children have formal and informal opportunities to develop oral language proficiency, literacy, and achievement as measured in both languages. • Home-school collaboration – Parents need opportunities to learn about bilingualism and biliteracy so that they can in turn support their children at home. There should be many opportunities for parents of DLL children to engage in the classroom and to share relevant cultural stories or experiences. • Raising the status of the target language to promote stronger bilingualism – DL teachers and administrators work to keep children motivated as they study the target language by ensuring that the target language is as important, exciting, and rigorous as their studies in English. • Leadership and support – DL programs require leadership support at the preschool site which is knowledgeable about bilingualism, DL strategies and implementation, and curriculum and assessment in two languages. • Quality of instructional staff and professional training – Teachers must be qualified to deliver the program at its highest level in both languages with native-like quality in the target language and participate in ongoing professional development to develop a repertoire of skills to support the children’s bilingualism and academic learning. • Positive instructional climate – Promotion of positive interactions between teachers and children and also among children is encouraged. In addition, grouping can effectively optimize children’s interactions and shared work experiences and facilitate extensive interactions among children that are necessary to develop a higher level of bilingualism.

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• Separate language blocks – Teachers do not mix the two languages during instruction and design schedules that protect language times so that young children have a real need to use each language. However, there may be times when responsible code-switching is necessary to promote children’s negotiation of meaning (DePalma 2010). • Linguistically balanced classrooms – Most often, the classes are divided into onethird monolingual speakers of the target language, one-third bilingual children, and one-third monolingual English speakers (or half NES and half monolingual speakers of target language) in an effort to secure peer models of each language in each classroom. Children are integrated for the majority of the day at all levels of instruction. The current DL program design for preschool is to take the program design developed for kindergarten (90/10–90% target language and 10% English or 50/ 50–50% target language and 50% English) and adopt it at the preschool level. As mentioned previously, preschool for 3–4- year olds is optional and is a different educational system than the mandated elementary system beginning in kindergarten (for 5-year olds). There is little guidance as to how much of each language should be provided for young DLLs in the DL program or what other developmental adaptations are advisable for preschool children from linguistically or socio-economically diverse backgrounds. However, there may be different needs for DLLs as opposed to NES children, as indicated below (Lindholm-Leary 2018). • For DLLs: Research presented previously demonstrates that many DLLs, particularly low-income DLLs, may enter preschool or kindergarten with poorly developed oral language skills in their L1 as well as English. They need considerable instruction to strengthen particularly vocabulary skills in their L1, which can then help them to develop English. But accountability requirements and research on English language trajectories for DLLs (National Academies 2017) suggest that DLLs need some English language development in preschool so that they begin kindergarten with some English language proficiency. Further, both dual language (developmental and two-way) programs could be appropriate at the preschool level for DLLs, as both are additive bilingual DL models that could promote both L1- and L2-English language development. • For NES preschoolers, one must consider the demographic characteristics of the entering children. While a normally developing middle class NES child may benefit from a DL approach in preschool, there are some considerations that should be addressed for potentially at-risk NES children. This is not because DL is not an appropriate program for such children per se, but because NES preschoolers, like many DLLs, are still in the early stages of learning their first language and may enter preschool with poorly developed language skills in their L1-English. Consequently, a DL model for preschool NES children from low SES backgrounds needs to develop a strong English-L1 language and literacy foundation. This means that a one-way program for high-risk children should not be a full DL with 90–100% of the second language. Similarly, a two-way program that

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includes DLLs with no or little English proficiency needs to consider the English language development needs of the NES children as well. At the same time, beginning-level English – as a-second-language program for DLLs – will not provide the academic vocabulary and preliteracy skills and experiences that atrisk NES children may need. This is not to say that these children should not participate in two-way models, since research clearly shows that there is an advantage for these children to learn a second language, and they can develop bilingualism through such an experience; rather, the development of their L1 needs to be carefully considered.

Instructional Practices While the program model may be designed effectively to meet the needs of preschool NES and DLL children, attention should also be given to the instructional practices that may be most effective with these children. As various reviews of research (e.g., Espinosa 2014; Genesee et al. 2006; Goldenberg et al. 2013; Howard et al. 2018) have indicated, there are a set of instructional practices that are more effective with young elementary-aged second language learners, though these are not as well defined at the preschool level for DL programs. Also, at the preschool level, there is much greater need for developmentally appropriate practices to enable children to acquire language and concepts in socio-culturally suitable environments (Espinosa 2014; National Academies 2017; Schwartz 2018). While some DL programs, such as the two-way program in Barnett et al.’s (2007) study, include alternating weeks of target language and English instruction, there are important reasons for using both languages every day (Lindholm-Leary 2018). The first reason is that young children who are still learning language need to practice each language every day; short-term memory will disintegrate quickly, and there must be repetition and practice to move information into long-term memory. If children are alternating language by day or week, the lack of practice may lead to less long-term memory storage of the second language or even new concepts presented in the L1. Second, young children should experience an additive bilingual environment in which they can understand and participate in instruction through their L1 for at least some part of each instructional day. If they spend a full week in the second language, where there is no support for the L1, young children may not perceive an additive bilingual environment but a subtractive bilingual environment, which may hasten L1 loss and a poorly developed second language.

Family Involvement Overall, research demonstrates that parents of linguistically and culturally diverse children are interested in their children’s education and believe that family involvement is important (National Academies 2017; Sibley and Dearing 2014). However, many culturally and linguistically diverse families may perceive barriers in their

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involvement, including a sense of alienation, distrust, and, for some families, a perception that their low educational skills or proficiency in English is not sufficient to assist in the classroom (Arias and Morillo-Campbell 2008; Lindholm-Leary 2001; Valdés et al. 2015). This is why it is important to develop family involvement activities that include a “funds of knowledge” perspective to better understand the contributions of all parents to children’s knowledge acquisition and sociocultural development, especially how family members may use their funds of knowledge in the classroom, and in their lives and their children’s lives (e.g., Gonzalez et al. 2005). Thus, effective programs at the early childhood level tend to incorporate a variety of family involvement activities, including those that honor and value the parents’ home languages and cultures. Not surprisingly, family involvement in literacy activities with their young children results in stronger literacy development (August and Shanahan 2006; Hammer et al. 2009). In DL programs, it is important that parents understand that talking and reading with their child is important, and it is just as effective for them to do so in their L1, despite the common message that parents often receive from educational institutions about promoting only English at home and school. One way that parents can promote stronger socio-cultural development is to ensure that children speak the home language and can engage with extended family members such as grandparents. Also, it is very helpful to provide parent workshops to help parents understand how to provide more enriched academic discussions and literacy development at home, especially for parents who have lower levels of formal education. For example, Cummins and colleagues (Cummins and Early 2011) describe the use of identity texts as a way to engage learners and parents in multicultural/multilingual schools. In sum, family involvement is an important component in DL programs at the preschool level. However, family involvement training and activities will also include important focus on building more L1 and socio-cultural connections through family and community interactions and activities.

Future Research Directions Research addressed previously is consistent across the few preschool level studies and early elementary level studies in showing that, over time, participation in DL programs enables children to become bilingual and biliterate, and to develop stronger academic skills and socio-emotional competencies than their peers in English mainstream programs. While the research demonstrates clear positive bilingual, academic, and socio-emotional outcomes in DL programs, there are several future research directions that would provide more clarity in how to develop higher quality programs for these young learners and their families. From programmatic and methodological perspectives, DL programs, and particularly those at the preschool level, are not clearly defined in research studies with respect to the amount of instructional time devoted to each language, the duration of the program, or what instructional practices were used, and this can make it difficult to compare results

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across DL programs or to replicate results and models. Clearly, research reports would be more informative to the research and educational communities if they provided more specific model information. In addition, larger and more systematic research that are also longitudinal are needed to address the variety of factors that could impact culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse children’s bilingual development, such as consistent use of the target language during teacher instruction and during children’s interactions, status of the target language in the classroom and at school, and the volume of target language literature and other books in the library for classroom and home lending. There are many challenges in assessing the target language development of young children, especially those acquiring two or more languages, to determine normal language development and to identify those children at risk for speech or other special education needs. First, there are few valid and reliable assessment measures that can yield information about young children’s oral language development and emergent biliteracy competencies. Second, additional research would be useful to understand how bilingualism impacts outcomes for culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse children who enter DL programs at the preschool level. To address many of these issues, more extensive studies of bilingual language development that go beyond quick teacher rating measures are needed. In addition, research is required to elucidate the characteristics of high-quality DL programs and how DL programs of different quality impact young children’s language and socio-emotional development and academic achievement. For example, one important characteristic relates to the strategy of translanguaging with young learners. Recent international studies have examined this important issue within preschool classrooms and suggest that the decision to mix the two languages may depend on a variety of factors, including the desired aims of bilingual education, the linguistic repertoire and competence of the children, the systematic use of the two languages in the classroom, and the societal power of the languages (DePalma 2010; Howard et al. 2018; Mifsud and Vella 2018; Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018). However, much more research is needed on how translanguaging impacts language development, especially second language development. Furthermore, more clarity would be helpful in designing developmentally appropriate DL programs that take into consideration the developmental needs of 3–5-year-old children for play, socioemotional learning, along with language and cognitive development. Finally, there is little research into the development of oral academic language proficiency and emergent literacy within DL programs, and especially how to promote high levels of emergent biliteracy, which are stated goals of DL programs. State and local standards and corresponding curricula are developed for teaching children through one language; thus, they do not provide assistance in how to promote literacy in two languages. Further, there is insufficient research to guide educators as to how to promote emergent biliteracy. Many researchers have examined biliteracy and have found that language and preliteracy skills in the L1 do play an important role for the learning of the second language (e.g., National Academies 2017), and there is research on the skills that appear to transfer from one language to another and on instructional practices that may be most beneficial for promoting

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literacy in a second language (e.g., National Academies 2017). But these studies have largely addressed older elementary-level children and have focused on how to help children develop proficiency and literacy in English, and not on how to develop bilingualism and biliteracy.

Conclusions The socio-political context of bilingualism and the considerable demographic cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity in the USA are important backdrops within which to understand the development of DL programs for young children in the USA. In the USA, there is no official national language, though English is recognized as the national language in educational policy, and bilingualism and bilingual education are sometimes lauded but rarely given official policy protection. The lack of support for dual language education for young children, especially dual language learners, has made it difficult to develop effective programs that best serve the needs of young children because of the strict accountability requirements to demonstrate English language proficiency for dual language learners. This context has had an impact on DL program development and on the type of research that is funded or conducted, namely research that examines whether dual language programs promote academic achievement and English language proficiency largely at the elementary level. Only recently, more research and program development have turned to DL programs for preschool children. The theoretical concepts underlying the model and research are based on the foundational principles of bilingualism, particularly the concept of additive bilingualism (Lambert 1984) and transfer of knowledge across languages (Cummins 1978). The research presented in this chapter clearly concludes that DLL children who participate in additive bilingual contexts, such as DL programs, demonstrate stronger language, academic, and socio-emotional development than their DLL peers who participate in subtractive English-only programs (e.g., Lindholm-Leary and Borsato 2006; National Academies 2017). Furthermore, research presented here on outcomes in DL programs is consistent with the large body of research on the linguistic interdependent hypothesis in showing that children with stronger L1 proficiencies demonstrate higher levels of language and academic achievement measured in L2-English (e.g., Genesee et al. 2006; Howard et al. 2018; Lindholm-Leary 2014, 2016). In addition, comparative research examining DL programs versus English-only programs and 90/10 DL programs versus 50/50 DL programs clearly showed that children who participate in programs with more target language instruction show developmental gains that are as high or higher than those of their peers in programs with less (or no – English only) target language instruction. These positive outcomes have resulted in increasing popularity of the DL programs. Despite the popularity of DL programs, modifications of the models used in early education may be necessary depending on the demographic and language backgrounds of the children. Further research is clearly needed to address the specific design and instructional practices that are associated with higher outcomes for

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disaggregated groups of culturally and linguistically diverse children. With proper planning to develop a vision of bilingualism and a high-quality dual language program, all young learners can achieve developmentally appropriate levels of language proficiency, biliteracy, and socio-emotional development.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Vocabulary and Grammar Development in Young Learners of English as an Additional Language

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Faidra Faitaki, Annina Hessel, and Victoria A. Murphy

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EAL Learners’ Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EAL Learners’ Grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion of the Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Online Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implicit Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Internationally, an increasing number of children learn English as an additional language (EAL). Children with EAL grow up in an environment where English is the majority language but are exposed to a different, minority language at home. Despite the increase in the number of EAL learners around the world, comparatively little is known about the development of their vocabulary and grammar at preschool age. Furthermore, the use of different methods in EAL studies can make research evidence difficult to summarize. The aim of this chapter is to F. Faitaki (*) · V. A. Murphy Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Hessel Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Department of Educational Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_35

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provide a comprehensive review of EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar development at preschool, drawing from studies that have used standardized tests, experimental tasks, or both. This review indicates that few studies have focused on preschool children with EAL. These suggest that, at the earliest stages of language learning, EAL learners generally know fewer words and acquire grammatical constructions at a slower pace than their English monolingual peers. These differences often persist throughout development, risking a negative impact on EAL learners’ academic attainment in an English-only school environment. Thus, this chapter also includes some suggestions for practice that could help children with EAL develop their vocabulary and grammar knowledge during and after preschool. Keywords

English as an additional language · Child bilingualism · Vocabulary · Grammar

Introduction Most children around the world are exposed to multiple languages from a young age (Eurydice 2017). For example, children who grow up in an English-speaking country might use a different language at home and, thus, learn English as an additional language (EAL) at (pre)school (i.e., between the ages of 3;0 and 6;0). In the UK, these children are called EAL learners; outside the UK, they are referred to as ESL (English as a second language) learners and/or ELL (English language learners). To be classified as “EAL” or equivalent, children must reside in a country where English is the official language, limiting the use of the term in majority English-speaking countries, when the generic term “bilingual” would likely have been used elsewhere (Murphy 2014). Children with EAL can be considered minority language speakers, as their home language is in the minority relative to the majority language of society (Murphy 2014). In some countries, children from ethnic (and linguistic) minorities are the predominant group of bilingual learners in schools. In some other countries, however, bilingual learners can come from regional minority contexts, as they speak an indigenous home language but are educated in the majority language. This is the case in Wales, where some children speak Welsh in the home but are educated through the medium of English. The population of EAL learners is inherently heterogeneous. Indeed, EAL learners can either be simultaneous bilinguals (that is, learning English and their home language at the same time) or sequential bilinguals (learning English sometime after the acquisition of the home language has begun) (Murphy 2014). Depending on the age at which they started learning English, EAL learners can have a wide range of proficiencies in English as well as in their home language. Furthermore, simultaneous bilinguals do not always follow the same path of acquisition as sequential bilinguals (Unsworth 2005) and thus, EAL learners are likely to manifest different

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developmental trajectories in English depending on their exposure to the language prior to the start of schooling. This observation is echoed in school reports, according to which children with EAL start school on different proficiency levels (Strand and Hessel 2018). In fact, in the first year of formal education in the UK, referred to as “Reception Year,” quite a few of the 4-year-old pupils are recorded as being “new to English” despite having lived in the UK from birth; this happens because the first year of formal education is also the first time that these children are exposed to English (Strand et al. 2015). While children who are “new to English” do not always meet the curriculum targets at the end of Reception, the ones who are recorded as “competent” or “fluent” in English at the start of schooling achieve, and even score above, the national average (Strand and Hessel 2018). In short, how well children know English affects how well they perform at school even from the age of 4;0. The relationship between English language proficiency and school performance persists throughout formal education, making EAL learners’ early linguistic competence an important predictor of later academic skills and overall educational attainment (Demie and Strand 2006; Muter et al. 2004; Whiteside et al. 2017). While developing their English language proficiency, children with EAL also have to find ways to maintain the home language. Home language maintenance allows children to build and sustain ties with the home culture and their families (Gao 2012; Pearson 2007), and is also believed to facilitate the development of crucial skills, like literacy, in the majority language (Murphy and Evangelou 2016). Moreover, bilingual children are reported to experience certain educational advantages including: the ability to communicate in more than one language; higher levels of proficiency; greater confidence and well-being; lower absentee and failure rates in school; higher aspirations to continue school; and positive correlations between levels of bilingualism and academic achievement (Cloud et al. 2009). However, these advantages are all dependent on high levels of proficiency in both of the children’s languages; hence it is important that the children’s home language is developed as fully as possible, in addition to the majority language. In certain educational contexts (that possess appropriate resources, use suitable curricula, and allow bilingual children’s two languages to coexist and grow in tandem), the socioeconomic and cognitive benefits of bilingualism can be used to children’s advantage (Murphy 2018). Yet, in many countries, schools struggle to fully support children from ethnic minority backgrounds. When bilingual children do not have access to adequate linguistic and educational resources, their lexical and grammatical knowledge in one or both of their languages is likely to remain less developed. It is the lexical and grammatical knowledge acquired at the earliest periods of development that has the greatest impact on children’s subsequent linguistic and educational progress (Strand and Hessel 2018). This knowledge precedes systematic language instruction at school and at the same time forecasts its success. Thus, studying EAL learners’ language skills over time, from preschool onwards, is valuable for mapping out children’s developmental trajectories, noting the relative importance of different linguistic (sub)skills, and identifying which areas would benefit from early intervention (Bowyer-Crane et al. 2017; Paradis and Jia 2017).

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Consequently, this chapter focuses on early periods of language learning (i.e., preschool) but presents research on various age groups of EAL learners (ranging from infancy to the end of primary school) in order to address questions about preschool children’s language skills from a developmental perspective. However, the research on the lexical and grammatical development of preschool children with EAL is limited. To this end, some of the studies described in this chapter concern monolingual learners and/or bilingual learners who speak a language other than English in addition to their home language. These studies are then used to make predictions about EAL learners’ performance. Although this is a notable limitation of the present review, the small number of studies focusing on preschoolers with EAL is a problem of the field as a whole – albeit one that more and more researchers are addressing. The chapter begins by introducing the process and importance of bilingual learners’ acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. Then, it reviews existing, new, and prospective research on EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical development. Finally, it includes a presentation of critical issues in the field of EAL research and a discussion of the educational implications that arise from the reviewed evidence.

Main Theoretical Concepts The task of language learning requires children to acquire diverse kinds of knowledge, with the ultimate goal being to communicate with others – to understand and be understood by one’s interlocutors. To achieve this goal, children must be able to assign meaning to the (combinations of) sounds that are present in their input and to use these sound combinations accordingly in their output. Creating a collection of (recognizable) words to use, or building up a vocabulary, thus becomes a key part of children’s language learning. However, knowing the words is not sufficient to guarantee successful communication, since a lot of meaning is not conveyed through individual words but through the way in which they are arranged, amended, and connected – in other words, through grammar. In short, both lexical and grammatical knowledge is required for children to understand and produce language. While monolingual children focus on the acquisition of one language, their bilingual counterparts are tasked with the acquisition of two languages at (more or less) the same time. To achieve this dual task, bilingual children make use of the same cognitive resources as monolingual children (▶ Chap. 2, “Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development,” by Butler, this volume). Yet, when it comes to the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar, bilingual children do not always perform on par with monolinguals in each of their languages (Bialystok et al. 2009; Melby-Lervåg and Lervåg 2014; Spencer and Wagner 2017). As EAL learners comprise a subgroup of bilinguals, they could reasonably be expected to differ from monolinguals with respect to language acquisition. However, investigating EAL (and monolingual) lexical and grammatical knowledge is not a simple task – not least because of the fact that both vocabulary and grammar are multifaceted concepts. EAL learners’ vocabulary development is often looked at in

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terms of the number of words a child knows, or vocabulary size. Children learning EAL are often found to know fewer words than their monolingual age peers (Hessel and Murphy 2019; Mahon and Crutchley 2006; Marchman and Martínez-Sussmann 2002). EAL learners’ vocabulary development can also be looked at in terms of quality. Studies on the quality of EAL and monolingual children’s vocabulary knowledge, or on vocabulary depth, reveal specific qualitative differences between the groups (Hessel and Murphy 2019; Kan and Murphy 2019; Smith and Murphy 2015; for a comprehensive review, see ▶ Chap. 3, “Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education,” by Sun and Yin’s contribution in this volume). Like vocabulary, grammar is also a complex domain, that is composed of two essential elements: morphology and syntax. The former deals with how words are organized internally, while the latter is concerned with how words are put together to form sentences. Combining the two elements, morphosyntax denotes word-level features that affect the organization of a sentence, like case and gender marking. Morphosyntax is known as a vulnerable domain for bilingual children and has often been the focus of research on young EAL learners’ grammatical development. In a nutshell, this research has shown that children with EAL can acquire morphological structures at a slower pace than monolinguals (a quantitative difference) (Paradis 2005; Paradis et al. 2008, 2011) and, sometimes, also at a different order from monolinguals (a qualitative difference) (Jia and Fuse 2007; Paradis 2010a; Paradis and Blom 2016). However, not all morphosyntactic phenomena represent as big a challenge to children with EAL. While the acquisition of verbal inflections, in particular of tense marking, appears to be troublesome for most EAL learners, their acquisition of nominal morphosyntax (e.g., pluralization) is on par with that of their monolingual peers (Schwartz et al. 2014). A factor that could facilitate or impede EAL children’s acquisition of certain morphosyntactic structures is crosslinguistic influence (CLI), defined as “the systemic influence of the grammar of one language on the grammar of the other language during acquisition” (Paradis and Genesee 1996, p. 3). According to Paradis and Genesee (1996), CLI can lead to: the transfer of grammatical properties from one language to the other; the accelerated acquisition of some grammatical properties in one language because of their presence in the other; or an overall delay in language acquisition. CLI (mostly in the form of transfer) has been well-documented in bilingualism research (for a review, see Serratrice 2013), but the causes of the phenomenon remain unclear. To date, three accounts have been proposed: the first suggests that CLI results from differences in the relative structure of bilingual children’s two languages (e.g., Hulk and Müller 2000); the second argues that CLI stems from differences in the quantity of the input that children receive in either language (e.g., Argyri and Sorace 2007). According to the third account, it is the quality of the input that children are exposed to that affects the nature and direction of CLI (e.g., Paradis and Navarro 2003). These three accounts are not mutually exclusive; in fact, different (combinations of the) accounts might be better suited to different bilingual subgroups. Investigating CLI and its effects requires highly specified methodologies, which can be difficult to design and implement with success, especially in complex and

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heterogenous groups like that of preschool children with EAL. Perhaps this is the reason why there seem to be no observation studies focusing on EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar. Instead, EAL researchers often opt for standardized tests. These are normed, valid, and reliable measures that are used in both academic and clinical contexts. For example, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn and Dunn 2007) and its British equivalent, the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn et al. 2009) can assess children’s vocabulary from the age 3;0. Similarly, the Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG; Bishop 2003) and the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice and Wexler 2001) can be used with typically and non-typically developing children from 4;0. However, standardized tests are usually not normed for bilingual populations, which hinders their use with EAL learners (Faitaki and Murphy 2020). Thus, research on children with EAL warrants the use of experimental tasks. While experimental tasks are not normed (and, therefore, risk being less valid and reliable), they can be used with bilingual populations and target linguistic phenomena that standardized tests cannot (Ambridge and Rowland 2013). Both methodological approaches have benefits and give rise to interesting results, that will be discussed in the following section.

Major Contributions EAL preschoolers’ knowledge of vocabulary and grammar is important for subsequent linguistic and educational development (Bowyer-Crane et al. 2017; Chen and Schwartz 2018). Thus, a review of the literature on the issue must refer to preschoolers’ competence but also to the impact that potential knowledge gaps might have on later performance. At the same time, it is pivotal to examine EAL learners’ performance under the light of linguistic and extralinguistic factors beyond the performance itself. This section will present the findings of studies on young EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical knowledge and discuss the additional factors that might underpin it.

EAL Learners’ Vocabulary Vocabulary knowledge has two dimensions: size and depth. To investigate preschoolers’ vocabulary size, it is possible to use standardized tests, such as the aforementioned BPVS and PPVT. In these tests, a child hears a word and is asked to match it to an image that captures its meaning. This format, then, taps into children’s knowledge of the relationship between a word’s form and meaning. As children do not produce the word but need to only recognize it, we can add that this procedure measures receptive (as opposed to productive) vocabulary size. Receptive vocabulary measures are often preferred with younger children as they can capture the early stages of knowing a word, thus providing a more complete picture of children’s knowledge than more challenging procedures. Studies using standardized

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tests have found that EAL preschoolers (that, is between 3;0 and 6;0) have smaller vocabularies in English relative to their English monolingual peers (Bialystok et al. 2009; Hessel and Murphy 2019; Mahon and Crutchley 2006). On a second look, these seemingly quantitative measures can also reveal qualitative differences between EAL and monolingual children’s vocabulary knowledge. For example, Bialystok et al. (2009) compared EAL and monolingual children’s knowledge of PPVT test items that are more likely to be encountered at home (e.g., “squash” and “pitcher”) or in the preschool environment (e.g., “rectangle” or “astronaut”). They found that EAL learners were almost on par with their monolingual peers in their knowledge of school words but knew considerably fewer home words in English than monolinguals. In other words, quantitative differences in vocabulary size were more prominent for words that are less likely to be encountered in a non-English home context. Beyond these differences in size, we can ask whether EAL and monolingual children differ in their vocabulary depth – in other words, in terms of qualitative aspects of word knowledge. An individual’s word knowledge can vary in several dimensions, including meaning, form, and use. For example, children might be able to understand a word’s meaning but not use it correctly, and vice versa: they might be able to produce correct sentences with specific words without knowing their exact meaning (Nation 2001). Compared to the number of studies on EAL and monolingual preschoolers’ vocabulary size, studies exploring differences in depth are more limited. Vocabulary depth has primarily been studied using two different experimental paradigms: asking children to provide word associations or descriptions (Cremer and Schoonen 2013; Cremer et al. 2011; Spätgens and Schoonen 2018); or studying their knowledge of challenging multi-word and figurative vocabulary such as metaphors, idioms, or collocations (Hessel and Murphy 2019; Kan and Murphy 2019; Smith and Murphy 2015). Both kinds of measures show that EAL learners tend to have less deeply developed vocabularies than their monolingual peers. For example, Hessel and Murphy (2019) reported that their preschool, 5-year-old EAL participants had weaker knowledge of both verbal metaphors (e.g., “time flies”) and nominal metaphors (e.g., “to be on cloud nine”) than monolinguals. This difference was particularly strong on a task that required children to explain (rather than recall or choose) the meaning of these metaphors in the story context. The findings indicate that language group differences in vocabulary depth can be expected to appear when children’s language use requires deeper word knowledge, and where a lack thereof weighs more heavily. Moreover, the authors highlight the often-stressed importance of investigating EAL vocabulary beyond single word knowledge in order to better understand and interpret EAL learners’ competence and performance (Kan and Murphy 2019; McKendry 2014; Smith and Murphy 2015). EAL researchers are divided on the question of whether the pervasive quantitative and qualitative differences between EAL and monolingual children’s English vocabulary require targeted support or vanish naturally over time. Some studies find that early differences between bilinguals and monolinguals persist throughout

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development; this has been reported in both longitudinal (Burgoyne et al. 2011; Hutchinson et al. 2003) and cross-sectional investigations (Bialystok et al. 2009; Cameron 2002). Moreover, one study has reported that group differences in vocabulary size widen as children get older (Whetton 1997). Yet a few other studies found that vocabulary differences between the two groups are particularly wide in early years but close later on (Farnia and Geva 2011; Mahon and Crutchley 2006; Paradis and Jia 2017). More research is required in order to better understand the gap between EAL and monolingual children’s performance, and the ways to deal with it.

EAL Learners’ Grammar Bilingual children’s morphosyntactic knowledge is usually measured through language production tasks – whether standardized or experimental. A typical measure of morphosyntactic knowledge involves children being presented with a (visual or auditory) stimulus and being prompted to describe it or answer questions about it (Ambridge and Rowland 2013). Analyzing children’s descriptions and/or answers, researchers are able to note their (in)correct use of morphosyntactic features and compare it with monolingual norms. This format is used in the TEGI, which measures (different aspects of) children’s morphosyntax. In particular, the TEGI is often used with EAL children from preschool onwards, as it is a nuanced measure that includes a Grammaticality Judgement Task (GJT) probe, testing children’s ability to detect grammatical irregularities, as well as three elicitation probes, testing children’s ability to produce a range of morphological markers. Using the TEGI (in parts or as a whole), it has been shown that children with EAL differ from their monolingual peers in terms of morphosyntactic development. In addition, all studies report that children’s morphological knowledge exhibits fluctuation and great individual variability from preschool onwards. The differences between EAL and monolingual children’s grammatical competence can be both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative differences mostly pertain to the bilingual acquisition of certain grammatical structures with delay relative to monolinguals (Paradis 2005; Paradis et al. 2008, 2011). For instance, using the TEGI together with a picture description task, Paradis et al. (2008) found that their 24 EAL 5-year-old participants, performed almost on par with their monolingual peers in terms of the acquisition of the auxiliaries “be” (e.g., “he is eating”) and “do” (e.g., “does he eat?”). EAL learners’ accuracy scores for the two structures were lower than, but not significantly different from, those of monolinguals. With time, EAL learners are expected to catch up and be as accurate as monolinguals in the production of auxiliaries. EAL learners might also differ from monolinguals in terms of the order in which they acquire certain grammatical structures (Paradis 2010a; Paradis and Blom 2016; Paradis et al. 2008). This was evidenced in Paradis and Blom’s (2016) investigation of the copula “be” (e.g., “he is hard-working”) in 79 5-year-old children in Canada who learned EAL in a sequential fashion. The children were divided in two groups: the “early L2” group and the “late L2” group. Paradis and Blom (2016) used the GJT

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and elicitation probes of the TEGI and found that all children acquired the copula with relative ease (like monolinguals) but before other verbal inflections (unlike monolinguals). Another difference between the two groups of learners can be the incomplete acquisition of a grammatical structure, which can occur despite years of continuous exposure to English (Jia and Fuse 2007). This was the main finding of Jia and Fuse’s (2007) longitudinal investigation of ten EAL learners who had Mandarin as their first language. The authors were interested to monitor children’s progress with respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology. They found that there was a structure that none of the learners mastered (i.e., produced accurately over 80% of the time) over the 5 years that the investigation lasted: the regular past tense “-ed.” The age at which children had started learning English partially predicted children’s performance in the structure, such that children who had started learning English before 9;0 achieved higher accuracy scores than those who had started learning English later. The patterns of acquisition observed in the results of standardized tests can be corroborated by those of experimental tasks (Paradis 2010b). Using both kinds of measures not only allows researchers to triangulate their findings but it also gives them the chance to extend their research design. For example, many researchers have used the TEGI probes to measure EAL learners’ acquisition of morphological markers together with novel language production tasks which focus on morphemes that are not included in the TEGI (Paradis and Blom 2016; Paradis et al. 2008, 2011). Together, the two measures can provide researchers with a more informative overview of EAL learners’ skills.

Discussion of the Evidence The studies presented above paint a reasonably clear picture of EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical knowledge at preschool and beyond. To judge whether this picture is accurate, it is imperative to consider the effect of three issues: first language (L1) typology; environmental factors; and methodological limitations. As discussed earlier, typological differences between two languages are often believed to result to CLI. In turn, CLI can manifest itself as positive transfer (e.g., if a structure is shared between languages) or as negative transfer (e.g., if a structure exists in one language but not in the other). While positive transfer will facilitate bilinguals’ acquisition of the structure in question, negative transfer is expected to achieve the opposite effect. With this observation in mind, researchers should assess the effect of children’s L1 on the acquisition of the second language (L2), especially if the children come from different linguistic backgrounds – as is often the case in EAL literature. Indeed, many of the studies described in the previous sections have included the children’s L1 as a variable in their modelling; however, the results that they report are mixed. For instance, Paradis et al. (2008) found that children’s L1 had no effect on learners’ performance. However, the lack of a significant effect of L1 in their study could be down to the small number of participants per comparison group. By

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contrast, Paradis and Blom (2016), who investigated the acquisition of inflectional morphemes, reported an effect of L1. The authors divided their sequential EAL participants in two fairly equal and robust groups: the first consisted of children whose home languages marked tense (e.g., Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish), and the second of those whose home languages did not (e.g., Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese). Children in the latter group were less accurate in the production of inflectional morphemes than in the former group. To account for this finding, the authors argued that children whose home languages encode tense morphologically can transfer the tense features to their second language, English; children whose home languages do not encode tense have no such features to transfer across. While linguistic differences between EAL learners’ two languages might affect their performance, there is a range of extralinguistic characteristics known to inform EAL learners’ linguistic profile. These include socioeconomic status (SES) (that is, one’s social and/or economic standing; De Cat, 2019) and the age of arrival to the country where the majority language is spoken (Montrul 2008). Another extralinguistic characteristic that is of importance is maternal education (De Cat 2020; Jia and Paradis 2015; Paradis and Jia 2017). Maternal education has been found to function as a predictor of performance in linguistic tasks. According to Jia and Paradis (2015), this finding can be attributed to the fact that mothers with higher education assign a higher value to language acquisition and, therefore, can better support their children’s first (minority) and second (majority) language development. Moreover, mothers with higher education tend to talk more and to use more complex vocabulary and morphosyntax (Hoff 2006). In addition to maternal education, the richness of the input that EAL learners are exposed to is also a good predictor of individual performance (Jia and Fuse 2007; Jia and Paradis 2015). Measures of input richness aim to capture bilingual children’s language use in different environments (at home or during extracurricular activities), and with the different speakers that children interact with in each of these environments. Jia and Paradis (2015) measured the effect of richness and other extralinguistic factors on 38 EAL learners’ use of referential expressions in Mandarin. The EAL learners, who had Mandarin as their first language and a mean age of 8;7, were pooled from two schools: a Mandarin-English bilingual school and an English monolingual school. Jia and Paradis (2015) reported that children’s use of referential expressions was lower than that of monolingual speakers for some but not all structures. While richness did not have a main effect, it did impact the performance of children in the English monolingual school. In other words, having a richer Mandarin environment outside school helped the EAL learners (who received less input in Mandarin and would otherwise have fewer linguistic resources in their possession) to perform like their counterparts at the bilingual school, and to catch up with their monolingual peers (c.f. Paradis and Jia 2017). Jia and Paradis’ (2015) study highlight the role of two variables that remain under-investigated in EAL research: the school environment and richness (which stands for out-of-school environment). More research can further the understanding of environmental factors on EAL learners’ performance, while providing practical suggestions to EAL practitioners.

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Taking these observations into consideration, it becomes obvious that sampling is a pivotal issue in EAL research. Depending on their linguistic and socioeconomic background, children with EAL may develop different levels of English proficiency and perform differently in linguistic tasks (Paradis and Jia 2017; Schwartz and Katzir 2012). Yet, the issue of the tasks used in EAL research is just as pivotal. Tasks can be either expressive (asking participants to produce speech) or receptive (asking them to understand speech). Expressive tasks, which are the most common in EAL research, may be more demanding for EAL learners with fewer linguistic resources. Under this light, the language in which the testing is conducted plays a role: if a test is administered in English, EAL learners who are not as proficient in English might not be able to manifest their full potential. In fact, a substantial body of research shows that children with EAL do not differ as much from monolinguals in terms of their English language competence and/or performance, when tested in their home language rather than English itself. This observation was evident in a study by Paradis (2010b), who tested French-English bilingual children’s acquisition of various morphemes using the TEGI and a production task, administered in English. She reported that bilingual children had lower scores than monolinguals on all probes, but children who spoke French at home underperformed relative to children who spoke English at home, perhaps due to the fact that testing took place in English. In addition to the task characteristics and the language of testing, another practical issue that could affect learners’ performance is the subject of testing. Indeed, EAL learners’ performance seems to fluctuate according to the lexical and grammatical items that they are being tested on. Consider the noted difference between verbal and nominal morphology that was discussed above: EAL learners are found to struggle with the former but excel in the latter. A similar phenomenon can be observed with respect to lexical items. A good example is presented in Bialystok et al.’s (2009) study, which compared EAL learners’ knowledge of home and school vocabulary items. According to the study’s results, differences in vocabulary size between EAL learners and monolinguals always have to be interpreted in relation to the kind of words that were tested, as asking for some words and not others will make differences appear larger or smaller. These results also highlight that group differences do not stem from a general weakness or inability to learn, but rather from differences in the language learning context. In a nutshell, the evidence presented in the previous sections suggests that preschool children with EAL display both quantitative and specific qualitative differences from their monolingual peers, as far as the acquisition of both vocabulary and grammar is concerned. Some of these differences vanish as EAL learners grow older, but others can remain throughout development. The persisting gaps between EAL and monolingual children should not be ignored, as they might impede the development of further linguistic and educational skills. However, all this evidence should be examined with a critical eye. The individual traits of EAL learners, such as their home language and the quality of their linguistic environment, are believed to impact their acquisition of linguistic phenomena. Moreover, the design of the studies on EAL learners (including the language of testing and the structures that are being tested) are expected to play a role in their performance. These factors should all be

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considered by researchers and practitioners when reading, designing, or conducting work on preschool children with EAL.

New Projects The studies reported in the previous section used standardized or experimental measures to test EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar. These measures assess children’s knowledge offline (that is, after processing has finished), which makes them unable to capture children’s processing as it happens. It is not surprising, therefore, that new projects in the field make use of online measures, such as recording reaction times and eye movements during language comprehension. These measures allow researchers to capture children’s resulting comprehension, but also their language processing during the task. Sometimes, online measures reveal differences in processing speed and low-level knowledge that do not appear in offline tasks. In addition, the field is moving from explicit (conscious) to implicit (subconscious) measures of children’s lexical and grammatical knowledge. Implicit measures, such as structural priming, ensure that children are not aware of the testing process (or at least of the linguistic constructions that are being targeted through the testing process). As such, these measures are ideal for gauging participants’ tacit knowledge of lexical and grammatical structures. Taking these observations into consideration, the following section explores these approaches, which could be valuable in the study of EAL learners.

Online Measures In vocabulary research, there are many ways to collect data online. One approach is to record the speed with which participants respond in the course of standard vocabulary measures, like picture naming or word recognition. For example, Kohnert and Bates (2002) recorded children’s reaction times in a picture-word verification task in order to investigate whether the linguistic context (i.e., monolingual English or bilingual English-Spanish) had an effect on EAL preschoolers’ speed and accuracy of word recognition. The EAL preschoolers’ reaction times revealed that they recognized words equally accurately in the two contexts but were slower when both their languages were present in the environment. In this example, online processing speed times uncovered what is most likely an effect of between-language interference on EAL preschoolers’ word processing, that would have remained unnoticeable had the researchers considered the offline data alone. Future work could investigate other factors identified previously in this chapter (such as L1 typology or language exposure) whose effects on children’s language development may show up in online but not offline data, or vice versa. Another approach to collecting online data on preschoolers’ word processing is to track their eye movements as they are looking at pictures of objects or scenes that are displayed on a screen. This approach is often referred to as the visual world

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paradigm (Huettig and Altmann 2005). In visual world paradigm tasks, children are typically instructed to choose the picture that fits the words or sentences that they hear. As speakers tend to fixate on objects and pictures that are associated with the words they hear, the time that children fixate on a picture serves as an indicator of their comprehension, while the time that it takes children to clearly fixate on the correct answer suggests their processing time. So far, the visual world paradigm has only been used with EAL learners between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0. For example, Marchman et al. (2010) measured children’s fixations on images of simple and familiar objects, like cookies, while they listened to sentences like “where is the cookie?”. Yet, the paradigm could easily be adapted for other uses and with older children. For instance, listening to words in sentence context allows researchers to look for intricate differences in more advanced language skills, such as predicting upcoming words (Nation et al. 2003). Future work could rely on the visual world paradigm to pinpoint the effects that the gaps in EAL preschoolers’ word knowledge may have on their moment-to-moment comprehension of English.

Implicit Measures The ways to investigate bilingual children’s grammatical acquisition are also changing, with implicit methods becoming more and more prominent. One such method is structural priming (also referred to as syntactic priming) (c.f. Branigan and Pickering 2017). This method is inspired by the deeply rooted and subconscious human tendency to use linguistic structures that have been used in the preceding discourse. As an experimental language production method, structural priming involves researchers “priming” their participants with a particular linguistic structure and noting whether they use it in their subsequent utterances. Using structural priming, researchers can understand whether learners have a mental representation of the grammatical structure under investigation. Priming has been used to uncover well-hidden discrepancies between bilingual children’s performance and knowledge, as well as between bilingual children and their monolingual peers. Vasilyeva et al. (2010) used a crosslinguistic priming paradigm to investigate 65 EAL preschoolers’ knowledge of the passive and active voice in Spanish, their home language, and English, the majority language. The children’s priming patterns revealed them to have the same mental representation of the passive and active voice as adults. Moreover, their underlying knowledge of the constructs was found on par with that of monolinguals in each of their languages, even though their performance seemed to lag behind. This finding reveals that differences in performance might not result from differences in representation. Thus, this study demonstrates how priming can provide researchers with a deeper understanding of EAL learners’ linguistic skills. Vasilyeva et al.’s (2010) study remains the only one that has used priming in the context of preschool children with EAL. Since the method can tap into children’s subconscious knowledge, researchers can use it to shed more light on EAL learners’

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acquisition process(es) and further explore their differences with monolinguals. Using structural priming, researchers can target preschool children as the method does not involve conscious processing or advanced literacy skills, and is suitable for children from the age of 3;0 (Kirjavainen et al. 2017). Moreover, since structural priming can occur within and across languages, it provides a useful means of investigating CLI effects on children’s knowledge and production of morphosyntactic constructions.

Critical Issues and Topics The number of studies on EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical development is limited. These studies show that EAL children tend to lag behind English monolingual children as far as the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar are concerned. According to the results of both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, some EAL learners are not able to catch up with English monolinguals’ lexical and grammatical knowledge throughout development. To better support EAL learners’ development, new projects in the field offer a thorough exploration of EAL children’s vocabulary and grammar, as well as of the positive or negative effects of CLI, through the use of online and implicit processing measures. The designs used in new projects lead to a reconsideration of the methods that were used in previous research on EAL children’s linguistic development. Most studies discussed in the previous sections use standardized and/or experimental measures. Standardized tests are norm-referenced against monolingual populations, which makes their use with EAL children problematic: tests that have been standardized on a monolingual sample do not necessarily have the same validity in a study of EAL language learning (Faitaki and Murphy 2020). Moreover, since EAL children’s lexical and grammatical development often is slower than that of their monolingual peers, using the age-norms provided in the tests’ manuals to judge their knowledge is not useful. Another problem with standardized tests is that they may not always measure the constructs most relevant to EAL language learning, such as vocabulary depth. As addressed above, experimental measures offer an alternative route to testing EAL learners’ knowledge. These measures not only avoid the problem of being only normed on a monolingual population but also allow the study of specific aspects of children’s knowledge since their variables can be chosen and manipulated with precision (Ambridge and Rowland 2013). However, experimental tasks are not without problems. For example, the fact that they range in design, difficulty, and precision, can impede researchers from replicating (and thus ensuring the accuracy of) their results. While inherent differences between experimental designs are noteworthy, the individual differences among EAL learners are critical to the analysis and interpretation of data. As mentioned throughout the chapter, EAL learners do not represent a homogenous group: the performance of children with EAL varies both among and within participants over a set period of time. Individual differences might make research on EAL learners’ development less generalizable. However, they can also

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provide a wealth of information to researchers. Using advanced quantitative analyses, such as multilevel modelling, that can account for fluctuations between and within EAL learners’ performance (e.g., De Cat 2020; Paradis and Jia 2017), researchers can discover the range of EAL learners’ performance, while disentangling group and individual effects. Furthermore, deciphering EAL learners’ individual developmental trajectories can have important educational but also clinical implications. Due to the societal importance of their findings, it is necessary that studies on EAL learners’ vocabulary and grammar are replicable and reproducible. The variability in experimental designs, linguistic items, learning contexts, and learners themselves makes generalizing the findings more difficult, but not impossible. To increase the replicability and reproducibility of their studies and findings, researchers who use experimental measures could grant access to their task materials and data to other researchers. It is only through replication that the findings of previous studies (often conducted with small samples and/or in context-specific situations) can be validated. Open access and replication together could increase the comparability among studies and allow researchers to draw clearer conclusions on the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar across tasks and samples.

Future Research Directions As the previous sections highlight, research on young EAL learners’ linguistic competence is still somewhat limited. Yet, the findings of these studies, as well as of those few that have focused on preschool EAL children, are clear: young EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical knowledge tends to not be on a par with that of monolingual language learners. Given the noted lag, order-of-acquisition differences, and occasional lack of mastery for some difficult structures, EAL learners’ developmental profile is in some ways similar to that of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), often leading to the misdiagnosis of EAL children as having DLD (Gutierrez-Clellen et al. 2006; Paradis 2005). Thus, tracking EAL learners’ linguistic development from preschool onward is important. Tracking EAL learners’ lexical and grammatical knowledge is also important, as it allows researchers to pinpoint the areas of vocabulary and grammar that are particularly challenging for EAL learners. This task is possible through longitudinal studies; these allow an investigation of EAL learners’ holistic first and second language development throughout an extended period of time. The few longitudinal studies on EAL acquisition that have been conducted so far (e.g., Jia and Fuse 2007; Paradis and Jia 2017) have given rise to large and informative datasets. These allow researchers to understand which aspects of vocabulary and grammar matter more for educational attainment, and to identify the areas that require and/or would most benefit from instruction. More longitudinal studies, using data from various ethnic and linguistic groups would be beneficial. Having identified areas that are at risk or of interest, researchers can proceed to the implementation of intervention studies. Interventions are conducted in order to

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evaluate the effect(s) of a treatment on the participants’ behavior. For preschool children, the treatment can take the form of games, shared reading, or explicit instruction. Given the fact that the linguistic skills acquired at the earliest stages of life pave the way for subsequent linguistic and educational attainment, it would be useful for EAL-focused interventions to target preschoolers. This does appear to be the case; most of the interventions on EAL language skills have focused on preschool children (Murphy and Unthiah 2015; Oxley and De Cat 2019). However, the number of interventions on EAL learners’ language and literacy is not high and has not changed much since 2000 (Oxley and De Cat 2019; Murphy and Unthiah 2015). It is imperative to conduct more varied as well as context-specific interventions in order to build a stronger knowledge base and to improve the current educational practice for EAL learners. In addition to adopting new methods, research on EAL learners’ vocabulary development could also benefit from adapting its linguistic focus. For example, most of the research on EAL learners’ vocabulary acquisition to date has involved looking at words in isolation rather than as part of the context in which they are embedded. Yet, recent studies have sought to investigate how the different properties of words might influence acquisition. These properties include the diversity of the semantic contexts in which the words occur (Hsiao and Nation 2018), the regular ways in which they get combined into phrases (Smith and Murphy 2015) or their metaphorical use (Hessel and Murphy 2019). In this framework, words are believed to belong in interconnected networks (that are bound by lexical and grammatical rules alike), an observation that has theoretical and empirical implications. Indeed, some of the semantic networks (and words within them) might be easier or harder to acquire for particular groups, such as preschool children with EAL. Reformulating, or at least reevaluating, the way in which linguistic constructs are viewed, can offer valuable insights into whether certain lexical and/or grammatical items require additional support, for instance, in the form of explicit language instruction.

Conclusion The reviewed research shows clear differences between EAL and monolingual learners in their acquisition of different aspects of vocabulary and grammar, irrespective of the measures used to test participants’ knowledge. Standardized tests and experimental measures both suggest that EAL learners lag behind their monolingual peers at early stages of linguistic development. In particular, children with EAL are reported to have smaller and less developed vocabularies, and to acquire grammatical structures at a slower pace and different order than English monolingual children. Many of these differences persist over time, with some EAL learners being unable to bridge the gap with their monolingual peers even at later stages of (linguistic) development. Due to their lower proficiency, EAL learners tend to also have lower educational attainment (Strand and Hessel 2018). Therefore, supporting children with EAL in their development of vocabulary and grammar is imperative in order to increase their chances of success at (and after) school.

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To this end, researchers need to work together with teachers and parents to pinpoint and help children develop specific areas that appear to be difficult for EAL learners to master, such as vocabulary depth and morphosyntax. In general, these complex linguistic constructs could also benefit from explicit instruction which involves drawing learners’ attention to the constructs in question and “teaching” them the rule that underpins the use of these constructs (Ellis 2009). While children can learn vocabulary and grammatical rules implicitly (that is, by encountering a word or phrase and figuring out its meaning or function), explicit instruction is known to benefit their acquisition (Spada and Tomita 2010). Drawing learners’ attention to the meanings of words can complement the process of incidental word learning (that occurs through reading), thus counterbalancing differences between EAL and monolingual children. Likewise, morphological acquisition can be facilitated through explicit instruction; although the acquisition of grammar is a tacit process for monolinguals, children with EAL might benefit from the learning about the morphemes that are challenging for them. Explicit instruction should be especially beneficial to EAL learners, who possess fewer linguistic resources and might not be able to understand or notice a lexical or grammatical item that they encountered by chance. Learning about a word and its properties allows EAL learners to notice it in the discourse and, thus, scaffolds its learning (Gallagher et al. 2019). Noticing can also be facilitated through the production of language: when learners are asked to produce speech, they are confronted with gaps in their linguistic knowledge (Hopman and MacDonald 2018; Schmidt 1990; Swain and Lapkin 1995). Under this light, the production of speech can be useful for the acquisition of new and consolidation of old vocabulary and grammar. Due to its learning potential, the production of speech has become a prominent component of most foreign language classrooms that adopt communicative approaches to teaching. However, such speech production opportunities are not always available to preschool children with EAL, who are often expected to pick up English. Future research could explore what kind of explicit instruction is beneficial and how to best integrate noticing and production practices in the classroom so as to support children with EAL in their lexical and grammatical development. Using explicit language instruction and drawing EAL learners’ attention to the language (through the production of language or otherwise) would be possible if schools had the required human and material resources to deliver English language lessons and/or interventions in order to help EAL learners improve their linguistic skills. This is often a difficult task for various reasons, including the wide distribution of EAL learners across the different regions and schools within them (Strand et al. 2015). Usually, some targeted support for EAL learners is available at least in the Reception Year (i.e., the last year of preschool in the UK). This is a positive measure, as Reception is an important year for shaping EAL learners’ subsequent linguistic and educational development. Indeed, the early years is the first educational experience in which many children with EAL receive substantial input in English and, therefore, it sets the foundations of their language knowledge. This can be facilitated if teachers know which components of language to target in their lessons.

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This chapter identified two linguistic features that are particularly vulnerable for language acquisition – vocabulary depth and verbal morphology. In addition, it presented some new methods in the field of language acquisition that can be used with young EAL learners so as to provide a more solid (and specific) understanding of EAL learners’ knowledge and gaps therein. The chapter also identified problems with existing research and some under-explored issues in the EAL field, highlighting that the research produced to date is relatively scarce and limited. More and wider research in the EAL field would allow researchers to pinpoint the linguistic problems that EAL learners might face and provide tangible solutions, thus having a positive impact on the lives of children with EAL.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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English as a Foreign Language in Early Language Education

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Danijela Prošic´-Santovac and Vera Savic´

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English Language Teaching at Preprimary Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rationale for Growing Tendency in Teaching English in Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Models of EFL Education at Preprimary Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Foreign Language Education Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Very Young Learners and Foreign Language Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Play and Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Literature and Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technology, Media, and Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early English as a Foreign Language Teaching Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Current Trends in Early Foreign Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Innovative Methodological Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contextual Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quality Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evaluation and Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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D. Prošić-Santovac Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia V. Savić (*) Faculty of Education in Jagodina, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_13

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Abstract

The growing global trend of teaching and learning English as a foreign language at an ever younger age has resulted in a proliferation of a variety of programs, both formal and informal. However, this trend has not led to much needed extensive research, and there is still a significant lack of literature and experience sharing that would aid teacher support. The chapter will describe the types of programs implemented in different countries and discuss research results informing us about the main theoretical concepts, pedagogies, and achievable goals. The focus will be on the critical issues and topics in the area of EFL and very young learners, such as outcomes and assessment, pedagogical issues, individual and contextual factors affecting processes and outcomes, motivation and attitudes, teachers’ roles and teacher education, the roles of institutions and parents, and the issues of equity and accessibility of early childhood EFL programs. The issues arising from some international projects will be given attention, as well as context-specific areas of concern and examples of good practice. The complex issue of the appropriateness of approaches and modes of children’s exposure to English as a foreign language will also be addressed. Future research should offer a macrostrategic framework to support the practitioners’ reflective approach to creating context-specific programs and coherent learning experiences for children. This could be done by supporting their cognitive, social, and emotional growth, and by fostering their linguistic development through communication, creativity, critical thinking, cultural awareness, and other skills and abilities needed for their personal growth. This calls for evidence of effectiveness of current methodologiesand quality of teacher education and materials, so that the weaknesses could be overcome in a way that teaching EFL in early language education could fully reflect the needs and characteristics of children aged 3–6. Keywords

English as a foreign language (EFL) · Very young learners · Challenges of preprimary EFL education · Innovative teaching approaches

Introduction The European Commission (2019) highlights the following advantages of foreign language learning: Foreign languages are essential for European citizens who would like to move, work, and study across the EU (and beyond). Learning a foreign language is also considered as an important factor for participation in European society as languages can unite people, render other countries and their cultures accessible, and strengthen intercultural understanding. (p. 7)

In the area of early language teaching and learning, a foreign language can be defined as “any language used in the pre-primary school context other than the first

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language/mother tongue, the language of instruction or the second language” (European Commission 2011, p. 7). Foreign language learning usually begins in primary school, between grades one and three (between the ages 6 and 9) (Enever 2018, p. 25), and is globally a more usual form of a new language learning than bilingualism or immersion (Pinter 2011, p. 86). Formally, i.e., as a compulsory part of the preschool curriculum, a foreign language, mainly English throughout the world, is rare at an early age, though there are some contexts in which it is taught as a compulsory course in state preschool institutions, like in Cyprus, Spain, or Poland (Alexiou 2020). More often, English as a foreign language is taught in private preschools or language centers from age 3, like in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand (Pinter 2011, p. 86), South Korea and France (Copland and Ni 2019), or China (Enever 2018). Due to the enormous popularity of English as an international language, it is usually the first foreign language in many contexts throughout the world (Eurydice 2012; Enever 2018, p. 27).

English Language Teaching at Preprimary Level Reports suggest that “children and teenagers represent the largest group of language learners globally” (Ellis and Brewster 2014, p. 77), and that popularity of English in Europe keeps rising, as “in nearly all European countries English is the foreign language most learnt by students during primary and secondary education” (European Commission 2017, p. 2). Although there are no official data about the scope of preprimary EFL, recent reports from a variety of contexts show that the trend is reflected at preprimary level where the number and variety of EFL programs for children aged 3–6 is increasing (Murphy and Evangelou 2016). Before describing these programs, it is important to define who preprimary EFL learners are. Enever (2018, p. 55) distinguishes two stages within the preprimary group of EFL learners: stage one, nursery, 0–3-year-olds, and stage two, preschool age group, 3–6 year-olds. Enever (2018) further clarifies the age ranges, stating that “[i]n educational systems around the world, compulsory schooling may start at any age from 5 to 7 years,” leading to difficulties in precisely defining the term “preschool,” as it “is understood differently in different contexts” (p. 55). For example, in Serbia and Finland children start primary education at the age of 7, and any education before that is preprimary for Finnish and Serbian learners, while in most countries in Europe and Asia children start primary school at the age of 6, which is when the preprimary education finishes. According to Ellis and Brewster (2014), who draw on extensive literature in the field, terms commonly used in the English language teaching profession to define preprimary children are very young learners, early starters, or young learners, with the life stage of 2–5-year-old children being referred to as preschool, preprimary, early years, nursery, or kindergarten. Since the scope of this chapter involves ages 3–6, and the above terms may be overlapping, the focus will be on the programs designed for preschool children aged 3–6. Thus, primary education that in some parts of the world begins at the age of 6 or even 5 will be excluded from the analysis.

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Rationale for Growing Tendency in Teaching English in Early Years Although teaching English as a foreign language at a very young age has been an underresearched area, some studies (Alexiou 2009, 2015; Edelenbos et al. 2006; Enever 2011; Korosidou and Griva 2019, 2020; Pinter 2011; Prošić-Santovac 2017; Read 2003) and reports (European Commission 2004, 2014, 2018) suggest that there are advantages of early learning of foreign languages (Table 1). Most researchers (Alexiou 2009, 2015; Edelenbos et al. 2006; Johnstone 2002, 2009; Korosidou and Griva 2019, 2020; Prošić-Santovac 2017) have indicated the linguistic, affective, sociocultural, and cognitive gains. Linguistic benefits of teaching English to very young learners are seen in pronunciation, phonological awareness, complexity of structures, vocabulary and lexical chunks, length of utterances, listening skills, and communication strategies (Johnstone 2002, 2009; Korosidou and Griva 2020; Prošić-Santovac 2017; Read 2003). Also, an early start may lead to greater proficiency and accuracy in the skills of speaking, reading, and writing, and to the development of language awareness and meta-linguistic skills as a basis for an easier new foreign language learning later in life (Tkachenko 2014). Table 1 Studies on gains of preprimary EFL learning and teaching Domain Linguistic

Cognitive

Affective

Sociocultural

Gains Pronunciation Complexity of structures Length of utterances Listening skills Communication strategies Overall proficiency Vocabulary acquisition Lexical chunks Grammatical structures Oral skills Accuracy in the skills of speaking, reading and writing, language awareness Meta-linguistic skills Memory Reasoning Problem solving Vocabulary retention Motivation Positive attitudes to learning English Entusiasm for learning English Self-confidence in interacting with peers, the teacher and visitors Attitudes toward other languages Multilingual and intercultural awareness Spontaneous interaction

Studies Alexiou (2015), Johnstone (2002, 2009), Korosidou and Griva (2019, 2020), Prošić-Santovac (2017), Read (2003), Tkachenko (2014)

Alexiou (2009), Johnstone (2002), Korosidou and Griva (2020)

Alexiou (2020), Edelenbos et al. (2006), Enever (2018), Lefever (2014), Pinter (2011), Prošić-Santovac (2017)

Ioannou-Georgiou (2015), Prošić-Santovac (2017)

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Apart from linguistic gains, there are advantages for children related to developing motivation and positive attitudes to and enthusiasm for learning English (Alexiou 2020; Edelenbos et al. 2006; Enever 2018; Lefever 2014; Pinter 2011; Prošić-Santovac 2017). Teaching an additional language to very young learners generally taps to all aspects of a child’s growth, i.e., physical, emotional, cognitive, mental, and social. Therefore, language learning is part of children’s holistic development and cannot be isolated from the rest of their growth (Mourão and Ellis 2020). The effectiveness of the whole-child approach has been measured by studying how language learning contributes to a child’s motivation, attitudes, intercultural and multilingual awareness, as well as the ability to learn. In the global and interconnected world of the twenty-first century, in many contexts throughout the world, preschool children are exposed to a number of languages and cultures daily, which often happens in the English classroom and affects children’s awareness of diversity. In a number of preprimary and early primary contexts children come from families in which two or more languages are spoken, thus turning the school environment into a multilingual and multicultural contexts where English develops in conjunction with other languages. The studies have found that children develop interest in using English and self-confidence in interacting with peers, the teacher, and even the visitors to the preschool (Lefever 2014). Moreover, positive impact has been found on attitudes toward other languages, multilingual, and intercultural awareness (Ioannou-Georgiou 2015). Studies have shown that an additional language learning contributes to enhancing young children’s cognitive skills and memory (Alexiou 2009; Korosidou and Griva 2019). Improvement of cognitive skills as a result of learning a foreign language is considered to be one of the most important benefits of an additional language learning, especially enhancement of a child’s ability to reason and solve problems, two of the twenty-first century skills needed for a child’s future life, academic success, and career. The EFL classroom is the place with a great potential to develop a child’s ability to find new ways to solve problems, make links and patterns, make predictions, and develop ideas of cause and effect. In addition, it can allow a child to develop effective strategies in doing a variety of tasks (Alexiou 2009; Early Education 2012; Johnstone 2002; Korosidou and Griva 2020). The linguistic advantages mainly appear in preschool settings and immersion contexts of EFL learning (Cameron 2008; Enever 2018; Shin and Crandall 2014) and are seen as general benefits applied to preprimary EFL contexts and usually guide the introduction of EFL programs for preschoolers. However, there are also challenges related to preschool EFL programs due to teachers’ lack of expertise in teaching young learners (Lugossy 2018). Therefore, all the benefits must be worked for as “offering another language at an early age is not inherently advantageous, but can only be effective if teachers are trained to work with very young children, classes are small enough, the learning material is adequate and sufficient time is allotted in the curriculum” (Edelenbos et al. 2006, p. 13).

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Models of EFL Education at Preprimary Level There are basically two types of English as a foreign language (EFL) provision in preprimary education (Enever 2018): 1. English is not a part of the preprimary curriculum, but is rather offered as an extracurricular provision at the preschool institution (state or private) and taught by externally hired staff and usually paid for by parents additionally. 2. English is a part of the preprimary curriculum (state or private) and taught by the regular staff of the preschool institution and not paid for additionally by parents. Although the contexts and the names used to refer to preprimary education vary throughout the world (e.g., play group, play school, kindergarten, preschool, or preprimary), there are basically two main models of EFL provision in preprimary education (Enever 2018): 1. Programs organized similarly as EFL teaching in primary school, focused on teaching different aspects of English, like vocabulary, grammar, the skills, and communication competences, more academically oriented; 2. Programs focused on raising language awareness of young children and on English as a communication tool used in child-initiated activities, more interaction oriented. Studies conducted in preprimary European contexts (Italy, Portugal, and Poland) and in Asia (China and Shanghai preschools) show different models of EFL education in the world today (Enever 2018, pp. 57–72). For the case of Italy, Enever (2018) reports the findings of Lange et al. (2014), who found that EFL, although not compulsory, does feature in many kindergarten programs. Their data was based on a large number of kindergartens – 1425 state-funded and 315 private ones, and showed that two models of provision were prevalent, both of which were used in almost half of the institutions. One of these models was similar to the commonly used primary school, in terms of organization, while the other focused more on raising awareness of EFL, and was more frequently used with younger children. The Portugal survey (Mourăo and Ferreirinha 2016) was even wider in scope, covering a total of 3217 preprimary institutions, both private and state-funded. EFL was offered in almost all of them, starting from the age of 3, either as an extracurricular activity, taught by usually externally hired personnel and paid for additionally by the parents, or as a part of the curriculum, the latter being more frequent in private kindergartens. The private sector also had a longer history of offering EFL, whereas in the state-funded kindergartens this was a recent development, within a 5-year period prior to the research being conducted. The study did not focus on revealing any particular model of teaching, but rather on the resources used, such as songs, rhymes, flashcards, games, stories, etc., as well as the evidence of good practice, “supportive of an integrated approach:”

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1) Joint planning, realization, and assessment of the foreign language project between educator and foreign language teacher. 2) The pre-primary professional participating in the English sessions. 3) The existence of an English learning area in the children’s classroom. 4) The English teacher being a permanent staff member. (Mourăo and Ferreirinha 2016, p. 14). The third variation of the models defined by Enever (2018) is implemented in Poland. Rokita-Jaskow (2013) reports that preschool institutions offer EFL as a noncompulsory extracurricular activity, also paid by the parents as an additional fee, with some private language schools organizing it for three-month-old children and above. However, among stakeholders, there was not enough awareness of the research available on the “realistically achievable outcomes for this age group” (3–6-year-olds), with the tasks “relying on rote memorization with somewhat short-term goals over activities that might contribute to developing a strong sense of engagement and motivation” (Enever 2018, p. 60). Shanghai preschool institutions also offer English as a foreign language at the age 3–6. Enever’s study (2018) revealed examples of good practice across several preprimary schools where observation was performed, such as: – – – – – –

providing daily EFL lessons, with length varying according to the learners’ age, providing English corners (similar to the Portuguese ELAs), introducing ‘multicultural activities’, comparison with local dialects, interactive games, “parallel enculturation in two distinctive literary traditions” (p. 68).

However, regardless of the good practices, the evidence of EFL education in these contexts revealed “a tendency for English to be provided as a stand-alone lesson rather than as an additional means of communication integrated throughout the school day” (Enever 2018, p. 71).

Early Foreign Language Education Policy Globally, English as a compulsory part of the preprimary curriculum is offered in different parts of the world, either as a foreign or second language, like in Armenia, Cameroon, Hong Kong (China), Georgia, Sweden, Tamil Nadu (India), Jordan, Kazakhstan, Namibia, North Cyprus, Pakistan, Qatar, Sierra Leone, and Uzbekistan, while in the other parts of the world it is provided in private kindergartens, like in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Greece, Goa (India), Indonesia, Palestine, Peru, Romania, Senegal, Serbia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Zambia (Rixon 2013). This list is not comprehensive, since other countries not mentioned in this enumeration, such as Finland, Austria, Hungary, etc., also have a tradition in providing English education in preschool contexts.

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In Europe, preprimary education is provided in all country contexts, but in most cases it is compulsory only in the final year before the beginning of formal primary education. As for language learning, the main focus in preprimary curriculum is on strengthening the language of instruction (European Commission 2014), usually the children’s first or second language, while the offer of modern foreign languages varies and differs in form. So, although language and communication are among priorities in early child development programs, foreign language learning is rarely formally included in the curriculum. Throughout Europe, the most frequently chosen foreign language by parents of kindergarteners is English (Eurydice 2012), and the provision is rarely compulsory (regularly provided mostly in private kindergartens), but is rather optional and nonformal, and has to be paid separately (European Commission 2011). Nevertheless, there is no statistical data available in relation to the provision of preprimary foreign language programs. There are examples of formal EFL programs which have become standard part of preschool foreign language provision, like in Sweden and the Czech Republic. In Sweden, for example, there are state Swedish-English kindergartens which offer bilingual education through daily immersion both to the nursery groups (ages 1–3) and preschool groups (ages 3–5). English exposure is part of the preprimary curriculum, so English is used by nursery and kindergarten teachers in all daily activities, and not in special foreign language lessons, thus providing preschoolers with the necessary exposure to the English language as the basis for developing communication skills needed for the multilingual and multicultural society. In the East Asian countries, such as China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), Taiwan, Korea and Japan, English is widely provided at preschool, but is formally taught to preprimary children only in Hong Kong, starting from children’s age 3 (Zhou and Ng 2016). Although English is an official language in Hong Kong, it is not widely used in the society on a daily basis, so its status may be regarded as being a foreign language, with Cantonese being the language of home and work (Zhou and Ng 2016). In China, Taiwan, and Korea, English as a foreign language is introduced by the public primary curriculum at the age of 9, while in Japan it had been introduced at the age of 11 before April 2020, when it started being taught at the age of 9, i.e., in Grade 3 (Nemoto 2018). The governments in these East Asian countries are now under the pressure to introduce English as part of the preprimary curriculum as English has become an important aspect of social status in these countries and “learning English is accordingly an important issue for parents to consider when planning their children’s education” (Zhou and Ng 2016, p. 137), although there is still little solid evidence of the effectiveness of such early provision, and in spite of the fact that continuity of preprimary English language study will not be secured if English is not part of Grade 1 primary curriculum. A great variety in the existing preprimary EFL programs indicates the popularity of English throughout the world as well as growing understanding of very young learners’ capacity to successfully learn an additional language at an early age. The next section highlights the main theoretical concepts of teaching languages to young learners. First, it sheds light on young children as learners and the effective ways

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they learn an additional language. Then, it stresses the role of play in children’s language learning, and finally points out the contribution of critical resources for teaching languages to children in the twenty-first century such as children’s literature and technology.

Main Theoretical Concepts Young children’s development in the preschool period encompasses great changes in all aspects of their growth. To ensure that language education meets all children’s needs and caters for optimal development conditions, foreign language teachers have to develop adequate pedagogical and management language conducive strategies (▶ Chap. 24, “Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education”). Moreover, it is crucial that preschool EFL programs mirror the overall objectives of education and care provided by preprimary institutions by respecting the children’s need to be physically and emotionally safe in the school environment, to be actively engaged in learning and adequately supported as an individual, and to be challenged academically and adequately prepared for further study (ASCD 2020).

Very Young Learners and Foreign Language Teaching Preschool years are extremely important for children’s learning and education, as the foundation for children’s development and lifelong learning is set in preprimary years. This involves cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and language development, and asks for programs that can “enable children to reach their full potential in a holistic way” (European Commission 2014, p. 10). Significantly, a balance of education and care is needed at preschool age, so national programs mainly focus on children’s overall development, aiming to secure success in education, health, and prosperity in the long run (UNICEF 2012). The primary aim of teachers of English as a foreign language should, therefore, be to support the holistic development of the child by focusing on their personal, social, emotional, linguistic, reasoning, physical, and creative development, as well as the development of literacy and numeracy skills. Regarding language development, EFL teachers should aim at providing a comprehensible input and conditions for oral language production. Teachers who develop a number of pedagogical and management language-conducive strategies, such as providing the right level of interesting, comprehensible and age-appropriate language input and engaging children in meaningful and purposeful classroom interaction for maximal language output, manage to “intentionally create ecological conditions that are conducive to productive use of the target language” (▶ Chap. 24, “Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education”). In order to secure quality input, teachers need to consider diversity in preprimary contexts. The period from 3 to 6 years of age is characterized by fast development, but also by many individual differences among children of the same age, and is mainly seen as “consecutively building on previous learning – though the learning

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objectives will be similar – expectations in relation to outcomes are different, due to the specific needs of children at different ages and their cultural context” (Mourão and Ellis 2020, p. 11). Children are active learners, with diverse competences, and their need for learning through play and for positive learning experiences should be met by the preprimary curriculum. An early start should consider how children develop and what realistically can be achieved at a specific age, in order to establish appropriate approaches to teaching and adequate learning objectives, as well as to guide parents’ expectations of their children’s progress and achievement. The preprimary EFL teacher’s responsibility is to make the language comprehensible by providing adequate context (van Lier 2004) and to regularly check if the children understand the language used and its purpose in the classroom activities. Preprimary children usually do not ask for clarification if they do not understand something, which has implications for teaching English as a foreign language: EFL discourse should follow the phrases and patterns children are familiar with from their life experience (Cameron 2008; Pinter 2011). These developmental constraints should be taken into account when planning speaking and listening activities for the preprimary classroom: new vocabulary should be presented in contexts that are meaningful to children and life-like (e.g., dressing for a certain kind of weather), in thematic units that are interesting to them (e.g., toys or pets), accompanied with already familiar chunks in songs (e.g., Days of the Week), stories (e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?), rhymes, games (e.g., The Broken Telephone), and through physical activity, such as applying total physical response (TPR) activities (like “Jump the Line”) that encourage children’s physical activity based on listening to comprehensible input and responding to it through movement: the teacher gives a command (Stand up!) and performs the action alone or with volunteers in front of the class, while the other children just listen and observe; later, the teacher gives already taught commands and children respond through movement, action, mime, or gesture. A lot of support is needed through visuals, gestures, movement, facial expressions, modelling, and demonstration, as well as in the form of constant encouragement and praise. Therefore, an ecological or holistic approach toward EFL at an early age is essential for its success, in addition to a child-centered approach. Apart from giving learners the chance to be physically active, TPR activities also satisfy their need to show what they know and can do when exposed to English. More importantly, being play-like, physical activities engage young learners in the way they learn best.

Play and Language Learning Play is considered essential in children’s lives and “it is recognized as being an approach to learning in the early years, for it is child-centered and involves active participation with adults and peers” (Mourão and Ellis 2020, p. 16). It contributes to child development in many ways, not the least important being linguistic development. Cook (1997) defines “play” as “behaviour not primarily motivated by the human need to manipulate the environment (and to share information for this purpose) and to form and maintain social relationships – though it may indirectly

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serve both of these functions” (p. 227). He does not regard language used in play as authentic, seeing that it does not have a real-life practical use from an adult’s point of view. However, from a child’s point of view, play and the language used during play are of great consequence, as play is pivotal to a child’s life experience, and, in that sense, language used is as authentic as it can get. Therefore, especially in the case of preprimary children, play, both guided and unstructured, should not be overlooked as a tool in language teaching (Prošić-Santovac 2017). The natural use of realia in the form of a variety of toys used in play offers a great source of contextualized linguistic input, relevant to the very young learners. In addition, role play, a frequent component in group play, and sometimes even in solitary play, provides ample opportunities for productive speech, and practice with the knowledge acquired, as well as a chance for assessment of that knowledge, with the aim of guiding further teaching practice (Prošić-Santovac and Navratil 2019). Apart from “play as a teaching tool,” play can also be ingrained in language itself. Language play is present in a child’s life from infancy, being “at the core of early parent-child interaction” (Crystal 1998, p. 159). Also, playground rhymes and word play can be heard spontaneously developing as children begin their interactions outside their immediate family environment. Other forms of language play include distinctive sound play, adopting a different voice to one’s own, and verbal humor (Ely and McCabe 1994). With so much of children’s interaction engaging in ludic linguistic behavior (see Cook 1997) that aids metalinguistic awareness, language play can indeed be viewed as “a continuing feature of development, as children progress through school” (Crystal 1998, p. 178), and this natural inclination on the part of children should be regarded as a valuable ingredient in English language teaching, as well. Therefore, play, as an activity which creates a language-conducive context, needs to be an ever-present component in English language teaching at the preprimary level.

Children’s Literature and Language Learning Another source of context- and content provision for preprimary English language teaching is children’s literature, both in the form of poetry and prose, either authentic or non-authentic. Nursery rhymes and stories of different kinds represent an important part of early childhood environment, except in the cases of severe socioeconomic or other deprivation, where using them in the kindergarten aims to bridge the gap in terms of literacy. Many nursery rhymes exemplify language play at its best, and can aid language acquisition from infancy, both in case of children’s first and second language (Prošić-Santovac 2009). Also, rhymes thus experienced provide “third spaces” (Levy 2008) for children, i.e., experiences that bridge the gap and connect their home and preschool environments, and by doing this, they help children feel more at home in an institutional context. This is also valid for stories, especially fairy tales, which are traditionally viewed as an adequate source of children’s entertainment. However, as “no book is ever socially or politically neutral, and books for the young are especially sensitive to the way a particular culture, art a

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specific time, views childhood” (Salisbury and Styles 2012, p. 113), teachers should be mindful of the choices they make for their learners and take into account a variety of criteria in the process in order to cater not only for linguistic but also for personality development (Prošić-Santovac 2015, 2019). Picture books use either illustrations only or illustrations and the accompanying text as a mode of story delivery, contributing to very young learners’ cognitive, affective, linguistic, and literacy development (Lugossy 2012). A picture book can be a vehicle for any literary content, both fiction and non-fiction, or even only linguistic in nature, with letters or individual words and phrases, and “by definition contains two modes of communication, the visual text and the verbal text” (Mourão 2013, p. 98). Due to their variety in terms of the level of both visual and linguistic difficulty, picture books can be an ideal language teaching material, as they allow the teacher to provide adequate scaffolding and guidance within the learner’s zone of proximal development or “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1978, p. 86). Wordless picture books are a category in and of themselves, as they can provide all this in one and the same book, depending on the interpretation and the focus chosen. Because “picture books are designed to set up a desire for a particular kind of reading whether it be shared, performative, interactive, pleasurable, or contemplative” (Mallan 2002, p. 24), they provide both meaningful input and meaningful experience for the very young learners, creating an authentic learning situation.

Technology, Media, and Motivation Implementation of child-centered pedagogical approaches allows children to use English as a foreign language naturally and in a playful manner (Mourão 2014). Suitable materials include the traditionally used flashcards, songs, storybooks, etc. which are supposed to easily attract children’s attention. However, in the modern era of technology, in which children are exposed to stimuli far livelier than static pictures, it is necessary to create a seamless transition between home and preschool environments, in order for the latter not to seem bland by comparison. A variety of computer applications “may also have the potential for developing motivation for learning L2 pronunciation, as they not only serve as the source of native pronunciation models but are also embedded in context” (Szyszka 2015, p. 6). In addition, at preschool age, adequate cartoons or animated films, for example, can be used to create themes around which learning can be organized, with ample opportunities for developing both productive and receptive skills through solitary or group role-play with character toys or puppets (Prošić-Santovac 2017). This is not to say that technology should be used all the time, as overuse could also lead to boredom and blandness of the language learning experience, and potentially contribute to the ever-increasing addiction of young children. However, in a preschool classroom, “completely avoiding exposure to the media and

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technology is not a good solution, either, at least not in an environment where this would be regarded as non-standard behaviour” (Prošić-Santovac 2017, p. 569), which is why achieving a healthy balance should be the educators’ goal. In order to do that, one has to bear in mind a misconception about technology and foreign language learning: that “technology itself embodies some new and superior methodological approach to language teaching, although, in truth, all the new digital technologies offer is a new set of tools that can function in service of the language curriculum with the correct application” (Blake 2008, p. 8). The agency has to remain with the educators, and the responsibility for the choice of content and materials used for learning has to lie with them. Only then can the use of technology and media in English language teaching contribute to the utter immersion of a child in the task at hand, and result in the “ultimate task engagement – when motivation, cognition and emotion are fully aligned with the task under completion” (Dörnyei et al. 2014, p. 22).

Major Contributions Early English as a Foreign Language Teaching Programs Teaching English as a foreign language at preprimary is a growing field not only of practice but of research as well. Studies have shown major contributions of early English language learning programs as a set of achievements in all aspects of young children’s development, from physical and socioemotional to cognitive and linguistic (Cameron 2008; Edelenbos et al. 2006; Mourão and Ellis 2020; Mourão and Robinson 2016). Children’s linguistic development cannot be separated from their overall development. By learning a foreign language, children learn about themselves and about the world around them. More specifically, programs of early foreign language learning contribute to: – Building positive attitudes to other languages and cultures and people by providing an enjoyable language learning experience. – The development of aural and oral skills in another language, especially listening comprehension. – The development of learning skills, metalinguistic awareness, and a foundation for further language learning. – Building a broad awareness of language. Early EFL programs that consider children’s overall development have the potential to be successful. Such programs provide quality exposure to English and EFL teachers understand that they should use English as much as possible and what they say should be comprehensible and build on children’s interests and previous knowledge. Teachers’ role is crucial for providing opportunities for free play in English: first, the teacher sets an English learning area in the preprimary classroom, as one of several different options available to children for free-play activities; then,

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she/he resources it with materials that children have already used in the English lessons, such as flashcards, puppets, props, games, or picture books; next, teacher leads an activity using flashcards (e.g., showing different professions, like teacher, doctor chef, pilot, astronaut, digger driver, racing driver) and has children repeat the words in a series of activities; finally, children repeat the sequence in their free play, not encouraged by the teacher (Mourão 2018). The teacher may monitor children’s play and language use, rephrase words spoken in the native language and recast them in English, praise children’s demonstration of comprehension, evaluate their progress, and plan challenging tasks and activities that enable further development. Children’s experimentation with English in free play is potentially conducive to their independent language use in low-exposure foreign language contexts (European Commission 2011; Mourão 2014). According to the European Commission (2011), “[t]his could take the form of sociodramatic/pretend play” (p. 14) as a spontaneous, effort-free foreign language use by children. The teacher may further encourage parents and family to motivate children’s English language use after kindergarten hours in their play or while reading English books or watching cartoons together. Parental involvement in children’s language learning motivates children and enhances their engagement (Zhou and Ng 2016), while parents’ positive attitudes to English language learning yield affective gains for young learners (Alexiou 2020). However, Zhou and Ng (2016) warn that parents’ out of school activities for English language learning of their children tend to focus on memorization instead of providing opportunities for meaningful and purposeful use of the foreign language, which may have a negative effect on children’s motivation. What is more, the pressure coming from parents for more English language learning opportunities at the preprimary level may result in inappropriate or poorly organized programs that do a disservice to young children (Enever 2018; Zhou and Ng 2016). The issues related to parental involvement, therefore, need to be studied further to shed more light on the factors that may enhance language learning and improve children’s affective response to learning foreign languages. As shown by research, to be effective EFL preprimary programs should aim to provide education and care to focus on developing basic communication skills, and to build motivation by providing language learning experiences that are fun and anxiety-free. Moreover, they should respond to children’s curiosity, interest in learning new things, the need for social interaction and for being active in making sense of their environment through exploration and play. Being rooted in research, these principles should guide any program for teaching English to very young and young learners.

Current Trends in Early Foreign Language Learning In the increasingly mobile and digital society, new ways of learning have emerged. There is a proliferation of online EFL programs for very young children, extremely popular in East Asian countries. This is the uncharted territory, yet to be studied and explored for its effectiveness and adequacy. There are a number of current trends in

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EFL teaching such as the use of digital storytelling that has already been studied for its effectiveness in teaching an additional language to young children, as well as introducing science concepts in English through hands-on activities, that is still developing and needs to be studied for its effectiveness. Another role technology plays in language education at preprimary is in the use of digital tools and multimodal practices in language activities, like playing digital games, listening to songs and stories, or practicing vocabulary. Using digital tools for language games or game-like activities has become part of some preprimary EFL programs, aiming to provide opportunities for interaction (Korosidou and Griva 2020). Foreign language learning was introduced to a group of 26 preschoolers for 8 months in a pilot program that involved two weekly EFL lessons conducted as interactive games and digital stories. The activities fostered problem-solving and creativity of children through different digital tools and multimodal input (visual and audio). The studies have demonstrated that new multiliteracies pedagogy is beneficial for the acquisition and retention of new vocabulary, for increasing children’s phonological awareness and for developing their oral skills and digital literacy, as well as for enhancing their motivation (Korosidou and Griva 2019).

New Projects New projects for teaching EFL at preprimary level are strongly rooted in childcentered pedagogies, respond favorably to the general developmental characteristics of children as learners, and take into consideration their capacity for additional language learning from the earliest ages. As preschool children are natural makers and creators whose imagination is limitless, some emerging approaches build on these characteristics to enhance foreign language acquisition and learning beyond immersion contexts. These are the makerspace method, in which children experiment and learn by doing (Chang et al. 2019; Clapp et al. 2020; Marsh 2017; Marsh et al. 2017; Strawhacker and Bers 2018; Walsh 2015), and the story-based EFL programs (Ellis and Brewster 2014; Ghosn 2002; Lugossy 2012; Malkina 2014).

Innovative Methodological Approaches The Makerspace Method A highly innovative approach to learning in early childhood is a makerspace method “seen as a hands-on, learner-driven approach that can be integrated into any subject or topic area, being inherently interdisciplinary” (Chang et al. 2019, p. 2). Makerspaces are places created at preschool (or school, library, museum, and similar public spaces) where children are introduced to a variety of materials and tools that inspire their making through play. The basis of the makerspace method lies in a constructivist approach to learning that aims to enable children construct knowledge through an interaction with physical environment (Marsh 2017). Like in common spaces organized as learning areas in kindergartens, where a lot of

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informal learning occurs through individual or group play in interaction with materials provided by the teachers (Mourão 2019), in makerspaces children are allowed to learn through play and by making and creating something. However, the key idea of foreign language learning in makerspaces is placing a child’s interest in the center by integrating a foreign language into the daily making activities (Clapp et al. 2020). For example, in makerspaces in Brazil, children as young as three engage in a number of making activities, from experiments to building and cooking, while being exposed to English and encouraged to interact in English (Clapp et al. 2020). Their multi-sensory experiences with a wide range of materials help them develop their making and creating skills and support their learning skills and language development, as well as their twenty-first century skills such as creativity, curiosity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and community building (Binkley et al. 2012). Children’s curiosity is awakened through thematically selected picture books: for example, after being read, the book Mud puddle (Munsch 2019), told and retold the story a few times, the 4–5year olds are challenged to make mud, and then to do experiments with “walking water” and to solve the problem of transferring water from one place to the other without moving the water containers. Children are challenged not only cognitively but also linguistically because of the need to express their own innovative ideas in a foreign language. However, they are highly motivated to complete the tasks and the foreign language is for them just a tool to share ideas, negotiate them, and discuss possible solutions with peers. The situation created in makerspaces is lifelike, interesting, inspiring and inherently motivating, and encourages meaningful and purposeful foreign language use (Cameron 2008; Shin and Crandall 2014). Makerspaces encourage children’s innovative thinking and thus have the potential to prepare them for the future and the jobs that do not exist yet (Huddleston 2019). Like 3D printers and robotics, makerspaces allow hands-on experimentation, production, and transversal learning across multiple media. Furthermore, they encourage improvisational problem-solving, learners’ agency, independence and self-efficacy, and enhance peer collaboration and sharing of ideas and understanding (Marsh et al. 2017). Strawhacker and Bers (2018) contend that “the most important lesson that children can learn in a makerspace is how to collaborate with friends, test ideas, and revise their work” (p. 24). Marsh and the associates (2017) argue that “makerspaces foster personalized learning by enabling participants to pursue learning opportunities that suit their interests” (p. 27). Creativity is part of young children’s way of learning, and making stresses the importance of creativity developed through experimentation and play in the process of making. Moreover, drawing on constructivism and experiential learning, makerspaces support a model of learning-by-doing and are in line with the pedagogies of early childhood education, thus preparing children for real-life challenges of the twenty-first century. There is still a lot to be learned about the effectiveness of the approach through research, but presently it is regarded as one on the promising Agency by Design (Clapp et al. 2020) trends with the potential to support children’s foreign language development by engaging them in hands-on activities.

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The Story-Based Method Another developmentally appropriate approach to teaching a foreign language to preschool children is a story-based method. Although stories and storytelling have long been recognized as an excellent approach to providing an exposure to authentic language to young and very young learners (Cameron 2008; Ghosn 2002; Lugossy 2012), storytelling is rarely applied as a method at preprimary and primary levels, mainly because teachers lack either the storytelling skills or the resources to organize storytelling activities (Savić and Shin 2013). Importantly, besides responding to children’s emotional and psychological needs, this approach allows for the development of cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence, creativity, and critical thinking (Malkina 2014; Savić 2013; Savić and Shin 2013). What is more, young children possess huge imagination, a love of fantasy, and the need for movement (Pinter 2006), and a story responds to these characteristics by providing “a play-like mental experience which enables the child to enter the story, act in it, and own it” (Malkina 2014, p. 82). Also, as young learners’ affective development is tightly linked with their social development, sharing stories, which is a social experience, will also impact this latter aspect. Ellis and Brewster (2014) highlight the importance of the interactive technique of storytelling and give it priority in the process of children’s construction of meaning when compared to simply reading a story to children. The authors further stress the capacity of storytelling to “create rich and naturally contextualised learning conditions that enable teaching and language learning to be developed spontaneously and creatively in a whole curriculum approach” (Ellis and Brewster 2014, p. 3). An example of a preprimary story-based EFL program that has been proved as effective in teaching English to preschool children is the one developed by Malkina (2014) and described as a kindergarten story-based approach guided by current research of narrative and oral discourse analysis. It relies heavily on both verbal and non-verbal complementary segments to include stress, pausing, voice pitch and intonation, as means for pointing out key words, since “key-words stories are the first step in storytelling for small children before they start telling long and complicated stories” (Malkina 2014, p. 84). The author claims that this storytelling strategy is a child-centered way to diminish the cognitive demands that speech and narrative processes place for them, while at the same time having the potential to teach children rhythm through constant repetition of key words, and also to create optimal input (Krashen 1981) through simplified narrative, gestures, mime, and TPR activities. This method has a potential to make feasible a challenging task of teaching EFL to very young children who have immature speech processing skills, lack language learning experience, possess a short attention span and very limited life experience, and to consequently foster their holistic development (Malkina 2014). Furthermore, storytelling and picture books can help children develop language awareness and specific cognitive strategies for language learning, like guessing meaning of new vocabulary. Storybooks are excellent authentic multimodal materials and a great alternative to coursebooks (Ellis and Brewster 2014), providing opportunities for developing visual literacy of preschool children (Savić 2020), much needed as a twenty-first century skill.

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Critical Issues and Topics Current critical issues involve a number of aspects related to EFL provision that mainly refer to contexts in which preprimary children learn English, such as the type of program and exposure to English, appropriateness of approaches and methods used, curriculum development, teacher qualifications and their English proficiency, availability and adequacy of resources, assessment of children’s progress, continuity of language learning, and parents’ role and support (Murphy 2014; Murphy and Evangelou 2016; Rixon 2013).

Contextual Factors The contexts of preprimary language learning vary enormously (Cameron 2003) and there are extensive variations in the provision of preprimary EFL both within countries and between them in terms of the quality of programs, quality of teaching, weekly hours, provision of appropriate materials, class size, and class climate. These and other contextual factors affect practice and modify the effects of an early start in EFL learning either by creating a favorable environment for young children’s foreign language acquisition and learning, or hindering it and demotivating children’s engagement and overall participation. Very often, the lack of resources makes teaching a foreign language to very young learners rather challenging (Rixon 2013). In addition, preschool EFL teachers in some parts of the world lack adequate training for acquiring pedagogical knowledge and skills needed for teaching this age group, particularly the skills to provide comprehensible input and scaffold young children by modifying their own speech as a means of classroom interaction (Zein 2019). What is more, teachers’ responsibility stretches toward ensuring coherence and continuity of EFL provision within early education programs, making their role increasingly demanding.

Quality Teacher Education One of the main pitfalls of an early start in foreign language learning identified by Nunan (1999) is inadequacy of teacher training. This has been echoed by Murphy (2014), who further stresses the importance of the quality of teachers and teaching. Positive results can be achieved in foreign language learning at a very young age with high-quality instruction, especially teachers’ fluency and spoken language competence, as well their knowledge of and skillful application of appropriate methods and techniques. Learning a foreign language can become very demotivating if children do not achieve fluency that enables them to participate in spontaneous meaningful communication, i.e., if they are not able to proceed beyond songs, chants, rhymes, and basic vocabulary. Inappropriate pedagogical practice may thus hinder children’s development. While specialist English language teachers are generally proficient in the foreign language, they often have little or even no training for teaching this age group, having been mainly educated to teach in secondary schools (Mourão 2019). On the other hand, kindergarten and preschool teachers’ language proficiency is generally lower, but they possess appropriate pedagogical knowledge for early

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childhood education. Collaboration of the two professionals can result in quality teaching, mutual learning from each other, sharing resources, and sharing responsibility in monitoring and assessing children’s progress. Moreover, collaboration in such contexts shows “the pertinence of working as a team to ensure the experience is positive and meaningful for the children” (Mourão 2019, p. 138).

Evaluation and Assessment There is little information about the approaches and processes for assessing children’s progress in preprimary EFL programs, though some valuable experiences have been shared recently (Mourão 2019). As objectives of such programs are much wider than linguistic achievements, and concern the child’s holistic development, this is a very complex issue that deserves much more attention. Good assessment practices of preprimary children’s linguistic progress involve continuous monitoring of their progress and formative assessment to anticipate their potential development (European Commission 2011). Preschool EFL teachers should be helped to “develop reliable methods of recording children’s progress” (Prošić-Santovac et al. 2019, p. 264) by designing child-friendly assessment activities and procedures, such as assessment using puppets, for example (Prošić-Santovac and Navratil 2019). Mourão (2019) describes a case study with best assessment practices for very young children. Two groups of 4- and 5-year-olds from low to low-middle socioeconomic backgrounds were exposed to English an hour a week (in two 30-min sessions) within their regular education in a preprimary institution in Portugal. English classes were given by a fully qualified English language teacher in the presence of a qualified preschool teacher, who played a crucial role in integrating English into daily activities both in the process of planning them and in scaffolding children’s learning. In this context the professional English language teacher and the preschool teacher used a number of assessment tools to collect evidence of children’s learning. These tools varied from observation, through photographs of children engaged in teacher-led activities or free play, to short written reports, in addition to children’s portfolios with photographs, children’s drawings, notes about children’s spontaneous language use and types of activities they enjoy, documented children’s progress, serving as evidence for parents and for achieving continuity in primary education. Continuity is related to smoothness of transfer from preprimary education to primary to enable children to build on knowledge and skills they have developed at preschool. Preprimary evaluation and assessment should, therefore, focus on parameters specific to a group of children, and may include a child’s motivation for learning English, interest in learning new words and phrases in English, spontaneous use of English in daily activities, pleasure in singing songs in English and in looking at books in English (Mourão 2019). Observation should be an assessment tool for collecting evidence of the parameters, while written narrative reports and portfolios should be used for formative assessment and for formal assessment meetings with parents. In this way assessment becomes an integrative part of everyday activities, mirroring learning and children’s overall language development.

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This section has stressed some of a number of critical issues related to the effectiveness of provision of English as a foreign language at preprimary level. The first group of issues relates to a great diversity of contexts in which English is taught, highlighting the need for considering numerous factors when designing and implementing early foreign language learning programs. The second and the third critical issues point to the need for EFL teacher education courses specifically targeting pedagogies for early foreign language teaching and assessment. Future research should give more information about age- and context-sensitive approaches to early foreign language development.

Future Research Directions While there has been ample research on preprimary learning and teaching of English in bilingual settings (such as English as L2 in English-speaking environments), foreign language contexts have remained an underresearched field. The area of preprimary EFL acquisition/learning and teaching has an abundance of issues to be studied in the future, the basic question being related to further comparison of linguistic gains of an early and later start, particularly to literacy development in primary school. Furthermore, the complex role of contextual factors in children’s EFL development should be clarified, especially the role of teacher’s English proficiency, qualification, pedagogical strategies, and professional development, and how family and parental support may affect children’s language learning. Little is known about the effectiveness of specific methods used in the preprimary EFL teaching, like makerspaces and story-based programs, or how much progress children make when hands-on activities and storybooks are applied on regular basis. With the twenty-first century teaching contexts being increasingly multilingual, lighter needs to be shed on language transfer and children’s motivation for learning English. The effectiveness of different programs, both formal and informal, more traditional or more child-centered, should be measured to guide future preprimary curricula for securing higher progress and better transit to primary education. Approaches to evaluation and assessment of preprimary children’s progress should be studied, and appropriate tools should be developed to inform children, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders of preprimary programs’ success. Also, the role of technology and multimodal materials needs to be studied for their future purposeful use. An important issue is to determine how much EFL learning contributes to children’s holistic development. Case studies and longitudinal research are needed to clarify all issues mentioned.

Conclusions The chapter aimed to explore the programs and main theoretical concepts, pedagogies, and achievable goals in the fields of teaching and learning English as a foreign language in preschools in different parts of the world, and to discuss

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research results indicating critical issues and topics of EFL and very young learners. Early exposure to foreign languages is considered to benefit children in multiple ways, with potential linguistic, affective, sociocultural, and cognitive gains to be taken from the experience. Of the many foreign languages available, English language is one of the most frequently taught at preprimary level worldwide. The EFL provision differs in preprimary education, in that it is either supplied as an extra-curricular activity taught by externally hired staff and paid for additionally or included in the preprimary curriculum with no additional staff hired nor extra fees involved, and it can be either compulsory and policyregulated or a non-obligatory add-on to the curriculum. Models of EFL education at preprimary level which are usually available either center around teaching the linguistic aspects of English, as in a primary school classroom, or they focus on the affective and communicative aspects of language learning and raising children’s language awareness. Nevertheless, the best practice for very young learners and one that should be aimed at is a holistic approach, contributing to the overall development of the learners in terms of personal, social, emotional, linguistic, reasoning, educational, physical and creative growth. For this to be achieved, the learning experience needs to be as child-focused as possible, using play as a vehicle of knowledge construction, transmission and exchange, as well as exposing children to the adequate literary works in the target language, in order to simulate home environment as much as possible. Also, with the same goal in mind, the usefulness of a variety of technologically advanced teaching options should not be overlooked. All this is important in order for the affective filter to be as low as possible and learning to be stress-free, and new trends have appeared with the aim of catering for this need, based on child-centered pedagogies. Methods such as Makerspace and Story-based method are some of the examples of such innovations. Online EFL programs for very young learners are also a novelty – one to be researched and examined in more depth. However, apart from the contexts in which EFL is learned, the impact of several factors should not be underestimated, such as contextual factors affecting the learning environment, quality of teacher education and approaches to assessment of learners’ progress in preprimary EFL programs.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools ▶ From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues ▶ Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education ▶ Vocabulary and Grammar Development in Young Learners of English as an Additional Language

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Origins of CLIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CLIL and Early Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining CLIL at Preschool Level and Its Distinctive Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Integration of Content and Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Integrating Cognitive Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Facilitating Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cognition and the Role of the L1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Country Snapshots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lithuania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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O. Mair (*) Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_14

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Abstract

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a form of bilingual education tied to a European political and educational vision of producing plurilingual citizens who are able to live and work in a global, mobile, multilingual society. Since the term was coined in 1994 it has become part of mainstream education. This chapter provides an overview of the development of CLIL and its application to preschool contexts with very young learners. Although CLIL has been adopted in policy in some parts of Europe, preschool CLIL programs are usually self-activated and largely undocumented in research. There are several overlaps, however, in the theoretical underpinning of early years education and CLIL, both of which are influenced by a socialconstructivist approach to learning, emphasizing the importance of experiential, child-centered learning. At the theoretical heart of CLIL is the integration of language and content and this is a critical issue as far as CLIL teacher education and the planning and implementation of CLIL programs are concerned. There are no major studies on CLIL at preschool and there is little empirical evidence of the benefits of a CLIL approach at this level, so there is a clear need for a research agenda to be established. As more preschool programs are documented, new data from classrooms and from the various stakeholders – children, teachers, and parents – is starting to emerge. Future research directions are likely to investigate all forms of outcomes in CLIL programs at this level, including aspects of first and second oral language learning and curricular outcomes. They are also likely to address teacher education, training, and implementation as well as investigating stakeholder perspectives. Given the importance of oral learning, the adoption of classroom discourse analysis could provide insight into CLIL practice at this level. Keywords

CLIL · Bilingual education · Integration · Preschool · Classroom discourse

Introduction The term “Content and Language Integrated Learning” (CLIL) was coined in 1994 (Marsh et al. 2001; Mehisto et al. 2008) and emerged in a European context. It is an educational approach rather than a foreign language learning methodology, and it is characterized by a dual focus on content and language learning and their integration. CLIL is a type of bilingual education (BE), which in one form or another has been in existence for centuries (Hanesová 2015), and it shares some features with immersion education, which arose in Canada in the 1960s in response to a perceived need to prepare students to live and work in a French-English bilingual society (PérezCañado 2012). It involves the learning of content through the medium of a foreign language.

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The Origins of CLIL The exponential growth CLIL has enjoyed in Europe relates to European language policy and to institutional and public interest in the evidence-based success of other dual-focused language programs, such as dual language bilingual education in the USA and immersion education in Canada (Mehisto 2012; Baker and Wright 2017, p. 235). References to CLIL start to emerge in European policy documents from the mid-1990s. In 1995 the European Commission released a White Paper on Education and Training which listed developing “proficiency in three Community languages” (p. 44) as one of five main lines of action to be adopted by member states. The White Paper also invited member states to reform their education policies to include the teaching of nonlinguistic subjects through a foreign language as a way of ensuring this proficiency and encouraging a “genuine use by all pupils” of Community foreign languages (p. 46). Following this, in 2003 the European Commission’s Action Plan for language learning and linguistic diversity promoted CLIL as an innovative approach to improve language teaching and learning (European Commission 2004; Ruiz de Zarobe 2013). In Europe CLIL has cemented its position over the last 25 years as a response to the need to improve linguistic competence without further crowding curricula and to make language learning more stimulating and effective. The development of this educational approach has also been supported by a growing body of evidence that learning through CLIL programs presents no threat to academic achievement or first language development. Moreover, CLIL may in fact enhance cognitive ability (Tedick and Cammarata 2012). Today CLIL is seen to be part of a political vision of multilingualism and of creating citizens able to live and work in an interconnected, diverse and mobile society. Although in the last decade or so CLIL has been adopted beyond Europe, in Asia (Robertson and Adamson 2013), Australia (Cross 2013), South America (Banegas 2021), and South Africa (Mathole 2016), for example, the motivations for its adoption may vary according to different contexts and cannot be embraced in a single overview. These non-European contexts thus fall outside the scope of this chapter. Over the last 20 years CLIL has become the dominant acronym among a few that essentially describe the same practice: AICLE (Aprendizaje Integrado de Contenidos y Lenguas Extranjeras [Foreign Language and Content Integrated Learning]) is also used in Spain and EMILE (l’Enseignement de Matières par l’Intégrationd’une Langue Etrangère [Subject Teaching through the Integration of a Foreign Language]) in France, but CLIL has caught on at a global level, becoming a buzzword in educational discourse (Pèrez Cañado and Ráez Padilla 2015). Thus, over time, CLIL has come to be recognized as an umbrella term (Marsh 2002, p. 15; Mehisto et al. 2008; Cenoz et al. 2013) that takes into account a range of practices and approaches. One of the best-known definitions is that given by Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (2010, p. 1) who describe it as: a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. That is, in the teaching and learning process, there is a focus not only on language. Each is interwoven even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time.

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This interweaving of language and content is at the heart of CLIL’s theoretical underpinning (see section “Main Theoretical Concepts”). In addition, Nikula, Dalton-Puffer, and Llinares (2013, p. 70) describe CLIL as “an educational approach in which a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction to teach content subjects for mainstream students,” thus making it clear that the additional language should be a foreign rather than a community language. Finally, there is also the issue of the implied efficiency of a “languages across the curriculum” approach, in which “a dual-focused objective would seem to be implying that CLIL kills two birds with one stone” (Ball 2002, p. 2).

CLIL and Early Language Learning The same White Paper (European Commission 1995) that promoted the teaching of nonlinguistic subjects through a foreign language also emphasized the European Commission’s belief that the “early teaching of language, starting at nursery school, should become part of basic knowledge” (p. 13). The period in which CLIL has developed thus corresponds roughly to a period in which Europe has witnessed an ever younger starting age for foreign language learning. This has been driven partly by policy, as well as by public perceptions of an earlier starting age being “better.” Public discourse about language learning in the late 1990s also helped to shape ideas of the benefits of early foreign language learning and bilingual education in early learning environments. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1997 speech at Oxford University is one well-known example: “Everyone knows that with languages the earlier you start, the easier they are” (Nikolov 2009, p. 16). Such public statements, not necessarily underpinned by research findings, have tended to receive more media attention than the work carried out by applied linguists. Parents, as the receivers of such statements and as important stakeholders in early learning, have been a driving force in seeking out and instigating bilingual and early foreign language programs (Edelenbos et al. 2006). Immersion programs in Canada, for example, began as a result of English-speaking parents in Quebec recognizing that French proficiency was important in a French-speaking society (Directorate-General for Education and Culture (European Commission), Eurydice 2006). CLIL, as one type of bilingual education, has received significant public attention and has frequently attracted the interest of parents as a possible solution for increasing language standards and as an innovative pedagogical approach. Consequently, parents have become involved in the implementation and development of CLIL projects with young and very young learners (Mehisto and Asser 2007; Ruiz de Zarobe 2013; Ioannou-Georgiou 2015). As noted by Mourão and Lourenço (2015, p. 1), the categories of “young learners” and “very young learners” are not fixed, but the former can take into account children aged 5–12 years or even 3–14 years, while the latter generally refers

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to the period before compulsory schooling at approximately 6 years of age. This chapter is concerned with preschool CLIL for “very young learners” in the 3–6 years age group, although to define CLIL and explain its origins, some attention must be given to other school levels. CLIL is now quite widespread throughout primary and secondary education in many European states, even if it has not been implemented as official national policy in most. In 2006, the Eurydice survey showed that formal CLIL projects had already been conducted or introduced in 30 European countries. Pilot projects at a national level had been set up in at a range of educational levels, from preschool to secondary. Belgium (Flemish-speaking part), Spain, Italy, Slovakia, and the UK (in Scotland) all had pilot projects at preschool level (Directorate-General for Education and Culture (European Commission), Eurydice 2006). Nevertheless, adoption of CLIL at preschool level since then has been patchy and is not well documented. The most recent Eurydice report (2017), which dedicated a large section to CLIL, shows that even though nearly all of the 42 countries involved now have some CLIL provision, very few have actually introduced this approach in all schools at some stage of schooling. The few countries that have done so include “Austria and Liechtenstein in the first grades of primary education, Cyprus in at least one grade of primary education, Luxembourg and Malta at primary and secondary levels,” while in Italy CLIL is provided in the last grade of upper secondary education (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice 2017, p. 14). This more recent Eurydice report does not provide insights into preschool level CLIL or an overview of developments at this level. As far as the 3–6 age group is concerned, there are many preschools and infant schools using a “CLIL approach,” although there are no available statistics regarding the extent and details of such programs in Europe. Marsh (2012, p. 175) notes that they are particularly difficult to obtain. He adds that “although there is much discussion about possible merits of the approach at this level, which suggests a possible increase in activity, substantiation remains problematic.” Pérez-Cañado (2012) provides a comprehensive overview of CLIL practice and research in a number of European countries, although there is virtually no mention of very young learners and only one bibliographic reference to a Swedish kindergarten context (p. 339). The literature suggests that preschool CLIL projects may be under-documented in European data because more than at other levels, they are the result of “individual initiatives undertaken by school communities, teachers and parents” (Ruiz de Zarobe 2013, p. 231). The European Strategic Framework’s working paper on preprimary language learning (2011) recognized that a CLIL approach exists in preschool contexts and may be adapted to national or regional curricula and to the age group. It has been suggested as an appropriate approach for the preschool by researchers (Portiková 2015; Murphy 2014) and predicted as a “key theme and future direction” for language learning with young learners (Copland and Garton 2014). Policymakers have also acknowledged the growing importance of CLIL at this level. In Italy, for example, the former education minister Stefania Giannini named CLIL as a suitable teaching methodology for foreign language instruction at the preschool in ministerial

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planning guidelines (2014). However, until now the growth and implementation of CLIL in European preschools has mostly been driven by schools and individual teachers who are keen to adopt a methodology that shares principles with some of the most significant early learning approaches, such as Reggio Emilia and Montessori. This accounts for its diffusion at a grassroots level and the tendency for evidence to emerge in the form of self-documentation and action research.

Defining CLIL at Preschool Level and Its Distinctive Features This section seeks to define some of the distinctive features of CLIL in European preschools by considering firstly how CLIL differs from other types of early language education and, secondly, noting how the profile of the CLIL teacher may differ from both that of the immersion teacher and of the foreign language teacher.

Differentiating CLIL from Other Language Programs at Preschool In the last 10 years, across Europe more and more preschool programs that claim to use a “CLIL approach” have sprung up. As noted, such programs tend to be of a grassroots, spontaneous style, often activated by single schools with the support of teachers and parents, rather than stemming from policy, such as that outlined by Mair (2018). Defining CLIL in a preschool setting poses some challenges partly because CLIL’s heterogeneous nature is no less evident at preschool level and partly because curricular “content” takes a different form at preschool. Most European preschools have play-based integrated curricula without subject-based learning or at least without separation of subjects into clear timetables. The lack of specific subjects at preschool has led some scholars to question whether “CLIL” or “immersion” actually applies to preschool contexts. Kersten (2015, p. 79), for example, appears to question the use of the term “immersion” by bilingual preschools because of the lack of subjects, stating that“[t]hese preschool programmes are often referred to as immersion programmes although they do not involve any subject teaching.” However, even though there may be a lack of subjects, preschool programs are contentrich and organized around integrated learning areas that take into account children’s physical, communicative, cognitive, linguistic, psychosocial, creative, and emotional skills development, as well as fostering school readiness. A CLIL preschool approach entails integrating language with play learning and planning around themes or content areas. It must be flexible enough to take into account the routines of the preschool and the unstructured approach to content learning. As Lasagabaster and Sierra (2010) note, quite a lot of English Language Teaching literature uses the terms “immersion” and “CLIL” interchangeably. They argue for the need to draw a clear separation between the two, noting that the objectives of CLIL and immersion are often different. Although the two practices share some principles, they differ in others. Specific features distinguish CLIL from other types of language immersion programs. CLIL may have specific characteristics in terms of teacher preparation, implementation, context, and theoretical underpinning (Lasagabaster and Sierra 2010). Hickey and de Mejía (2014) outline different models

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of immersion in the early years. They note that in bilingual models of early years immersion “children are exposed to two languages, one of which may be the native language of some or all the children, and the other the dominant language of the wider community” (p.133). This is generally not the case with CLIL programs in European contexts, where the additional language used in the program is not the native language of either the children or the teachers, but usually a foreign language, English being the language most commonly used (Coleman 2006; Harrop 2012 and Costa 2016). Another distinctive feature is that immersion children who study a local or regional language as part of an immersion program usually have a lot more opportunity to use the L2, while CLIL students use it primarily in the classroom, as in the case of English in Spain (Lasagabaster and Sierra 2010), rather than in the wider community or at home. In Europe the languages taught through CLIL are mostly major international linguae francae, rather than community languages (Pérez-Cañado and Ráez Padilla 2015). The objective of CLIL programs is not for participants to become sequential bilinguals (learning a second language in the early years after the first has been established, for example in contexts when the home language is different from the community language) but to increase their language proficiency and fluency in the foreign language while gaining other knowledge and skills. For this reason, children in CLIL programs are often referred to as “classroom bilinguals” because their L2 language skills enable them to function in the L2 within the learning environment, but they are not required to use it immediately in the wider community. This chapter uses the term “foreign language” to refer to the CLIL language. Another distinguishing feature is thus that the rationale for many European CLIL programs is quite different from an early years language immersion program, such as the aforementioned French immersion in Canada and two-way Spanish-English dual language programs in the USA, which aim to avoid attrition in the non-dominant language and ensure acquisition of the dominant language in the community, leading to bilingual competence. Nor are CLIL programs motivated by assimilation of language minority students as in content-based instruction in the USA (Baker and Wright 2017, p. 236). All the same, it may be hard to differentiate between partial immersion models and self-declared CLIL models, particularly at preschool level. Some programs define themselves as “CLIL,” but involve native speaker teachers and use a community language as the “CLIL” language. On the other hand, some forms of immersion may fit the description of a CLIL program, even if they do not adopt the term.

The Portrait of the CLIL Preschool Teacher The portrait of the CLIL preschool teacher may differ greatly from that of foreign language teachers at schools, with the former holding an early years teaching qualification, and the latter usually a language teaching qualification. This matches the profile of CLIL teachers at other school levels, who tend to be nonlinguistic subject specialists or content teachers rather than having qualifications as language teachers (Nikula et al. 2013). The non-native language competence of the teachers

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involved in CLIL programs is also a common feature, unlike in immersion contexts in which native-speaker teachers from both languages in the program are involved. Teachers usually share a native language with their pupils, creating a situation in which the CLIL language is a foreign language for both teacher and children. To summarize, due to the need to teach in a foreign language in a CLIL program, teachers may require specific pedagogical preparation as well as appropriate linguistic competence. The question of the CLIL teacher profile has a bearing on to the type of content taught through CLIL. Pladevall-Ballester (2016) explains that at primary school level, the rationale for the choice of subjects may be driven by providing opportunities to develop language skills in contextualized environments, such as in science subjects, or by concerns about using CLIL for more “academic” subjects because of the perceived cognitive demands, in which case subjects like Physical Education (PE), Music and Art and Craft (A&C) subjects may be chosen. In other cases, the choice may simply be tied to teachers’ L2 level or to practical concerns such as timetabling. With very young learners, before academic learning, most of these issues do not apply because the teachers are not subject specialists and there is little separation into subjects. The question of providing contextualized content is important, and examples in the section on “Major Contributions” show that content relating to stories, songs, and games and to nature learning are often selected for CLIL at preschool. To recap, the introduction has provided an overview of CLIL’s historical background and its emergence in Europe at all school levels as part of a vision to prepare students to meet the multilingual and multicultural needs of an increasingly mobile society. It has also identified CLIL as an umbrella term that encompasses a range of practices, which nonetheless share some specific features, and it has raised the question of whether CLIL, as an approach often associated with subject learning, may be applied to preschool contexts with learners aged 3–6 at all. Despite CLIL being recognized as appropriate for very young learners, a review of the literature reveals little formal policy and national implementation regarding CLIL at preschool level. This contrasts with the grassroots adoption of CLIL for use with young learners that is widely documented by teachers, and is beginning to be documented by research, as will be seen in the sections on “Major Contributions” and “New Projects.”

Main Theoretical Concepts A social constructivist approach to learning, which emphasizes a child-centered approach, active learning, interaction, and scaffolding (Coyle et al. 2010) underpin both CLIL and many approaches to early learning, which may be responsible for the interest in CLIL on the part of early learning practitioners and its quick diffusion in preschool environments. As CLIL offers learners of any age a natural situation for learning languages, it builds on other forms of learning and may be particularly motivating (Coyle et al. 2010). Marsh and Langé (2000, p. 5) confirm that “it is this

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naturalness which appears to be one of the major platforms for CLIL’s importance and success in relation to both language and other subject learning.” This section addresses the key principles on which CLIL has been developed. As suggested by the country snapshots, which are mostly based on small-scale studies of CLIL at preschool level, there are few major studies, with that conducted by Ioannou-Georgiou (2015) being the most significant. They share some features and offer a good starting point for schools and communities looking to implement CLIL and teachers seeking advice on planning preschool CLIL lessons as well as classroom strategy. In the last few years, more studies have emerged, as the next section outlines.

The Integration of Content and Language Learning In addition to having different contexts and rationales for implementation, and involving different teacher preparation, CLIL is underpinned by an integrated approach to language and content learning, an issue that is addressed further in the next section. Well-known Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories have been important to the development of CLIL. These include Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1985), which says that for language acquisition to take place, learners need sufficient comprehensible input, and Long’s interaction hypothesis (Long 1981, 1996), which posits that SLA is aided by interactional contexts in which learners avoid communication breakdown by negotiating for meaning. However, it has also been argued that such theories do not take content learning sufficiently into account (Coyle et al. 2010; Mohan and van Naerssen 1997). CLIL theorists emphasize that when a language is a medium of learning as opposed to the object of learning, a new set of assumptions must be applied and an approach that integrates cognitively meaningful content learning and richly contextualized language learning must be developed. As a way of “mapping” this integration, Coyle et al. (2010) developed the 4Cs Framework, in which the 4Cs are content (subject matter), communication (language learning and using), cognition (learning and thinking processes), and culture (developing intercultural understanding and global citizenship). In CLIL, language progression does not apply, and the language used and “taught” is that demanded by the content. The content needs drive the planning of what Coyle et al. (2010, p. 55) refer to as the “learning route” and the introduction of new language. Whereas in foreign language teaching contexts, content is drawn on to make a planned progression through grammatical structures more meaningful, in CLIL contexts, learners will need to use certain linguistic forms to be able grasp and explain the content. For example, a history lesson may call for students to be able to use the past tense effectively before it would normally be introduced in a foreign language lesson setting. As Coyle et al. (2010, p. 59) argue, “progression through the conceptual understanding of the content, rather than progression in grammatical awareness typified by learning present tense before past tense and so on” is of vital importance. As a result, teachers must be helped to identify what these language demands are when planning for CLIL or during teacher education. Krashen (1981)

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seems to make similar arguments with reference to contexts in which the language is a medium of instruction, suggesting that although grammar structures are acquired in a predictable sequence, this sequence does not need to be followed by the teacher’s syllabus. In recent years there has been an increased theoretical interest in the process of integration in CLIL and a “cognitive-linguistic turn in CLIL” has been identified (Reitbauer et al. 2018). Most notably perhaps, Nikula, Dafouz, Moore, and Smit (2016) examine what integration means in relation to curriculum and pedagogic planning, participant perceptions and school classroom practices. At the most essential level, what makes CLIL different from English language teaching or EFL classes is the conscious “pedagogic integration of contextualized content, cognition, communication and culture into teaching and learning practice” (Coyle et al. 2010, p. 6). Concerning young learners, the integrated approach of CLIL is “particularly appropriate and feasible” when education is child-centered and experiential (Genesee 2014, p. 26). As experiential and social learning are the main modes of learning in preschool, the CLIL content may be presented through multisensory and physical activity. Given the absence of subject learning with the 3–6 years age group, the content comprises a thematic area. As Coyle et al. (2010, p. 53) note, content does not have to be part of “a discrete curriculum discipline.” This thematic area thus becomes the departure point for applying the 4Cs framework, which must be mapped out during the planning stage with reference to the local learning priorities and take into account that at this level, language is developing through speaking and listening skills, as literacy is usually not part of the curriculum.

Communication In the 4Cs Framework “communication” is used by Coyle et al. (2010) to refer to language learning and its use. This involves both the more functional interpersonal language known as BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency), a distinction first introduced by Cummins (1980). If applied to preschool, the notion of CALP may seem somewhat artificial insofar as the language is “academic” only in the sense of it taking place within a formal school context. Thus discipline-specific language does not really apply. A way of redefining this distinction with regard to very young learners would be to consider the spontaneous language of play and socialization as distinct from the language of the classroom used between teacher and children to set up more structured activities, establish routines, and regulate behavior. The latter may involve entirely different forms and registers, instructional language, and the language of hypothesizing and classifying. It might be termed “pre-academic” language and the language of thinking. To take an example, children or teachers asking “Can I play?” and saying “Your turn!”, which belong to an informal, interpersonal register and fulfill a pragmatic function, are quite different from “Why do you think it will sink?” and “Let’s sort the cards. Put the red ones in the red box,” which belong to a more formal, instructional register and are more associated with teacher discourse. The latter paves the way for academic

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learning, which involves making hypotheses and predictions. Gibbons (1991, p. 3) draws attention to the way the language of play does not normally engage higher order thinking skills, such as “hypothesizing, evaluating, inferring, generalizing, predicting or classifying.” She points out that “these are the language functions which are related to learning and the development of cognition; they occur in all areas of the curriculum, and without them a child’s potential in academic areas cannot be realized.” Likewise, Blum-Kulka et al. (2004) address the different genres of child communication with peers and teachers and their different functions in classroom settings. It must be remembered that BICS and CALP are conceptual constructs, but ones that help establish a framework on which educators can base planning (Cummins 2016). Both of these language functions thus need to be considered in a CLIL program. The routines of preschool – welcome, roll call, the calendar, hygiene, play, meal-time, and rest-time – can be hard to separate into BICS and CALP, but they clearly facilitate overall functional language development.

Integrating Cognitive Challenges CLIL teachers of young learners must analyze the cognitive demands of tasks, asking themselves what kind of thinking and cognitive challenges are involved: “is it lower-order processing such as recalling the names of 2D shapes and identifying them; or is it higher order processing, such as [...] thinking creatively about how they could make repeated patterns with them?” (Bentley 2015, p. 94). Identifying the cognitive demands of a task then enables teachers to establish linguistic objectives. A concrete example is provided by García Esteban (2015a) who reports on a small study involving preservice preschool teachers undertaking CLIL training in a Spanish university. In an exercise involving storytelling using a CLIL framework, the trainee teachers were required to include strategies that lead to lower-order thinking skills, comprising thinking and remembering, and higher-order thinking skills, including analyzing, evaluating, and creating (García Esteban 2015a, p. 48) following Bloom’s taxonomies. These included planning a range of different types of interactions, such as asking children to recall aspects of the story, followed by non-display questions that engage children’s analytical skills by asking them to evaluate the characters or whether the story has a happy ending, for example. The aim of the exercise was to help teachers establish “successful and sustainable” CLIL practice by giving careful thought to the role of cognition and the integration of language and content. This small study also suggests the way that the adoption of thoughtful planning principles, although specifically advocated as part of CLIL, may also simply be consistent with good pedagogical practice.

Facilitating Interaction A systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach, which holds that language is a resource for meaning rather than a series of rules, has become increasingly important

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in CLIL. In CLIL contexts, classroom language is “less concerned with well formedness than with reconstructing meaning to the mutual satisfaction of speakers” (Lorenzo 2007: 32). There is thus an emphasis on the co-construction of meaning. Ideally, for learning to take place, CLIL activities should offer opportunities for interaction and dialogic learning (Wells 1999; Coyle et al. 2010) in the foreign language (FL). A dialogic-interactive model, underpinned by the sociocultural construct of scaffolding, provides opportunities for CLIL learners to be cognitively engaged by moving from everyday to academic or pre-academic discourse and opportunities for language “through” learning (Nikula et al. 2013). This represents something of a dilemma at preschool level, where children are at a critical stage in L1 language acquisition and may be coming into contact with the FL for the first time. If dialogic learning is to take place, the children ideally should be able to communicate with each other and with teachers in the FL, something that is impossible for beginners. To facilitate communication in the FL, teachers will need to scaffold new content and language effectively. Facilitating interaction in preschool level CLIL may include giving special attention to the physical space and material. Mehisto, Marsh, and Frigols (2008, p. 29) list the core features of CLIL methodology as involving a “multiple focus; [a] safe, and enriching learning environment, authenticity, active learning, scaffolding and cooperation.” These aspects are applicable to school contexts with very young learners in a number of ways. The spatial design of the rooms, for example, can favor social development and interaction. Musatti and Mayer (2011) found that at Italian “nidi” or infant-toddler childcare facilities for children aged up to three, spatially organized sets of play materials contribute to maintaining children’s attention and their prolonged engagement on an activity and favor their social interaction. In EFL research on very young learners, English language areas (ELAs) have been promoted and studied as a way of fostering English interaction and language development (Mourão 2014, 2018). In a CLIL context, supporting activities, games, and play by ensuring that educational settings favor interaction and the co-construction of knowledge are likely to support both communication and cognition. The desired outcome in a preschool CLIL environment is for child-led, spontaneous play to eventually involve the foreign language.

Cognition and the Role of the L1 According to Piaget’s (1952) classification of children’s cognitive development, children at preschool are in the “pre-operational” stage, and in linguistic terms, this means they are consolidating their L1 grammar (Anderson et al. 2015). Cummins, on more than one occasion, has drawn attention to the common underlying proficiency of first and second language learning, showing that metalinguistic knowledge and skills are transferrable across both languages (1980, 2000). Much of the grammar learning in the preoperational stage is incidental and unconscious and the CLIL approach essentially seeks to support the extension of such acquisition to the foreign language (Anderson et al. 2015). Very young learners from 2 to 7 years

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are engaged in the fast mapping of new L1 lexis, a process that may also apply to an FL in a naturalistic learning context, as Rohde and Tiefenthal (2000) have shown. It is natural, at this stage, for children to mimic new words and repeat them before they have mapped the meaning to the sounds, in both the L1 and in a foreign language. It is thus clear that in a CLIL environment, children’s whole linguistic repertoires need to be protected and stimulated. Alternation between languages and codeswitching, when speakers change codes mid-utterance or alternate codes to include an L1 translation or a word or phrase (Nikula et al. 2013, p. 81), may be both a means of reinforcing L1 lexical development and supporting the child’s emerging grasp of the FL. Early conceptualization of CLIL established a clear role for translanguaging, which at that point seemed to be defined much like codeswitching, as a scaffold or as recourse in case of communication breakdown (Nikula and Moore 2019, p. 240). Switching codes is to be expected at this stage, especially as children may understand some FL lexis well before they reach a productive stage and thus need to rely on the L1. The more recent definition of translanguaging, which posits that bilinguals have a single linguistic repertoire from which they select aspects strategically to guarantee effective communication, as Nikula and Moore (2019) argue, may be applicable to CLIL preschool contexts. They argue that using translanguaging for pedagogic purposes may aid deeper learning and strengthen the cognitive processing of concepts. This issue is seen as a future direction for research. As Coyle et al. (2010, p. 37) write, children’s emerging language “needs to be captured, recycled and developed strategically by teachers and learners.” Teachers in CLIL programs thus require instruction and practice in making new lexis and sounds in the FL salient through repetition, recasts, and reformulation in the context of games, songs, stories, manipulation, and kinesthetic activities. Anderson et al. (2015: 142) note that a high degree of fluency is preferable in teachers because of their impact as role models for oral communication. Native-like pronunciation is however not necessary. In Europe individual countries and regions make different recommendations for the FL competence of CLIL teachers at all school levels, but it usually corresponds to B2 “independent user with vantage” or C1 “proficient user with effective operational proficiency” level as outlined in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), a well-known instrument for defining language competence in Europe (Eurydice Report 2017: pp. 91–2). The CLIL Teacher’s Competences Grid (http:// tplusm.net/CLIL_Competences_Grid_31.12.09.pdf), created by researchers based in different European countries, shows that CLIL teachers should ideally possess a complex set of competences, including a knowledge of second language acquisition, but it does not once mention CEFR language level. The authors note that “the local context will place its own demands on CLIL teachers” (Bertaux et al. 2010, p. 1).

Culture Tied to the idea of a dialogic and interactive approach is the notion of “culture” as defined in the 4Cs framework. Coyle et al. (2010, p. 54) list “‘self’ and ‘other’

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awareness, identity, citizenship, and progression towards pluricultural understanding” as priorities for inclusion in any CLIL program. This is an appropriate fit for a CLIL approach at preschool, where children are learning about other points of view, empathy, and tolerance. Local learning culture needs to be taken into account too. In France, for example, the Republican values of “liberté, egalité, fratenité” filter through to all levels of schooling, which means that children largely leave their home cultures and languages behind when they enter the learning environment (Ellis 2016, p. 267). In other countries, such as Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, and Norway, children’s home languages at school must be recognized and supported within the school environment (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice 2019). It is important for children to develop both a sense of the local place and an understanding of a place’s values and distinctiveness, as well as an awareness of other perspectives and of other children’s different heritages and languages. One of the best ways of incorporating a cultural dimension is through literature, such as picturebooks and poems, as well as through songs (Bland and Lütge 2013). This section has sought to provide insight into the theoretical underpinnings of CLIL, showing that while some of the well-known theories of Second Language Acquisition and Systemic Functional Linguistics have been influential, over time CLIL has developed its own theoretical underpinning, with particular reference to the integration of content and language. This section has explained Coyle et al.’s 4Cs Framework and addressed the role of communication, cognition, translanguaging, and culture in CLIL, considering the application of these concepts to preschool contexts.

Major Contributions There are many studies on CLIL and “young learners” but seldom do they involve very young learners (VYLs) aged 3–6 years. As noted above, to date there are few major contributions regarding CLIL at the preschool level. This may be due to the fact that researchers believe there are few differences between early years immersion programs and CLIL, or because they believe that without a subject-based curriculum, CLIL is not an applicable model. Yet the fact that the CLIL label is by now so widespread at this level, means that more research needs to be undertaken. Until more classroom data emerges it is difficult to draw conclusions about the benefits of a CLIL instructional context at this level. As will be outlined in this section, the few CLIL preschool programs that have been documented involve low exposure approaches. Among such low exposure preschool CLIL programs that have been documented in research are programs in Cyprus (Ioannou-Georgiou 2015), in Spain (García Esteban 2015a, b), in Italy (Mair 2018), and in Finland (Pynnönen 2013). The absence of higher exposure programs may be attributed to the experimental nature of the programs or a lack of resources to support more intensive forms of implementation. The programs do not generally appear to involve tandem teaching, with the use of a native or bilingual speaker of

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the L2. The outcomes from such projects thus cannot be expected to be comparable with those from the Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies project. Many of the documented preschool CLIL programs adopt modular, interdisciplinary, themed, or “language shower” approaches, which according to Marsh (2012, p. 205) are “practical and theoretically sound platforms” for the introduction of CLIL. The term “CLIL Showers” is used to describe a kind of micro-immersion in which children are given limited exposure to the L2 in short daily bursts, initially at least, and is recurrent in the available literature concerning very young learners. According to Bentley’s (2015) definitions, such programs are part of “soft CLIL,” that is, lower exposure approaches, and differ from “hard CLIL” approaches in which up to 50% of the curriculum is taught through the foreign language. In his good practice recommendations Marsh (2012) suggests that preschool be given special attention with regard to such low exposure “soft” CLIL programs. It is clear that the aim of such programs cannot be bilingual language proficiency, but to increase oral receptive ability, promote initial productive ability, pave the way for language learning at successive school levels, and enhance language awareness. Such programs may also be motivated by the desire to facilitate continuity from preschool to primary by offering a consistent approach and curricular continuity at both levels, as aspect that needs more attention (▶ Chap. 23, “From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues”). In the following section, an overview of preschool CLIL research carried out in European countries provides insight into existing practice and future directions.

Country Snapshots Several researchers have provided snapshots of CLIL programs in specific countries in the form of case studies. Such studies enable an insight into the design and implementation of CLIL projects at preschool level and open up further avenues of research. Cyprus The biggest study of preschool CLIL programs to emerge so far was carried out in Cyprus (Ioannou-Georgiou 2015). In Cyprus official English Language Learning policy lowered the starting age to include “pre-primary” education in 2010. This is a year of compulsory schooling for 5-year-olds, prior to entering primary education, but if places are available, children as young as three may be admitted to preprimary. Ioannou-Georgiou (2015) describes a pilot project coordinated by the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute from 2007 to 2010 which concerned the implementation of an English Language Learning project in 10 preprimary schools. It involved 15 teachers taking part in in-service training provided by the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and 550 children aged four and five. The study provides stakeholder perceptions from in-service teachers and children. Data concerning the teachers was gathered through initial pretraining questionnaires and

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post-training interviews. A total of 251 randomly selected children were interviewed over the first 2 years of the project and overall perceived both advantages and disadvantages to the implementation of CLIL modules. Ioannou-Georgiou concludes that with “adequate training and systematic support” (p. 106) teachers can become successful agents in the implementation of CLIL at preschool. CLIL, she notes, adds additional challenges, such as the integration of content and language, and teachers need “multi-level support” (p. 107), although she does not provide details of how exactly teachers should be guided. Recommendations are provided, on the other hand, in a book of Guidelines published by PROCLIL (Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlou 2011). Like García Esteban and Fernandez in Spain, Ioannou-Georgiou advocates the use of “CLIL showers,” involving regular or even daily short sessions in the CLIL language, using games, songs, and stories, especially during the implementation phase of a CLIL project. The PROCLIL Guidelines make recommendations for the initial stages of CLIL, for the role of the L1 in the classroom, effective CLIL teaching, materials evaluation, assessment in CLIL, and the uses of stories. There is also advice about supporting children, particularly at the initial stages, and engaging with parents via the provision of printed information and presentations as a means of involving them and building trust. The effective teaching recommendations are based on the results of classroom observation undertaken during the research. Spain Spain is recognized as one of the most significant players in the CLIL landscape both in terms of widespread implementation of CLIL across school levels and in terms of research output (Dalton-Puffer et al. 2014). Already in 1999 there were several preschool CLIL projects with 3–6-year-old learners, according to Navés and Munoz’s summary (1999). They noted, however, that the many examples of CLIL practice were largely undocumented in research and in the 20 years since then, not much has changed. García Esteban’s work (2013, 2015a, b) is one of the few exceptions. In her first brief article on the topic (2013) she addresses the absence of teaching materials and frameworks for this level, as well as specific training or methodology for preschool contexts, thus highlighting the way “teachers need to produce their own materials in order to make them truly CLIL context-responsive” (p. 52). She highlights the way the topic or thematic area must be considered the “starting point of the planning and material creation process” (p. 52). The article proposes ways in which Coyle et al.’s (2010) 4Cs framework can be applied to preschool, applying it to an example of teaching with folktales. Elsewhere, Garcia Esteban discusses preservice teacher education involving a “weak or soft CLIL” and topic-based approach in Spain in two articles. García Esteban notes that although Spanish guidelines support early EFL education at preschool, policy regarding teacher education and methodology is not centralized and each region and community adopts its own training and methodological solutions (2015b: 31). They do, however, share a common objective of promoting content acquisition and communicative competence (2015b: 31). The goal of one article (2015b) was to assess how training in “Soft CLIL” can be a tool for developing lesson plans. The article presents data from a study involving third-

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year full-time students of English as a Foreign Language in a BA (Hons) program in Infant Education at the Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros, Madrid. The 29 third-year students were studying the subject “Designing and Delivering Effective CLIL Lessons” in which students were required to design a theme-based lesson plan following a “rationalized CLIL model” (2015b: 32). After adapting themebased, published English language teaching (ELT) material to focus on themes, and designing their CLIL lesson plans, students completed a questionnaire with 10 closed questions and an open-ended question in which they reflected on the quality of their own materials and planning, whether they had planned sufficient cognitive challenges (in the form of lower or higher order thinking skills, see section “Facilitating Interaction”) and whether there were adequate language teaching strategies. Results pointed to the kind of pedagogical preparation that trainee CLIL teachers need to undertake in order to become successful CLIL teachers: they need to learn to develop material, integrating appropriate cognitive challenges and need to introduce topics by scaffolding through practical activities. Garcia Esteban suggests that with appropriate training in Soft CLIL, preservice teachers can facilitate “cognitive development, real communication and cultural awareness” among children and aid in effective implementation (2015b: 34). In a further article Garcia Esteban (2015a) reports on a small study based on a microteaching session involving 12 third-year full-time students of English as a Foreign Language in BA (Hons.) Infant Education. The microteaching concerned the planning and preparation of CLIL lessons and then presentation of a lessons based on fairytales, with the aim of working on curricular topics. As Garcia Esteban (2015a, p. 48) argues, stories can be a tool for opening up nature topics and mythology. She gives the example of the English folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk, explaining that “children can use the foreign language to learn the cycle of plants growing a seed (Science) or create a puppet giant to familiarize with the figure of the Cyclops in Greek mythology (Literature).” The trainee teachers were taught to apply a CLIL framework based on Coyle et al. and Garcia Esteban’s previous study (2013) and they were then required to self-assess their microteaching through a questionnaire with 10 closed questions and 1 open-ended question, similar to the aforementioned study (Garcia Esteban 2015b). Analysis of the questionnaires showed that the students used pedagogical resources such as “summarizing, retelling or using different registers” to scaffold the concepts and support language learning, but that they needed to work more on the use of questions that would engage children’s higherorder thinking skills (p. 50). Findings of the study report that storytelling can be considered an effective CLIL resource for teaching environmental or cultural content (p. 51). Both studies highlight the function and value of rigorous methodological training for preservice CLIL teachers as well as presenting a proposal for the use of frameworks and the integration of cognitive challenges when designing teaching material and using stories to teach content. Fernández-López (2014) also proposes using stories to structure preschool CLIL learning, this time in the form of audio-visual stories. Her MA thesis provides an example of how audio-visual stories, specifically the cartoon series Peppa Pig, can be used to teach science and English. The project was designed for the final year of preschool in Spain in which children are aged 5–6. Fernández-López proposes the

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use of the 5-minute episodes to integrate with routines (the protagonist Peppa is a similar age to the children and shares similar routines), developing speaking and listening skills through a range of games. Furthermore, the story can be opened up to teach nature topics: the thesis proposes a lesson plan around an episode about gardening in which Peppa gardens with her grandfather. The content objective for the lesson is to teach children about planting a seed and what plants need to grow, as well as the life cycle of plants. There are also suggestions for assessing content and language learning through play-based activities. Finland In Finland a form of CLIL has been around for over 20 years. It has in fact been possible to teach nonlinguistic subjects through a foreign language since 1991, before the term was coined. English, French, and German are all used in CLIL programs, while the second language, Swedish, is used in immersion programs. In an MA thesis, Pynnönen (2013) reports on a small research project on the role of CLIL showers in a Finnish preschool, with a focus on children’s perspectives. This action research introduced English to preschool children “through playful situations by using songs and games” over 10 CLIL showers – short half-hour sessions (2013, p. 8). The participants in the study were 16 children in a Finnish preschool. Pynnönen presents data from participant observation and from interviews conducted with children in the course of which they explained their drawings undertaken in response to the CLIL showers. Pynnönen notes the importance of a kinesthetic approach with this language level and suggests that the content and language delivered through CLIL must engage children in physical learning, such as Asher’s Total Physical Response (TPR) method (Asher 1969). The study did not test language attainment, but noted that children in interviews did not remember the longer phrases that they had been observed to understand during the “showers,” although they remembered single words, pointing to lexical retention (Pynnönen 2013). Other European Countries In other European countries, such as Slovakia and Spain (Lasagabaster and Sierra 2010), the absence of CLIL preschool data may simply be a question of an approach to early language learning going “unlabelled.” As Murphy (2014) notes, the boundaries between CLIL and immersion are often blurred when it comes to young learners. Portiková (2015), for example, gives a brief account of the way preschool teachers in Slovakia are already adopting the principles of CLIL in that “they are choosing thematic areas, topics and activities that are identical to the national and school education programmes,” and suggests the conscious, planned integration of CLIL as a way of promoting continuity of language learning across different school levels.

New Projects This section provides examples of some of the most recent research on CLIL at preschool level and includes both unpublished theses and research published in major journals. If there are relatively few new CLIL preschool projects documented

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in research simply because existing CLIL practice is not being labeled as “CLIL,” we can expect more research to emerge over the next few years. It has been noted that “CLIL for learners at this level would be similar in many respects to existing approaches for pre-school language learning” (Anderson et al. 2015, p. 142). Internet searches reveal that the term is increasingly applied by preschools to theme- and topic-based L2 projects, but there is little research on such projects. New research from northern to southern European contexts is starting to appear, often attracting the attention of young researchers. Two areas that are starting to receive more attention are the issue of teacher education for preschool CLIL as a distinct research domain, and teachers’ strategies, as will be seen.

Greece In Greek primary schools, English is introduced from year three or year one, depending on the type of state school, while some private schools introduce it from kindergarten, which is the term given to the second and final year of preschool for children aged 5–6 years. Iskos, Ralls, and Gegkiou (2017) discuss a CLIL project implemented from kindergarten to grade 3 level (ages 5–8) at a private school. The researchers used a case study design, with three sources of data: semistructured interviews with the six English teachers involved in the teaching of kindergartengrade 3; journals/diaries from the English STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) teacher; and examples of lesson plans. Qualitative analysis was applied. The research investigated the teachers’ experiences and understanding of CLIL practice and showed that teachers had quite divergent opinions about what CLIL involved, which suggests the need for the provision of clearer theoretical underpinnings. One teacher felt that she could teach CLIL classes and successfully communicate content even with children whose understanding of English was very limited, while another talked about the challenges of trying to explain science content about planets to learners with limited English, for example. One teacher believed she did not use CLIL properly, with a disproportionate language focus, while another believed she used CLIL constantly (Iskos et al. 2017). An interesting observation was that English is used exclusively in the CLIL lessons and there is no evidence of codeswitching or translanguaging being used as a strategy. It was not made clear in the paper if this was a result of school policy, but if so, it appears to run counter to CLIL practice, which tends to regard the use of the L1 as a resource rather than something to be avoided.

Lithuania In Lithuania, regardless of the method used, foreign language teaching at preschool is a recent development. At a national level “the topic of CLIL in Lithuanian kindergartens has not been discussed” (Bajoraitytė 2017, p. 9), although there are some examples CLIL programs at primary and secondary levels, and some form of CLIL training is included in teacher education. Bajoraitytė’s (2017) Master’s thesis was based on a study of the only kindergarten in Lithuania that has a long-running CLIL project with

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an established methodological approach (Bajoraitytė 2017). It aimed to investigate the conditions necessary for the adoption of a CLIL method in other Lithuanian kindergartens, as well as in-service teachers’ perspectives on CLIL at this level. To do so, it drew on qualitative content analysis of interviews with a CLIL expert from a university and six kindergarten teachers. The thesis identified four conditions for CLIL implementation including (1) state financial support for training, (2) community support, (3) a “whole-school” policy applied to implementation, and (4) the need for clear methodological guidelines to be established (Bajoraitytė 2017). The thesis also highlighted the varying layers of academic, school, and personal investment that are needed for successful CLIL implementation. It concluded that upper intermediate, “independent user” language competence, corresponding to a level B2 in the CEFR was sufficient for preschool CLIL teachers but that teachers need a sound knowledge of CLIL frameworks and theory, which has implications for teacher education. Data from teacher interviews suggested the absence of resources for CLIL required a personal investment of time and effort on the part of teachers to create material and plan content, but that they did not view this as a deterrent. Training in scaffolding was considered an important prerequisite for teachers.

Italy In Italy, there is no legislative framework for foreign language learning at preschool, but in 2014 a large-scale national survey revealed that 84.8% of state, council-run (run by local municipal authorities) and private preschools had some form of foreign language instruction or programs that simply aim to raise awareness of other languages (Langé and Lopriore 2014). CLIL is being adopted in some preschools but has received little attention in research. One exception is a project in two Italian not-for-profit private preschools documented by Mair (2018). The study provides data from an in-service teacher education project and the implementation of CLIL in three preschool classes. At the preschool level, four in-service teachers took part in CLIL training and received the same CLIL theoretical and methodological input as their colleagues from the primary and lower secondary schools in the same institution. In total there were 22 teachers. Mair’s study of the three preschool classes was carried out in the context of a broader study of the implementation of the CLIL program across three school levels (preschool, primary, and lower secondary school) concurrently. During the implementation phase, participant observation was used and some of the CLIL sessions were video-recorded. The study of the preschool classes involved four teachers and approximately 75 children aged 3 to 6. The study bears comparison with Ioannou-Georgiou (2015) and Pynnönen (2013) in that it is a qualitative case study and includes the perspectives of teachers and children. The research used triangulation of data from participant observation, surveys, interviews, and focus groups to evaluate the success of the project. The training and implementation adopted a modular or theme-based approach to CLIL. English, not a home language of any of the preschool children, was the

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foreign language used in the program. English was also a foreign language for the teachers who took part in the CLIL training. The children also had EFL lessons held on a weekly basis by a visiting native speaker, in the same way that most primary schools with CLIL programs have foreign language instruction as well as teaching of part of the nonlinguistic curriculum in the CLIL language. The schools’ two visiting native speaker teachers were not part of the CLIL training. As well as completing the CLIL theoretical training, the teachers in the study took part in separate workshops designed for the preschool and primary teachers, including the use of songs and children’s literature in the classroom, synthetic phonics, and materials development. Synthetic phonics is a method for teaching reading in English that involves children learning to identifying phonemes and synthesize, or blend, them. It is widely used in Anglophone contexts. The use of synthetic phonics in training was based on another Italian CLIL project carried out at primary school, the IBI-BEI (Istruzione Bilingue Italia – Bilingual Education Italy) project in the Lombardy region (Cavalieri and Stermieri 2016), but when proposed as part of training for preschool teachers, it represented an innovation. It was included in recognition of the need to enhance phonological awareness and to provide teachers with a resource for offering explicit input on the sound system of English as a foreign language in the classroom. Focusing on phonology is important because very young children have been found to be more capable than older learners of acquiring the phonological features of an L2 and achieving fluency in accent (Moyer 2004). Research relating to the PAM- L2 (Perceptual Assimilation Model of Second Language Speech Learning) has shown that “in order to tune into the phonetic differences that signal phonological contrast in the L2” learners should have high quality input before the establishment of a large L2 vocabulary (Tyler 2019, p. 615). The study sheds light on stakeholder perspectives, presenting qualitative data from semistructured interviews with children and focus groups with teachers. Teachers were interviewed individually prior to training and took part in focus groups following the observation. A small sample of the 75 children from the “CLIL” classes were also interviewed. Data from these preschool classrooms provides some insight into the way a teacher might scaffold learning within preschool CLIL activities, leveraging code switching to help children negotiate and construct meaning in English. In one example cited, a teacher reformulates a child’s input and scaffolds the language by building on the child’s existing knowledge and skills, as advocated by Mehisto et al. (2008): T3. What’s your favourite season? Child 1. Summer T3. Why?... Why?...... Perché? Child 1. Perché ci sono i flowers. (Because there are flowers). T3. Because the flowers bloom.

In this example the child responds to the non-display question using the L1 but inserts the acquired L2 lexis in the logical position with correct plural ending. The teacher recasts the child’s words using an expansion “the flowers bloom,” lyrics from a song that the children have already been taught and sung many times (Mair 2018,

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p. 34). Teacher and children thus engage in a negotiation sequence and the co-construction of knowledge. It requires extensive and careful input on the part of teachers to guide children to begin to use new lexis in a productive way, which is also a constant process. What Llinares, Morton, and Whittaker (2012, p. 194) have termed scaffolding “at the micro-level” is of fundamental importance at preschool. Effective scaffolding, as Meyer (2010, p. 15) notes, helps students “to verbalize their thoughts appropriate to the subject manner.” This kind of classroom data enables an understanding of the practical workings of CLIL in the classroom to emerge and in particular insight into the evolution of classroom discourse. Results of the study supported the need for CLIL teachers to have a CEFR B2 minimum level (corresponding to the level of upper intermediate, or independent users in specialized contexts) and pedagogical preparation for CLIL. In qualitative analysis of observation data and video recordings of the classrooms, it could be seen that teachers in the study who did not have a high enough level in the foreign language at times modeled incorrect pronunciation. They also showed a reduced capacity to teach spontaneously and instigate play activities in the L2, despite achieving some positive results in terms of children’s response to CLIL activities, material, and even making new lexis salient (Mair 2018). Teachers also found the long time required to attend CLIL training courses and prepare material for CLIL modules to be a partial deterrent to continuing with the project. Nevertheless, they remained convinced of the validity of the material during implementation and gained greater confidence in their own ability as CLIL teachers. The study points to the need to provide substantial training and ongoing support for teachers embarking on preschool CLIL projects. It also provides an example of the kind of training areas that might be covered in both pre- and in-service teacher education.

Spain Cortina-Pérez and Pino Rodríguez (2021) consider the extent to which preservice preschool teachers in a Spanish university feel prepared to teach in CLIL settings. Their study evaluates how CLIL teachers’ competences and the profile of the CLIL teacher are perceived by preservice preschool teachers by analyzing data from questionnaires filled in by 105 trainee teachers. Results showed teachers did not yet feel prepared to become CLIL school practitioners. Although the study does not regard implementation, or details of teaching strategy, the fact that preschool teachers are being prepared for CLIL contexts in university teacher education programs suggests that CLIL is used widely in Spanish preschools.

Finland Perhaps the most significant new study to emerge in the last couple of years is a case study based on a Finnish early childhood education center (ECEC) that uses CLIL in English with over 100 children divided into three age groups (two groups of 1–2-

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year-olds; two groups of 3–5-year-olds; and one group of 5–7-year-olds) (Holmila 2019; Holmila and Moate 2020). The first two groups are referred to as “daycare” groups, while the third group is the “preschool” group, in keeping with the Finnish school system, where “preschool” describes an academic year in which curriculum learning in Finnish and English begins before primary school. The preschool group is the main focus of the study and the data it presents refers to this group. This bears comparison with the “pre-primary” context in Cyprus described by IoannouGeorgiou (2015) and the “kindergarten” context in Greek described by Iskos et al. (2017), in which academic and subject learning begins. An important feature to note is whether the context described by Holmila and colleagues may constitute an example of “hard CLIL” because the preschool group has “a native English-speaker as a fulltime worker means that English is a constant presence in the children’s daily lives” (Holmila, p. 65). Even with the younger groups, “CLIL is casually blended into the daily routines and activities” (p. 66). If so, this constitutes one of the few if not the only study available on “hard CLIL” or “strong bilingual”-type settings in preschool. The study presents teachers’, parents’, and children’s’ perspectives in relation to the CLIL activities based on data from questionnaires and interviews. One of the most significant themes of the study relates to changing demographics in the school community due to immigration, with a growing number of children who are learning Finnish as a second language and English as a foreign language an L3, leading to an increasingly multilingual and multicultural teaching and learning environment (Holmila 2019, p. 54). This is quite different from the largely monolingual background of the children in Mair’s (2018) study of two Italian preschool contexts. In interviews teachers expressed uncertainty about whether CLIL provision for children learning Finnish as a second language “is a positive addition or a cause for concern” (p. 54). The researcher identifies “a divide between the belief of some staff members that multilingualism has harmful implications for children’s development and the idea that multilingualism is enriching and positive” (p. 55). The parents of the children identified as multilingual in the study did not express similar concerns and tended to have more positive overall views of CLIL, seeing it as “adding value” (p. 58) and aiding in establishing foundations for the transition to primary school (p. 59). The multilingual children interviewed did not present an impression of being “overwhelmed with the presence of another language” (p. 73). Indeed, some expressed joy in learning new vocabulary, while the views of others suggested that the CLIL activities in English may be a kind of leveler that provides children with a range of different first languages with the same conditions, or even a “sanctuary” (p. 73). A related finding, that activities in English as a foreign language appeared to act as a kind of leveler, was noted by Mair (2018, p. 43) commenting on classroom observation in an Italian preschool. Holmila notes that among the teaching staff are teachers who have a longer history of CLIL and substantial training and experience in it, while others are relative newcomers who express “insecurities and confusion” (p. 61). The study finds that the teachers with little training are the ones who expressed greater doubts and concerns about CLIL, thus suggesting the importance of providing teachers with

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appropriate training, including theoretical knowledge, and opportunities for professional development in the form of visits to other preschools with CLIL, observation and enhancing the existing community of practice, if uncertainties are to be overcome and CLIL is to be successful. It also finds that at times there is insufficient planning for CLIL in relation to the curriculum, possibly due to the embeddedness of the CLIL activities and their spontaneous character. Even though there is a “significant minority” (p. 28) of migrant students in the context described (only 20% of the children come from migrant backgrounds), Holmila recognizes that in Finland as in other parts of Europe, the demographics are changing quickly and CLIL needs to come to terms with meeting the needs of a linguistically and culturally diverse community by embracing a flexible approach to translanguaging and use of multiple languages. Notably, the study does not attempt to measure child learning outcomes with regard to content or language. As the study acknowledges, “there are no set goals, no learning targets specifically in relation to CLIL” at the preschool, against which outcomes could potentially be measured (Holmila 2019, p. 77). The study does not provide classroom data and is focused on perceptions rather than teachers’ strategies. Summary This section has drawn attention to the main research projects carried out to date on CLIL preschool settings in Europe. Research on projects in Cyprus (IoannouGeorgiou 2015), Italy (Mair 2018), and Finland (Holmila 2019) together with the PROCLIL (2011) handbook, all provide useful insights for schools and communities wishing to implement CLIL at preschool level as they take into account the approach’s theoretical underpinnings and their application to preschool contexts, while also giving suggestions for effective teaching strategy and providing stakeholder perspectives. Such studies provide a worthwhile foundation on which future research can be built. The overview also suggests a gap in the research when it comes to content and language learning outcomes at this level and the need for further classroom observation. It points to some emerging trends, such as the need for CLIL to meet the needs of an increasingly plural, multicultural society, and the presence of many languages in the classroom, as is addressed in the section ahead on Future Directions.

Critical Issues and Topics A clear definition of CLIL, planning guidelines and resources for CLIL implementation and teacher education are all critical issues if CLIL is to develop successfully and offer continuity. Over time, it will be essential to define CLIL more clearly, at all levels, but especially at preschool level because of its special characteristics. In spite of the diffusion of CLIL and its success at other school levels, several scholars acknowledge that the heterogeneity of the CLIL term, in which it is used to describe a wide variety of practice, is problematic, risking pedagogical ambiguity and lack of clarity

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on a policy and implementation level (Cenoz et al. 2013; Bruton 2013; Pèrez Cañado and Ráez Padilla 2015: 3). Thus, Ioannou Georgiou (2012, p. 497–98) claims that if the term CLIL is used in a too inclusive manner, it will lead to the dilution of its meaning and its misapplication to other approaches that use content but are not content-driven, like L2 immersion programs such as Swedish as an L2 in immersion in Finland. At preschool level this is particularly relevant given the tendency for CLIL programs to be established on a bottom-up, grassroots basis. It is unclear, for example, whether “soft-CLIL” which is – according to Bentley’s (2010) schema – “language-led,” can actually be classified as CLIL at all if it is defined as being driven by linguistic objectives. The examples of preschool CLIL outlined in the previous section suggest that “low exposure,” which refers to time spent learning through the CLIL language, does not necessarily equate to “soft CLIL,” because even if the hours dedicated to CLIL may not be comparable with 50–50 bilingual programs and may amount to less than 25 percent of the curriculum, they are nonetheless specifically guided by the selection of content and a theoretical underpinning based on the integration of content and language. Thus, the definition of “soft and hard” CLIL may need to be reconsidered or avoided all together. A few of the examples of CLIL in European countries point to a need for centralized guidelines and even national policy relating to the type of bilingual or foreign language learning used in schools. When former Italian education minister, Stefania Giannini, publicly recognized CLIL as an appropriate approach for preschool education in ministerial guidelines, she failed to provide concrete details of how this should be carried out (Langé and Lopriore 2014). Likewise, the Finnish national core curriculum mentions using the approach of teaching content in a foreign language but does not explain how this teaching should be organized and thus individual schools are left to their own devices and are free to make their own decisions (Pynnönen 2013). Unfortunately, this seems to be a common pattern. In terms of planning and implementation at preschool level, both content and language objectives must be established for CLIL topics or learning areas. Activities and materials that are developmentally appropriate must be proposed, allowing for play learning that is both teacher-led and child-initiated. Examples given in this study suggest that appropriate topics include nature learning, such as the life cycle of plants and the seasons, and that appropriate activities include stories, songs, and games. This may require special attention to space and material used for CLIL activities and nature learning may be valuable. With regard to English language learning spaces, Alstad (2018) found that in a Norwegian kindergarten, setting up a natural physical environment involving plants, animals, water, and rocks in which the L2 input was provided was helpful. Content must be cognitively engaging and stimulate language development using a range of strategies common to other early language instructional contexts (▶ Chap. 3, “Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education”). This requires institutional and individual commitment and cooperation among teachers to identify objectives and prepare material, ensuring that the local learning priorities and culture are taken into account. It should be noted, however, that planning and materials design, along with in-service training, are both time-consuming activities (Ioannou Georgiou 2015; Mair 2018).

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At higher educational levels, L1 subject teaching materials are often abridged or adapted for nonnative speakers in CLIL contexts, unlike in immersion contexts, which use textbooks written for native speakers of both languages. Given that textbooks are not always used in preschool contexts for children aged 3–6, this does not necessarily apply. However, developing activities like drama, role plays, and games, which are cognitively meaningful, and learning how to use them effectively in the classroom, is a challenge for preschool CLIL teachers too. Although academic publishers are starting to produce CLIL materials for very young learners, these may not necessarily fit with local learning priorities and curricula. Oxford University’s Show and Tell series (Pritchard & Whitfield), for example, may not be deemed appropriate for all CLIL preschool learners because it includes “letter formation activities” which lead to “reading and writing simple sentences.” Given that few European countries teach reading and writing to very young learners aged 3–5, such material has limited application. To conclude, the local learning culture needs to be the starting point when establishing a framework for CLIL preschool planning. The non-systematic approach to early language learning and teaching of any kind and the lack of ongoing monitoring threaten the quality of provision (Portikovà 2015: 187). This applies to CLIL settings as well. Any implementation program should begin with a needs analysis which takes into account the perspectives of parents, heads of preschool, and teachers (Navés 2009). The wider school community requires education about the aims and methodology of CLIL as well as the principles that underpin it. Likewise, the systematic monitoring of programs during and after implementation will enable more substantial conclusions about the efficacy of CLIL at this level to be drawn. An interesting detail to emerge from focus groups with teachers in Mair’s project (2018) was the perceived importance of affective and emotional bonds. Teachers at the Italian preschools felt that they were potentially more effective language teachers than the visiting English language teacher due to both pedagogical preparation and the established affective ties with children. Thus, at preschool level the affective and social dimension of learning of any kind, including language learning, cannot be overlooked. As Schwartz (2018, p. 3) notes, in preschool L2 learning contexts children’s initial encounter with a new language as a new learner coincides with separation from home and an encounter with a new social context with new actors in the form of teachers and peers. A successful experience of the new language is thus “inevitably connected with such ecological conditions as creating a low-anxiety and secure atmosphere that will be conducive to target language perception and production.” The perception by CLIL teachers that they are more effective than visiting native language instructors, although needing support from more substantial evidence, suggests the value of CLIL as a model at preschool: the generalist teachers may be best placed to take into account developmentally appropriate learning and the emotional and care needs of young children as well as integrate language learning into routines. CLIL, in which generalist teachers become language teachers as well, can potentially make the learning of a foreign language accessible to a lot of children in that it avoids the need for visiting language specialists, and can ensure

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greater exposure to this language than weekly foreign language lessons allow. Furthermore, with its emphasis on negotiation and communicative exchange, CLIL may prove to be a worthwhile model at a stage of development in which emotions and an increasing awareness of self and others are critical (Sofronieva 2015). Despite the plurilingual intentions with which CLIL was founded, English is overwhelmingly the foreign language most used in European CLIL programs. In fact, most available data concerns preschool CLIL programs that involve English as the foreign language. This raises questions about whether the goal of plurilingualism is best achieved by CLIL. In future it would be important to see more data emerge about preschool programs using widespread foreign languages other than English, such as Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, or even local minority languages.

Future Research Directions In the absence of substantial data about preschool CLIL programs, we may look to some of the longitudinal and empirical studies carried out at primary school in order to make cautious predictions about the direction future research is likely to take. Since Murphy (2014, p. 119) called for “more systematic research examining the outcomes of CLIL programs, particularly at the primary level,” the findings of some new empirical studies have emerged. Pižorn (2017) describes a three-month experiment in Slovenia which aimed at assessing how a CLIL approach enhances 10-yearolds’ English language proficiency, how it impacts learners’ attitudes to foreign language learning and instruction, and how children taking part in the program perceive CLIL. The study compared language attainment with a group of CLIL learners and non-CLIL learners studying English as a foreign language. The study used Cambridge tests to assess learners’ progress and questionnaires to gauge their attitudes. Results showed a significant improvement in reading and writing, but not listening skills among the CLIL group. It did not evaluate content learning, which as the author notes, is one of the challenges in evaluating the success of CLIL programs: the need to evaluate both content and language learning and the difficulty in finding appropriate instruments for doing so. In another study, García Mayo and Imaz Agirre (2017) assessed the extent to which conversational strategies are influenced by instructional context by comparing mainstream EFL and CLIL contexts in two age groups, 8–9-year-olds and 10–11year-olds. The study found that with the older learners there was a decrease in conversation adjustments in both contexts, and a decrease in L1 use among the mainstream EFL learners, but not the CLIL learners. The authors argue that CLIL learners are more used to participating in classroom interaction and are thus less likely to display misunderstandings and rely on the adjustments and repetitions for comprehension. More research looking at conversation adjustment in CLIL settings with very young learners would be interesting. As far as 3–6-year-olds in CLIL programs are concerned, further research should explore whether the curricular learning objectives for both language and content are

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being met and document the kinds of strategies that are used by teachers and children to support learning within the classroom. In addition, as Murphy (2014, p. 119) notes, research that critically evaluates “the strengths and weaknesses of CLIL” is needed with regard to the preschool as well. This may call for the inception of longitudinal studies. To date there are no such studies on preschool CLIL settings. The reasons for this can only be speculated on but might have to do with lack of official recognition and national policy regarding CLIL, uncertainty over what constitutes CLIL at this level, or less societal inclination to focus on education for this age group. Given the primacy of oral learning in the preschool environment, the application of a discourse analytic framework to CLIL classroom discourse at this level may be particularly fruitful. Nikula, Dalton-Puffer, and Llinares (2013, p. 92) assert that classroom discourse in primary and preschool CLIL contexts is an “underexplored area” and suggest it as an important focus of inquiry with young learners. They provide an overview of existing research on classroom discourse and advocate “linguistically- and socio-culturally-oriented analyses of classroom discourse with ethnographically-oriented approaches.” Studies based on observation and video recording that investigate different types of preschool classroom discourse, such as discourse genres, negotiations for meaning and the use of questions, similar to the study conducted by García Mayo and Imaz Agirre but with younger learners, could yield interesting insights about the ways language resources are deployed and merged to maintain the communication flow in CLIL contexts. In this context, Fleta (2018, p. 288) notes a “paucity of research studies on teacher-child discourse skills” and calls for more research into the manner in which teachers foster children’s L2 development. Her own research is not focused on CLIL contexts, but similar research based on preschool CLIL settings would be worthwhile. As a kind of subcategory of classroom discourse, it would be interesting to explore translanguaging in the CLIL preschool classroom. Translanguaging involves teachers and children in bilingual contexts selecting one language strategically from an entire linguistic repertoire in order to communicate effectively, rather than separating the two systems, as Nikula and Moore (2019) explain. Nikula and Moore identify translanguaging as a “cutting edge” (2019, p. 238) area of inquiry in CLIL. It would be interesting to see the results of exploratory studies that identify instances of bilingual talk in CLIL preschool classrooms, building on the kind of classroom discourse data presented by Mair (2018) and outlined above. Furthermore, Kirsch and Seele argue that translanguaging is part of a more inclusive and socially just pedagogy (▶ Chap. 29, “Early Language Education in Luxembourg”). Supporting very young learners in L2 acquisition through guided play is another, not unrelated area of importance and one that is equally worthy of research. Guided play, together with co-constructed thematic or inquiry-based curriculum, has been shown to be very beneficial with very young dual language learners (DLLs) in the USA (Baker 2019). Educators in European CLIL contexts can certainly benefit from a knowledge of guided play practices used in other contexts where children are developing additional languages. Such practices include scaffolding talk in play through the use of visuals, gesture, repetition and correct modeling, stimulating

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curiosity in new words, and the use of music and rhyme (Baker 2019). On a research level, observation of preschool CLIL environments and documentation of the extent to which these practices take place is important in order to gain insight into both classroom discourse and play, and the interplay between the two.

Conclusions This chapter has presented an overview of CLIL in European preschool contexts. CLIL is a form of bilingual education that arose in a European setting in response to a perceived need to improve language competence using an innovative and effective methodology. After tracing the emergence of CLIL and situating it as part of a European political and cultural vision of creating plurilingual citizens, the chapter has sought to define CLIL at preschool level, acknowledging that very young learners have specific care and emotional needs. It has applied definitions of CLIL and the “Four Cs” theoretical framework to preschool contexts and considered how CLIL is different from immersion education in terms of linguistic aims, teacher profiles, implementation, exposure, and intensity, as well as methodology. In recent years, the integration of content and language in the classroom and the use of both languages – the CLIL and non-CLIL languages – in classroom discourse has been a particular focus of research. Indeed, if CLIL is to be meaningful, the integration of content and language, as well as culture, requires careful consideration. A clear planning framework in which teachers outline content and language learning objectives and the way they are to be achieved is necessary. At the present, one of the biggest challenges to successful implementation of CLIL is the lack of a legislative framework and resources, as well as centralized guidelines for teacher education. Although there are many European preschools labeling themselves as having a “CLIL” approach, their projects are often set up spontaneously and do not stem from policy or planning recommendations. The small amount of research conducted on CLIL preschool projects suggests that teachers called upon to adopt this approach require specific pedagogical preparation and ongoing support, as well as a high level of L2 language competence. The chapter concludes by establishing a research agenda for CLIL in the preschool context. This includes evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of CLIL as opposed to other approaches to language learning, such as foreign language instruction and immersion; evaluating L1 and L2 learning outcomes as well as content learning; documenting classroom discourse to investigate the integration of content and language in the classroom; and investigating stakeholder perspectives.

Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education in Israel ▶ Early Language Education in Luxembourg

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▶ From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Long, M. H. (1996). The role of linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia, (Eds), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). Academic Press. Lorenzo, F. (2007). The sociolinguistics of CLIL: Language planning and language change in 21st century Europe. Revista Española di Lingüística Aplicada. Volumen Monográfico, 27–38. Mair, O. (2018). Four seasons of CLIL at two Italian pre-schools. In F. Costa, C. Cucchi, O. Mair, & A. Murphy (Eds.), English for young learners from pre-school to lower secondary: A CLIL teacher training project in Italian schools. Universitas Studiorum. Marsh, D. (Ed.) (2002). CLIL/EMILE. The European dimension. Actions, trends, and foresight potential. University of Jyväskyla. Marsh, D. (2012). Content and language integrated learning (CLIL). A development trajectory. (Doctoral thesis). Spain: Universidad de Córdoba, Córdoba. Marsh, D., & Langé, G. (2000). Using languages to learn and learning to use languages an introduction to content and language integrated learning for parents and young people. University of Jyväaskylá on behalf of TIE-CLIL. Marsh, D., Maljers, A., & Hartiala, A.-K. (2001). Profiling European CLIL classrooms: Languages open doors. University of Jyväskyläy. Mathole, P. (2016). Using content and language integrated learning (CLIL) to address multilingualism in South African schools. European Journal of Language Policy, 8(1), 57–77. Mehisto, P. (2012). Criteria for producing CLIL learning material. Enceuntro, 21, 15–33. Mehisto, P., & Asser, H. (2007). Stakeholder perspectives: CLIL programme management in Estonia. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10(5), 683–701. Mehisto, P., Frigols, M. J., & Marsh, D. (2008). Uncovering CLIL: Content and language integrated learning in bilingual and multilingual education. Macmillan. Meyer, O. (2010). Towards quality CLIL: Successful planning and teaching strategies. Pulse, 33, 11–29. Mohan, B., & van Naerssen, M. (1997). Understanding cause-effect: Learning through language. Forum, 35(4), 22–40. Mourão, S. (2014). Taking play seriously in the pre-primary English classroom. ELT Journal, 68(3), 254–264. Mourão, S. (2018). Play and peer interaction in a low-exposure foreign language-learning programme. In M. Schwartz (Ed.), Bilingual preschool education: Agency in interactions between children, teachers, and parents (pp. 313–342). Springer. Mourão, S., & Lourenço, M. (Eds.). (2015). Early years second language education: International perspectives on theory and practice. Routledge. Moyer, A. (2004). Age, accent and experience in second language acquisition. Multilingual Matters. Murphy, V. A. (2014). Second language learning in the early school years: Trends and contexts. Oxford University Press. Musatti, T., & Mayer, S. (2011). Sharing attention and activities among toddlers: The spatial dimension of the setting and the educator’s role. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19(2), 207–221. Navés, T. (2009). Effective content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes. In Y. R. Ruiz de Zarobe & R. M. Jiménez Catalán (Eds.), Content and language integrated learning. Evidence from research in Europe (pp. 22–40). Multilingual Matters. Navés, T., & Muñoz, C. (1999). Implementation of CLIL in Spain. In D. Marsh and G. Langé (Eds.), Implementing content and language integrated learning. A Research-Driven TIE_CLIL Foundation Course Reader (pp. 145–158). Continuing Education Centre, University of Jyväskylä on behalf of TIECLIL (European Lingua Project). http://www.ub.es/fi loan/ addendumen.html. Nikolov, M. (Ed.). (2009). Early learning of modern foreign languages: Processes and outcomes. Multilingual Matters.

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Nikula, T., & Moore, P. (2019). Exploring translanguaging in CLIL. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2), 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050. 2016.1254151. Nikula, T., Dalton-Puffer, C., & Llinares, A. (2013). CLIL classroom discourse: Research from Europe. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 1(1), 70–100. Nikula, T., Dafouz, E., Moore, P., & Smit, U. (2016). Conceptualising integration in CLIL and multilingual education. Multilingual Matters. Pérez Cañado, M. L., & Ráez Padilla, J. (2015). Introduction and overview. In D. Marsh, M. L. Pérez Cañado, & J. Ráez Padilla (Eds.), CLIL in action: Voices from the classroom (pp. 1–12). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pérez-Cañado, M. L. (2012). CLIL research in Europe: Past, present, and future. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15(3), 315–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13670050.2011.630064. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. International Universities Press. Pižorn, K. (2017). Content and language integrated learning (CLIL): A panacea for young english language learners? In J. Enever & E. Lindgren (Eds.), Early language learning: Complexity and mixed methods (pp. 145–163). Multilingual Matters. Pladevall-Ballester, E. (2016). CLIL subject selection and young learners’ listening and reading comprehension skills. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 26(1), 52–74. Portiková, Z. (2015). Pre-primary L2 education in Slovenia. In S. L. Mourão (Ed.), Early years second language education: International perspectives on theory and practice (pp. 177–188). Routledge. Pynnönen, J. (2013). Finnish preschool children’s experiences of an English language shower (Master’s thesis). Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä. Reitbauer, M., Fürstenberg, U., Kletzenbauer, P., & Marko, K. (2018). Towards a cognitivelinguistic turn in CLIL: Unfolding integration. Latin American Journal of Content & Language Integrated Learning, 11(1), 87–108. https://doi.org/10.5294/laclil.2018.11.1.5. Robertson, P. & Adamson, J. (Eds) (2013). The Asian EFL Journal Special Edition CLIL in Asian Contexts: Emerging Trends, 15(4). Rohde, A., & Tiefenthal, C. (2000). Fast mapping in early L2 lexical acquisition. Studia Linguistica, 54(2), 167–174. Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. (2013). CLIL implementation: From policy-makers to individual initiatives. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(3), 231–243. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13670050.2013.777383. Schwartz, M. (2018). Preschool bilingual education: Agency in interactions between children, teachers, and parents. In M. Schwartz (Ed.), Preschool bilingual education, multilingual education (Vol. 25, pp. 1–36). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77228-8_1. Sofronieva, E. (2015). Measuring empathy and teachers’ readiness to adopt innovations in second language learning. In S. Mourão & M. Lourenço (Eds.), Early years second language education: International perspectives on theory and practice (pp. 289–203). Routledge. Tedick, D. J., & Cammarata, L. (2012). Content and language integration in K-12 contexts: Student outcomes, teacher practices, and stakeholder perspectives. Foreign Language Annals, 45(Suppl. 1), s28–s53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2012.01178.x. Tyler, M. (2019). PAM-L2 and phonological category acquisition in the foreign language classroom. In A. M. Nyvad, M. Hejná, A. Højen, A. B. Jespersen, & B. Hjortshøj Sørensen (Eds.), A sound approach to language matters – In honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn (pp. 607–630). Aarhus University. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Towards a socio cultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge University Press.

Part III Caregivers in Interaction in Early Language Pedagogy

Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theories of Language Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consecutive Bilingualism – What Are the Issues Here? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent Research and Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So What Does a Plurilingual Pedagogy Look Like? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter reviews some theoretical underpinnings to early language acquisition, including research into early bi- and plurilingualism, both simultaneous and consecutive, and the implications for the role of input and interaction in language development. It then discusses this within the context of a multilingual world and describes some recent projects in plurilingual pedagogy. The chapter goes on to consider some practical actions that might offer greater visibility to all the language of young children, both at home and in early years’ settings outside the home, and support their bi- or plurilingual development in a globalized world. It concludes by outlining some possible directions for future research.

G. Macrory (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_21

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Keywords

Input · Interaction · Plurilingualism · Caregivers

Introduction Young children’s linguistic development is unarguably a crucial underpinning to successful social, emotional, and intellectual development. It is thus of paramount importance that our understanding of this is informed by research. Ingram (1989) noted that the twin goals of research into language development were description and explanation. Description of the language children actually understand and produce clearly allows us to plot a typical developmental timeline for all aspects of language: phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This is in itself a complex endeavor, not only because these fundamental elements are inter-related, but because they are linguistically and culturally constrained. The particular linguistic characteristics of individual languages – for example, gender, case, tense formation, phonemic distinctions – will have an impact on the precise developmental path that may emerge. It is vital that those who engage with young children possess a sound grasp of what it is reasonable to expect when, not in a deterministic manner but with an awareness of the likely parameters of variation and the way in which factors such as hearing or visual impairment can have upon the developmental path and rate. This issue is further compounded when we recognize that for the majority of the world’s children, growing up with more than one language is a reality (UNESCO 2003, p.12). This suggests that in general, bilingual and multilingual contexts, that is, the presence of different linguistic groups living in the same country, are the norm rather than the exception throughout the world, both in the North and the South. The myriad possibilities that ensue from this present us with a potentially daunting task. Furthermore, the cultural context in which a language (or languages) is learned will undoubtedly influence not only the pragmatics of the language concerned, but also the opportunities afforded by curricula or pedagogic approaches and indeed the extent to which young children are seen as appropriate conversational partners for adults. The latter issue inevitably overlaps with the role of research in explaining how children learn language. A central issue in explanations of language development is thus the role of caregivers, be they parents, siblings, grandparents, childminders, nursery staff, or early years teachers. This chapter will seek to address these complex issues in the following way: first, we will consider what importance is accorded to the role of input and interaction by differing theoretical perspectives, before considering language development in bi- or plurilingual children and the different contexts in which this takes place. This will in turn allow us to address the implications for caregivers and the support that might be offered to them, before reflecting upon the future directions in which research could usefully take us.

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Main Theoretical Concepts As noted in the introduction above, a key issue is that different theoretical perspectives accord more or less weight to the input the child hears and the interaction in which she engages. Child language research has a longer history than some might appreciate, with Saxton (2017) noting that the earliest systematic study of child language was reported by Tiedemann in 1787 (p.283). Ingram (1989) describes in some detail the periods 1876–1926 and 1926–1957, characterized, respectively, by dairy studies and large sample studies. These periods, however, preceded what can be described as an upsurge of interest such that it is the last fifty or so years which have seen an explosion of research in this area. The circumstances of the upsurge of interest referred to above are sufficiently well known as to require little rehearsal here. It is sufficient to note that the collision of views between Skinner (1957) and Chomsky (1959) was a key event in the history of research into child language acquisition. Chomsky’s challenge to behaviorist explanations of child language acquisition turned researchers away from empiricist and descriptivist traditions and towards a more mentalist perspective. In so doing, this served to do two important things in the study of child language: it laid the basis of a tension between datadriven and theory-driven approaches that still exists, and also placed grammar on center stage. As we will see in the next section, challenges to Chomsky’s nativist approach have in varying degree pointed to the role of caregivers/input. Central to this discussion is Vygotsky’s (1978) socio-cultural theory. Vygotsky held that social interactions within a child’s cultural context were the key to human development. Crucially, he proposed that there was a Zone of Proximal Development whereby interaction with more experienced others allows the child to accomplish things she or he would not yet be able to do alone. Thus, adults mediate the world through their interactions and model appropriate behavior. The implications for the development of language are thus very different from the idea of an innate language-specific component. Contemporary explanations that focus on the interaction with others favor usagebased theory, most closely associated with Michael Tomasello (2001, 2003). Saxton (2017) notes that this perspective has emerged over the last 10 years as the most viable alternative to the nativist paradigm (p.279). This falls within the domain of the field of Cognitive Linguistics, which holds that children’s language development is essentially cognitive in nature, linguistic structures arising from cognitive schemas similar to those that exist in other cognitive domains, deriving from recurrent events characterized by recurrent communicative roles. According to this view, children have an impressive ability not only to discern these event structures, but to understand the intentions of adults as expressed through language, aligned with a sophisticated capacity for imitative learning (Tomasello 2001, 2003). This is not inconsistent with the ideas of Vygotsky about the social nature of language. The implications of these theoretical perspectives will be explored further in the next section. As noted earlier, however, learning more than one language is the norm. It is therefore necessary to address some other key theoretical concepts, those of multilingualism, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and translanguaging.

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Until relatively recently, research has traditionally considered bilingualism, focusing upon the acquisition of two languages; latterly, the concepts of plurilingualism and translanguaging have added complexity and nuance to our understandings. While the terms multilingual and plurilingual are used by some writers interchangeably, we will here adhere to the use of the term plurilingual to describe the use of multiple languages by the individual and the term multilingual to refer to the nature of societies or social contexts where multiple languages are spoken. For example, India has 19 official languages (UNESCO 2003, p. 13). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Companion Volume (Council of Europe 2018) distinguishes between multilingualism (the coexistence of different languages at the social or individual level) and plurilingualism (the dynamic and developing linguistic repertoire of an individual user/learner). The latter is considered to be an uneven and changing competence, in which the user/learner’s resources in their languages or varieties may differ, but the fundamental point is that plurilinguals have a single, inter-related repertoire. Plurilingual competence involves the ability to call flexibly upon this inter-related, uneven, plurilinguistic repertoire to, for example, switch languages or dialects. Translanguaging is an action undertaken by plurilingual persons, where more than one language may be involved (p.28). While these concepts are important, we need to address first of all the issue of bilingualism, long a focus of research. Perhaps the first thing to consider is the age at which a child becomes bilingual. It is generally agreed that a distinction exists between simultaneous and successive or consecutive bilingualism. What is not so agreed is what that distinction consists of. For example, McLaughlin (1984) regards the acquisition of more than one language up to the age of three to be simultaneous. He admits that this is arbitrary, but notes that “by the age of 3, it would seem that the child had had a considerable head start in one language; it is no longer a question of acquiring the two simultaneously” (p.73). Meisel (2008), reviewing the Critical Period Hypothesis most often associated with Lenneberg (1967), suggests that between ages 3 and 4 is a crucial point, at least in the areas of morphology and syntax (p.58). However, de Houwer (1995: 222–3), in reviewing findings on bilingual language acquisition from the preceding 12 years of research, regards bilingual acquisition as pertaining to children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from before the age of two. She further distinguishes between Bilingual First Language Acquisition (following Meisel 1989), which refers to the acquisition of more than one language from birth or at most a month after birth, and Bilingual Second Language Acquisition which is used to describe cases where the child is not exposed to the second language until a month after birth, but before the age of two. She argues that the time of first exposure is of possible importance, if comparisons are to be made between bilingual children and monolingual children. However, it is by no means obvious why there should be such an important distinction between the first month and those after, and she does not attempt to explain this (pp.222–3). Unsworth and Hulk (2009) note the problem of how to classify the children who fall in-between these two groups, that is, children whose age of first exposure lies somewhere between the ages of, say, 1 and 4 and they refer to these as “early successive bilinguals” (p.70). While some (e.g., Romaine 1995) consider

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consecutive or successive acquisition as belonging to the field of second language acquisition, we take the view in this chapter that while age is an important factor, in both cases, children are experiencing bilingual development (see de Houwer 2009). Taking simultaneous bilingualism first, a manifestly important consideration is the contexts in which children grow up. Romaine (1995) sets out six possible situations in which children may grow up bilingually, taking as variables the languages spoken by the parents, the language spoken by the community, and the strategy adopted by the parents for speaking to the child (pp.183–5). These are as follows: Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Parents: The parents have different native languages with each having some degree of competence in the other’s language. Community: The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community. Strategy: The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth. Type 2: “Nondominant Home Language” /“One Language – One Environment” Parents: The parents have different native languages. Community: The language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community. Strategy: Both parents speak the nondominant language to the child, who is fully exposed to the dominant language only when outside the home, and in particular in nursery school. Type 3: “Nondominant Home Language without Community Support” Parents: The parents share the same native language. Community: The dominant language is not that of the parents. Strategy: The parents speak their own language to the child. Type 4: “Double Nondominant Home Language Without Community Support” Parents: The parents have different native languages. Community: The dominant language is different from either of the parents’ languages. Strategy: The parents each speak their own language to the child from birth. Type 5: “Nonnative Parents” Parents: The parents share the same native language. Community: The dominant language is the same as that of the parents. Strategy: One of the parents always addresses the child in a language which is not his/her native language. Type 6: “Mixed languages” Parents: The parents are bilingual. Community: Sectors of community may also be bilingual. Strategy: Parents code-switch and mix languages.

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How might we illustrate these scenarios and what are the implications for input and interaction? The first one is exemplified by my own PhD research, where the mother spoke French, the father English, and the language of the community was English (Macrory 2004). This situation creates the need to ensure as many opportunities as possible for the child to hear and use French, socially nondominant language, particularly once the child starts schooling in English. In this case, the effect was quite noticeable as the girl’s English became very quickly much more dominant. The second situation is one where the parents might have chosen to interact in French to maximize the exposure, such that English was the lesser used language. Types three and four characterize situations where the dominant language is not used in the home either but in three, the child has input from two L1 speakers of the same language, as is the case in many UK Asian families and in four, the situation described by Hoffmann (1991), where the children learned German from their mother, Spanish from their father but in an English-dominant community. Strategy five may arise when, for example, one of the parents uses English as a global language with the child. The final scenario is reflected, for example, in the Finnish-Swedish context in Finland described by Palviainen and Boyd (2013) where bilingual parents used both languages flexibly. These six scenarios do not perhaps fully reflect the complexity of bilingual situations at home. For example, Deuchar and Quay (2000) report a situation where an English speaking mother and a Spanish speaking father both used Spanish at home and English outside the home, so that, for example, the mother spoke Spanish at breakfast but English upon arrival at daycare (2000:6). This underlines the complexity of individual situations and the factors that affect them. Furthermore, this is not a simple linguistic issue. On the contrary, De Houwer (2009) emphasizes the importance of the social and affective contexts in which children grow up, the factors that influence parental decisions and the opportunities thus afforded to young children to speak their various languages. A further issue is that many children and families are plurilingual rather than bilingual (Hoffmann 1991). Arguably, plurilingualism and migration are closely linked, adding further layers of complexity to the issue of language development. As Martin-Jones et al. (2012) note, there has been an upsurge of interest into multilingualism in the preceding two decades, due to the significant demographic, cultural, and linguistic changes ushered in by “globalization, transnational population flows, the spread of new technology and the changing political and economic landscape of different regions of the world” (p.1). Within Europe, mobility across countries is currently contributing to a growing diversity in today’s European schools and classrooms, with students from a wide variety of language and cultural traditions and backgrounds whose individual educational needs, including their language-related needs, have to be met within the schools system (European Commission 2008; Council of Europe 2001). However, arguably beyond Europe, plurilingualism is a long-established feature. Watson, some 20 years ago (1999), pointed out that too little attention had been paid to the linguistic diversity of many poor countries by international donor agencies. Canagarajah (2009) suggests that while the Council of Europe had brought it into scholarly discussion recently, in fact “there has been a plurilingual tradition of

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communication, competence, and pedagogy in South Asia since pre-colonial times” (p.1). Similarly, Dyers (2013) points to the prevalence of this in Africa, and Mackey (2012) suggests that although North Americans have had a worldwide reputation as English-speaking monolinguals, the incidence of plurilingualism in North America is generally high. Indeed, Farr (2011) exemplifies this with specific reference to Chicago. Other contexts include, for example, Latin America and Australia (Hamel 2013). Fielding (2016) signals the need to re-conceptualize language learning to acknowledge the language resources of children with plurilingual experiences, regarding this as particularly important in countries like Australia with what she calls a traditionally monolingual mindset. Children’s plurilingual – or bilingual – experiences may arise from simultaneous bi- and plurilingual experiences at home and in the community. However, it is also the case that migration and mobility in an increasingly globalized world mean that young children arrive in an educational setting with no prior learning of the language of that setting. Furthermore, this means that preschools as institutions become multilingual and multicultural. Thus, preschools become contexts not only for fostering already established simultaneous bilingualism and plurilingualism, but consecutive too. This becomes a pressing issue for all who work with young children – how do we ensure their successful linguistic development? We have so far outlined some key theoretical concepts centered on the different approaches that have been taken to understanding children’s language development, and we also considered the complexity presented by children growing up bilingually or plurilingually in increasingly multilingual contexts. In the next section, we develop these ideas in further depth.

Major Contributions Theories of Language Acquisition The Nativist Perspective As noted above, research into child language acquisition and learning has a long history but the last 50 or so years have been particularly important. Skinner’s (1957) behaviorist view of language learning had essentially treated this as similar to other kinds of learning, predicated on the notions of imitation and reinforcement. Children imitated the adults around them who in turn rewarded their efforts by responding and reinforcing the behavior. This was challenged by Chomsky (1959) who noted first of all that imitation could not adequately explain language acquisition, observing that children frequently produce utterances that they clearly have not heard. He pointed to a number of features that he claimed indicated the existence of a Language Acquisition Device. The aspects to which he drew attention were that children appeared to learn language at an astonishing speed, were systematic and rulegoverned in their production of language, that they followed a developmental path with clear and predictable milestones, were resistant to correction, and they did all

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this despite what he called “the poverty of the stimulus.” The conclusion was that there was a Language Acquisition Device and an underlying “Universal Grammar” (+ Principles and Parameters) that allowed the child to learn any of the world’s languages. In other words, while he accepted that there had to be enough input to trigger it, the role of the input was very much downplayed. As Pinker (1995) put it “(language) is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction. . ...and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. . ..people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs” (p.18).

Challenges to the Nativist Perspective Challenges to this nativist perspective came first from those that argued for a semantic basis to children’s language (e.g., Bowerman 1973) and later from those who raised the profile of the role of input and social interaction. As noted earlier, Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory underpinned such approaches. In particular, Chomsky’s argument relating to the poverty of the stimulus was challenged by those who observed the particular nature of speech addressed to children, dubbed “motherese” (Newport et al. 1977) and later the more neutral Child Directed Speech (CDS) (p.112). The characteristics observed were exaggerated intonation patterns and higher pitch, age-appropriate topics, and lexicon and limited range of grammatical structures. On this topic, the seminal edited volume by Snow and Ferguson (1977), notably titled “Talking to Children,” highlighted a range of issues such as maternal speech styles and included examples from different cross-cultural contexts, such as rural Africa and Latvia. The universality of CDS was, however, questioned by a number of researchers (see e.g., Heath 1983; Lieven 1994), but Saxton recently (2017) concludes that the majority of children in the world are exposed to some aspects of CDS, although he argues that it is facilitative rather than absolutely necessary (p.112). While Snow (1977) observed that earlier research had focused on the input rather than noting that this occurred in interaction with the child (p.32), it was perhaps the (edited) sequel (Gallaway and Richards 1994) with its title “Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition” that signaled a real shift towards interaction. It also located this in a variety of contexts including other family members, atypical learning situations (e.g., deafness), and school settings, thus widening the potential scope for investigating the role of input and interaction. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Development While much of this research effectively challenged the idea that the input was degenerate (Chomsky 1965), precisely how children learned from the input nevertheless presented researchers with a real challenge. Interest in Cognitive Linguistics and usage-based theory has begun to provide some answers. Tomasello’s (1992) observations in his diary study of his daughter suggest that language may, in fact, be acquired in a much more piecemeal fashion than was once supposed. One of the examples he gives is of “make” and “made,” the use of which in quite different contexts by his daughter suggested that for her there was no relationship between the two words. This is very different from the traditional notion that the child might have

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acquired the past tense of the verb to make. He postulated that early multiword constructions are based on specific lexical items from which they infer patterns. Rather than this being innate, he argues that children are generalizing based on the input they receive, from which they subsequently form abstract categories. My PhD subject, Adèle, used the frame “do you want” only with noun phrases in object position for a full 5 months before she used this with a verb phrase (Macrory 2007). Furthermore, as noted in the earlier section, children have a sophisticated ability to understand event structures and also the interpersonal and intentional nature of communication (Snow 1999), allowing them therefore not only to map meaning on to experience but to infer and use the grammatical constructions that bring these together, gradually adding to and extending the scope of the constructions (p.261).

Input and Output What, then, is the relationship between these constructions and the children’s output? The usage-based approach stresses the relationship between input and output, a claim lent weight by, for example, my PhD participant, Adèle’s, French output mirroring that of her mother and her English, albeit to a lesser degree, to that of her father (Macrory 2007, p.789). However, the relationship between input and output is not simply a quantitative one. Many have stressed the importance of the quality of the input and considered what kind of input can be facilitative. Adult speech to children often involves repetition of the child’s own language. As Saxton (2017) puts it, “repetitions with minor variations to the original utterance are the adult-child discourse” (p.102). Commonly known as recasts, parents or caregivers frequently repeat back to the child a slightly expanded version of what she or he has just said, thus maintaining the communication and placing the immature speech in a bigger “frame.” So, if the child says, for example, “daddy car,” a typical expansion can be “yes, Daddy’s in the car.” This also serves to tie events and language together. Recasts can also take the form of a correction, responding to an incorrect form with the correct version, as in this example from my daughter, aged 2;8: “we couldn’t found it” to which I replied “oh you couldn’t find it?” While for some time, many researchers believed that children received little in the way of evidence about how the language works, it is now generally accepted that indeed they do and that they respond accordingly (Saxton 2017, p.111). In order for children to develop language, then, both the quality and quantity of input are very important, as is their interaction with caregivers. Some have indeed argued that production is the leading edge of language development, overturning the conventional view that comprehension always precedes production (Clark 1977, 1982; Peters 1983), and Elbers (1995) has suggested that children use their own output as input. This view underlines the crucial role of interaction with others and reflects the Vygotskian perspective noted earlier. To summarize this section on theories of language development, then we can see that the implications of a nativist perspective are quite different from those of a nonnativist approach. The latter clearly accords a vital role to the input that allows children’s cognitive capacities to discern patterns and construct a grammar, in the context of social interaction that offers opportunities for production as well as

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comprehension. We will address more specifically what this might mean for caregivers of young children later in this chapter. For now, we will consider what this might imply for bi/plurilingual children.

Language Development in Simultaneous Bilingual Children We noted in the earlier section that it is important to distinguish between simultaneous and consecutive bi-/plurilingualism. Taking simultaneous first, what are the key issues to consider here? Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory stresses the sociocultural context and indeed, many scholars such as De Houwer stress the importance of the social environment in which bilingual children grow up. Spolsky (2004), writing about language policy, notes how language practices “embrace conventional differences between levels of formality of speech and other agreed rules as to what variety is important in different situations” and that in multilingual societies “they also include rules for the appropriacy of each named language.” Furthermore, he draws our attention to how quickly school children infer what language is deemed appropriate (pp.9–10). De Houwer (2009) points to the potential damage that negative attitudes can have upon the decisions that parents make regarding the language(s) their children will grow up with, suggesting that these can come from a range of people, including doctors, neighbors, friends, and childcare workers with issues such as concern that bilingual children may be confused by more than one language may make less academic progress than monolingual children. She also suggests that “often, it appears as if people’s concerns about child bilingualism are a disguise for negative attitudes towards the minority language” (pp.91–2). However, even if this is not the case, it is perhaps a misunderstanding based on observations or stories of the language use of bilingual children. First of all, far from bilingual children being confused, the evidence suggests that they are able to differentiate the two languages from a very early age (e.g., Bosch and SebastiánGallés 2001). This does not, however, mean that they will always use them separately. Typically, bilingual children will produce a range of utterances – some unilingual and some mixed utterances, consisting of words or morphemes from both languages. On occasion they may produce utterances that are neither one nor the other – for instance, Adèle, the 2-year-old simultaneous bilingual girl in my PhD study referred to a leaf as a “leuf,” clearly a combination of the English word “leaf” and the French word “feuille” (Macrory 2004). It may well be that it is this feature of bilingual usage that others wrongly infer to be evidence of confusion, when it is simply the bilingual child drawing upon the repertoire at her disposal. Bilingual children also have to make a choice about which language they use, which may be based not just upon what they have at their linguistic fingertips, so to speak, but also upon the observations they have made of who speaks which language. Adèle at the age of two made the assumption that I was primarily a French speaker, translating into French from English when she thought I had not understood (see Macrory 2006), suggesting early language awareness and pragmatic sensitivity; this may influence the language they choose but also whether to produce mixed utterances or not. Lanza (1997) suggested that a child’s willingness to produce these may be affected by her perception of how willing her interlocutors were to accept a

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mix of both languages. Deuchar and Quay (2000: 105) report that their SpanishEnglish bilingual child was more likely to produce mixed utterances with her monolingual grandmother than her bilingual father, as the grandmother appeared willing to accept words in both languages in order for the conversation to proceed. So, it appears that bilingual children may themselves have some agency in the language they produce as a result of sensitivity to the interactional contexts in which they find themselves. A related pertinent issue here is the relationship between the two languages: not all bilingual children (or adults, for that matter) develop both languages to the same level or in the same way. The level of development may be related to the situation in which the child is growing up: consider, for example, a child who is in an English speaking environment in the UK with one English parent and another who speaks the L2 but where both parents work and the child is in English speaking day care. There will be significantly less opportunity to hear or use the minority language. Conversely, a child whose L2 parent is full-time at home and where there is substantial additional experience of the L2 through books, television, relatives, and so on is likely to make more progress. In a situation where both parents speak, the L2 at home will result in the community language being the less developed one. A slightly different issue is where certain activities – such as bath time – are always conducted in just one language, so that the child has lexical items or routines in that one language. As noted above, for example, Deuchar and Quay (2000) report on an English-speaking mother and a Spanish-speaking father, both of whom used Spanish at home and English outside the home (p.6). Such a situation can mean that the child develops language related to home such as food and bedtime routines in Spanish and play routines with other children in English. Equally, where the parents do in fact speak their own language to the child, particularly if one parent is home-based and the other at work outside the home, the child may only experience certain activities in only one of her or his languages. A further issue is that language use may vary over time – once a 3-year-old starts nursery or school, this may give the language of that environment a “boost,” possibly to the detriment of the other language(s). This potentially causes concern (or not) and brings us to what de Houwer (2009) calls “impact beliefs”: parents may not believe that their input matters and can have an impact on their child’s language development; equally they – and teachers and childcare professionals too – may believe that young children just “pick language up” (p.92). To summarize this section so far, then, we can see that the context of simultaneous bilingualism is an important and relevant issue. It also underlines the complexity of this development, making it challenging to discern what precisely the role of the input is.

What is the Role of the Input in Simultaneous Bilingual Upbringing? A major issue within the area of input in bilingual acquisition is the effects of differing degrees of separation in the input. De Houwer (1995) remarks that “the degree of language separation in the input has often been seen as a major determinant in early bilingual acquisition in general” and that the one person/one language

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strategy (OPOL) (see Ronjat 1913; Döpke 1992) has been “hailed as the best method for ensuring problem-free (read “mixing-free”) bilingual development” (p. 225). De Jong (1986) points out that this is a strategy that child-care experts tend to feel that they can recommend (p.36). Nevertheless, there remain questions regarding the feasibility of the OPOL strategy and its effectiveness. We have to recognize that once the parents speak to each other, one of them by definition must switch language, so that children must for some of the time be exposed to code-switching. Until we know more about what it is that children learn about through “overhearing,” it is difficult to tell what effect this aspect of the input might have. On a positive note, this gives the child the opportunity to hear a conversation in the language without necessarily having to participate in it On the other hand, depending on the proficiency of the parents in the two languages, it may always be the same parent who switches language, thus depriving the child of the possibility of listening in to parents’ dialogue in one of the languages. However, we should remember that despite the “high profile” of this particular strategy, it is only one of a number of situations in which children become bilingual – as already outlined. In many situations, children hear mixing in the input. For example, Goodz (1989) found that even with parents who claimed to adhere to the one person/one language strategy, language mixing by parents and children was closely related, and that parents tended to respond to children’s mixed utterances with mixed utterances of their own (p.38). Goodz (1994) offers some possible reasons for parental code-mixing, including the possibility “that repetition, recasting and expansion, all characteristics of child-directed speech in general, may serve to stimulate a great deal of parental language-mixing in bilingual families” (p.72). Similar, Pettito et al. (2001) found that the rate of mixing in the children’s language in their study was directly related to their parents’ rate of language mixing (p.28). Moreover, they also found that the greatest occurrence of “guest” words comprised nouns or other content words, introduced into the host language, typically the language of the addressee (p.32). This suggests a systematic and nonrandom approach to mixing that relies on the children’s interlocutor sensitivity. Language mixing may also be a question of child’s lexical resources including availability, familiarity, and preference, an issue Deuchar and Quay (2000) consider to be underestimated in importance (p.113). Murphy (2015) also concludes that “crosslinguistic influence is a normal part of young bilingual children’s development and does not seem to be either rampant and/or random” (p.37). De Houwer (2009), however, reminds us that it is unlikely that children will use only mixed utterances, also suggesting that they quite possibly cannot be avoided. She concludes that OPOL is more often an ideal than a fact (pp.107–109). Furthermore, she points out that following this strategy does not necessarily have the outcome of active bilingual use by children. De Houwer’s study of 3677 parents and 4556 children in 1899 families in Flanders illustrates this well, where the families in which parents shared the minority language and both of them used this language in communication with their child, there was a greater chance that the child would speak both of their parents’ languages, but in a situation where both parents used the societal language alongside the OPOL strategy, a child’s chance of growing up actively using both

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languages was significantly reduced (de Houwer 2007). She stresses the fact that the minority language is the one that is at risk of not being spoken by the child, noting that raising children to speak a single language has a 100% success rate except in some cases of impairment, whereas raising children to speak two languages only has a 75% success rate (p.421). In summary, then, simultaneous bilingualism is a far from simple notion. Rather, it presents in myriad ways that reflect not just the range of family situations possible, but the broader societal context. Thus, the input that children receive and the interactions they are able to engage in are a function of these intersecting factors. To varying degree, however, these opportunities are there from early on in life. A different situation arises when older children find themselves in a new language learning experience: consecutive bilingualism.

Consecutive Bilingualism – What Are the Issues Here? While some simultaneous bilingual contexts will offer less opportunity for the community language to be experienced by the child (e.g., a Spanish and German couple bringing up a child in an English-speaking environment), it is highly unlikely that children born in a particular environment will have no experience of the societal/ community language at all. Conversely, globalization and migration internationally mean that many 3- to 5-year-olds find themselves in a day care or educational setting where they are completely new to the language spoken there. While there are complexities inherent in the simultaneous bilingualism scenario, the consecutive situation brings arguably even more complexities that will be discussed further in this subsection. First of all, children may be monolingual in another language, which may seem more straightforward to early years’ professionals, but which means the child may lack the experience of bilingualism or plurilingualism. Of course, he or she may be bi- or plurilingual in two or more other languages already. As for the parents, they may or may not speak the language of the new environment, with obvious implications for engagement with the educational setting. A further consideration is that the parents’ reasons for migration may vary hugely, from the trauma of refugees to relocation for professional or academic reasons. Many families are also transnational, with some members living across national boundaries (Fesenmyer 2014). There is compelling research evidence that affective factors can exert influence upon new language learning (Dörnyei and Ryan 2015). Depending on the particular context that children find themselves in, the support for the language(s) they already speak may vary hugely. They may find themselves in a community with many other speakers – including perhaps other children – or the opposite. All of this makes it something of a challenge to (a) learn the new language and (b) retain and develop the language(s) they already have. In order to rise to these challenges, what do parents and caregivers/teachers need to know? Perhaps firstly, they may be concerned how to retain their existing language(s). However, in considering the development of the new language, it is

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vital to differentiate between route and rate. As we will outline in the section on critical issues below, teachers and caregivers interacting with young children need to appreciate the typical route that a learner will take, both in general terms and with relevance to the actual language being learned. They also need to understand the factors that may impact upon the rate of learning. These factors are related to the particular situation that the child is in, including such social factors as the reason for migration or the support available from family members. Linguistic factors may also play a part as there may be an effect of the L1(s) on the new language: transfer/ mixing – can be caused by similarity or difference. If the former, cognates and similar structures may assist, whereas there may be avoidance strategies resulting from complexity of the new item in L2, for example, subjunctive in French or tag questions in English (Ortega 2009). Those involved with the child may be focused on the development of the new language, yet there is a need to support existing languages – parents also often think they have to speak the language of the new environment/educational setting with the children, failing to appreciate the role of their input in maintaining the other language(s). Schwartz (2010) underlines the crucial role of the family in the maintenance of home languages, but in reviewing family language policy, she also draws our attention to the complexities of what she calls the “minority-majority language reality, in which children generally grow up with the minority language spoken at home and the majority language spoken in the community.” Within-family factors such as family structure, parental background and attitudes towards the new language co-exist alongside family-external issues such as peer group influence (notably in adolescence) and importantly the choice of education available, a key aspect of the socio-linguistic context (p.171). She notes that bilingual education has the potential to offer a strong support for the home language and conversely, that “acquisition of the majority language (L2) at the expense of the children’s L1, as in a case of ‘weak’ bilingual schooling, results in a subtractive bilingual environment” (p. 181). This brings us to the crucial role of schooling in the maintenance and development of the minority language. Parents and practitioners in early years’ settings may not be fully aware of the now well-attested cognitive benefits of bilingualism (Bialystok 2001). Tabors (2008) offers a positive response to linguistic and cultural diversity, recommending first and foremost that we should “recognize that all children are cognitive, linguistically and emotionally connected to the language and culture of their home” (p. 174). She recommends the active involvement of parents and families, suggesting too that teachers should “encourage and assist all parents in becoming knowledgeable about the cognitive value for children of knowing more than one language, and provide them with strategies to support, maintain and preserve home-language learning” (p.176). However, the benefits and potential losses go beyond the impact upon cognitive development. Wong Fillmore (2000) writes movingly of the impact that language loss can have not just upon the children themselves but the whole family. She concludes that “For immigrant children, learning English as a second language and dealing with school successfully are just one set of problems to be faced. Hanging on to their first

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language as they learn English is an equally great problem. Hanging on to their sense of worth, their cultural identities, and their family connections as they become assimilated into the school and society is a tremendous problem for all immigrant children,” and argues that “parents and teachers should be working together to find other ways to support children's development and retention of their primary languages, and to make their adjustment to school an easier one for everyone involved” (p.207) (see ▶ Chap. 20, “The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education,” by Irem Bezcioglu-Göktolga, this volume). Once we place the above into a contemporary or recent setting, it is perhaps inevitable (and right) that the complexity of language use and language learning should prompt some enquiry as to how best to respond. One such response is the development of multilingual pedagogies, now recognized as highly relevant to early childhood (see Kirsch 2018). The next section will therefore review research into the effectiveness of such language education policies and practices. To recap before we do, however, it is important to bear in mind that we are seeking to enable bilingual development, not simply development of the new societal language. This means taking into account key factors such as whether children are bilingual already, why they find themselves in this context, and what support they and their families need to learn the new language while continuing to nourish the first language(s).

Recent Research and Projects In this section, we will first of all consider how perspectives on bi- and plurilingualism have changed, moving away from the strict separation of languages embodied in the OPOL approach that held sway for some time. The notion of the importance of separation in the input has of course had a lasting legacy in terms of practice, both at home and in school. Immersion programs and bilingual schooling have much in common with this approach, for example. We will see how plurilingual pedagogy differs from these approaches, what characterizes it, and what it implies for early years education and for parents and caregivers. We will then look at some examples of this in practice in order to discern the critical issues that we should be addressing in early years education and care. We will consider the issue of pedagogy first, before considering implications for the home environments, as the relationship between these two settings is complex and important.

Changing Perspectives We have seen in the previous section how important interaction with caregivers is – language usage that was often seen as a result of cross-linguistic influence and strategies that see speakers as “switching” “codes” seems to be a typical aspect of bilingual or plurilingual development. As such, the notion of a more holistic approach to bilingualism or plurilingualism has gained ground, although as long

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ago as 1982, Grosjean observed that a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one but a linguistically unique language user whose language use is a function of the differential experience they may have with each language. More recently, Heller (2007) rejected the idea of bilingualism as “parallel monolingualisms.” An obvious implication of this perspective is that children (and adults) draw upon the complete repertoire of language at their disposal. MacSwan (2017) notes that “as a conceptual framework, translanguaging and related ideas promote a positive view of bilingualism, permitting bilinguals to act naturally, using language as they do at home and in their communities” (pp.171–2). This does not, however, mean that bilinguals cannot differentiate their languages – indeed there is much evidence that very young children can differentiate their languages from very early on. As Murphy (2015) notes, “children code-switch as a direct result of their environment, either in that they have not yet acquired translation equivalents for lexis or syntax, or because of family, community, societal, or pragmatic influences” (p.33). Nevertheless, some have suggested that mixed utterances are evidence of a single underlying system and indeed, scholars in the field of translanguaging go so far as to suggest that so-called individual “languages” are social and historical constructions (MacSwan 2017). While such debates may seem esoteric to those interacting to young children, they do have implications for practice in that one inference is that if there are not individual “codes,” then code-switching cannot exist. As MacSwan goes on to note, “the consequences of denying the existence of multilingualism and therefore of code-switching are far reaching. If code-switching does not exist, then neither does the empirical basis for the repudiation of a deficit perspective on language mixing” (p.168). And one of the aims of a plurilingual pedagogy is to challenge the deficit model, in other words to see bilingual or plurilingual ability as a resource – as MacSwan puts it, “if teachers recognize that codeswitching is richly structured and evidence of linguistic talent, as research has shown, then children’s bilingual ability is more likely to be viewed as a resource rather than a deficit in educational settings” (2017: 170). More than this, however, it is closely connected to the notion of social justice. As Garcia and Flores (2012, p.232) point out: unless teachers’ pedagogies include the language practices of students, and unless all students are taught in ways that support and develop their diverse language practices, there cannot be any meaningful participation in education, and thus, in society. Multilingual pedagogies are thus at the center of all education that meaningfully includes learners; that is, education that is not simply done to students, but in which students do and participate.

We might ask here to what extent the notions of simultaneous and consecutive bi-/ plurilingualism are relevant here. In some contexts, a child may arrive at school at age 3, monolingual in a different language to that of schooling. Where the child is resident in the country, it is unlikely (as noted earlier) that he or she will have no experience at all of the language of schooling. On the other hand, children may well arrive in another country as a result of migration and be completely new to the culture and the language. We could then see this as a case of consecutive

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bilingualism, or if the child already speaks more than one home language (as parents may both speak different languages to the dominant community one), plurilingualism. Arguably then we could say that some children have already experienced simultaneous bilingualism and are now experiencing consecutive language learning, a situation that blurs the boundaries of the concepts. As Murphy (2015) suggests, it may be useful to see the distinction between simultaneous and consecutive as a continuum rather than a dichotomy (p.18). Thus, teachers and early years’ practitioners are faced with a complexity that begs an appropriate response. In the following section, we will consider how such a response may look like.

So What Does a Plurilingual Pedagogy Look Like? Creese and Blackledge (2011) note that “moving between languages has traditionally been frowned upon in educational settings with teachers and students often feeling guilty about its practice” (p.7). They further suggest that code-switching is rarely institutionally endorsed or pedagogically underpinned. Moving between languages (translanguaging) is thus a key feature of this pedagogical approach, on the part of both teachers and learners. However, the particular national and local contexts that pertain are important in at least two ways. Firstly, the policy context may prioritize certain languages or pedagogical approaches, either implicitly or explicitly. In England, official government guidance and other documentation refer to bilingual pupils as pupils learning English as an Additional Language (“EAL”). Books such as Soni (2013) entitled EAL in the early years: hundreds of ideas for supporting children with English as an additional language, while offering welcome ideas and support, can serve to privilege the learning of English as opposed to the other language(s) the young child may have. In terms of the wider context, Piccardo (2013), writing from a North American one, compares non-English-dominant regions (such as Europe) to English-dominant regions, suggesting the idea of plurilingualism at the individual level paired with multilingualism at the societal level emerged from the Council of Europe’s policy of respecting and valuing linguistic (bio)diversity. She suggests that as North American classrooms are increasingly multilingual and multicultural, there is great potential for adopting plurilingualism as the foundational philosophy, arguing that it is not necessary for teachers to speak the languages of their learners in order to capitalize on their learners’ previous cross-cultural and language learning experiences, solely that practitioners need to see through a different lens from a monolingual one, saying that “all forms of code-mixing and translanguaging should be seen as positive signs of progress, as the construction of proficiency. Therefore, such techniques should not be forbidden or ignored, but exploited as learning epiphanies” (pp.608–9). This could as easily serve as a philosophy for those working in the early years, although we cannot assume that this will happen naturally and without intervention. Secondly, early years’ teachers’ attitudes towards, and beliefs about, language use and multilingualism are likely to predispose them to think and act in particular ways. The role of teachers’ agency in changing outcomes is crucial, as illustrated by

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Dubiner et al. (2018), whose preschool teachers saw themselves as agents for linguistic change and successfully increased the amount of Arabic used in a Hebrew-Arabic context, by recognizing that the model previously employed was not producing active bilingualism. Rather, the children had mostly receptive language skills in Arabic and saw no real need to communicate in it (pp.257–8). Switching from a one-teacher one-language model to a partial one-way immersion program in which all teacher used only Arabic during the day in school leads the children to a more active use of Arabic. Mifsud and Vella (2018), however, demonstrate how the wider societal context and the language policy of the school can affect preschool teachers’ beliefs and agency. Writing from a Maltese context where the language with greater prestige is English, they describe a project where two different preschool contexts prompted different strategies on the part of the teachers. In the context where the preschool policy was the promotion of English, the teacher was more likely to allow and use Maltese, whereas in the preschool where Maltese was the main language, the teacher was disinclined to allow English. The authors speculated that the teacher “might have felt less empowered to code-switch from Maltese to English, since the two languages held different cultural capitals” (p.284). Equally, parental agency can be influenced by these wider societal perspectives. Another recent study of Curdt-Christiansen and Wang (2018) shows how in a Chinese context, parents managed to raise their children in Putonghua (widely used across the whole country) by prioritizing it over Fangyan (a local dialect) because of the higher value and wider utility of Putonghua in China. Furthermore, the parents involved in the study all demonstrated their agency by making conscious decisions and planning for their children to develop English. They note that parents were committed to making English education enjoyable for their children, remarking that “the agentive management endeavour, however, is in stark contrast to the ‘lack of agency’ attitude and non-interfering laissez-faire policy on Fangyan” and concluding that their study “shows that linguistic hierarchy is a strong factor influencing parental agency regarding which languages they want to develop and which languages they want to let go” (pp. 249–50). Teacher agency and parental agency need, however, to work in tandem, something Bezcioglu-Göktolga and Yagmur (2018) found not necessarily to be the case. They carried out a project in a Dutch speaking context with Turkish speaking children and families, collecting data from 40 second-generation Turkish parents and 5 Dutch primary school teachers. Their study shows the potentially negative impact that teachers’ beliefs and attitudes can have – the results of the study demonstrate that Turkish parents and primary school teachers held conflicting beliefs and opinions regarding the role and function of home language activities for the linguistic development of children. Despite the fact, teachers remained unaware of their agency on Turkish families. The authors noted that both teachers and parents aim at children’s increased success in school but they are not aware of each other’s efforts towards the same goal (pp.230). This illustrates the need for early years’ practitioners and parents/families to work together.

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Recently, Kirsch and Aleksic (2018), writing from the context of Luxembourg, stressed the need for multilingual pedagogies in early education settings and suggested that as these value home languages and familiarize children with several languages and cultures, they are inclusive and benefit both monolingual and bilingual children (p.148) (see ▶ Chap. 29, “Early Language Education in Luxembourg,” by Kirsch and Seele, this volume). However, they lament what they see as a gap to be bridged between the need for multilingual education and effective practices in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and note the need for professional development. They report on the outcomes of a 15 h long course of professional development undertaken by 46 early years’ practitioners in Luxembourg. This context is a trilingual one (Luxembourgish, French, and German), where multilingual education became mandatory in formal and informal ECEC settings in autumn 2017. Teachers and carers are charged with developing Luxembourgish (in 2016/17, only 38% of 3year-olds spoke this at home) and familiarize the children with French and value home languages. Children become literate in German in Year 1 (Kirsch and Aleksic 2018, p. 152). Practitioners were introduced to new perspectives on bilingualism and language learning as well as practical ways of enacting a plurilingual approach, namely, child-centered activities such as story-telling and working with rhymes in the home languages. Questionnaire data from the participants revealed a significant increase in the promotion of the children’s home languages, particularly in planned activities such as singing, rhyming, and storytelling. Part of the study involved indepth interviews with six of the practitioners and carers, and the findings revealed that initially, while considering multilingualism to be an asset, they were skeptical about multilingual education and felt the need to emphasize Luxembourgish, reflecting the emphasis from the policy context; they were also of the view that use of home languages might be an impediment to this. One of the key changes in understanding was appreciating that young, emergent bilinguals/multilinguals needed more time than they had realized to develop their language skills (p. 154). They also began to understand that the children’s receptive skills were ahead of their production and that the use of their home language(s) was not the impediment that they had believed it to be. It is worth returning here to the importance of context. In the particular context described by Kirsch and Aleksic (2018), the children spoke a limited range of languages and the practitioners were themselves multilingual – in some cases they shared the languages with the children but we could surmise that their own multilingual experience should predispose them to appreciate the need to use a language even if they themselves do not speak it. Piccardo (2013) argues that it is not necessary for teachers to speak the languages of their learners in order to capitalize on their learners’ previous cross-cultural and language learning experiences. However, there may be many practitioners, particularly in English-dominant contexts, such as the UK, who resist the idea that young children in their care should develop not only English but all their languages. Drury (2004), writing about bilingual children in preschool, notes how quickly children learn that their efforts need to go into learning English and she argues that planned time and explicit recognition of first language development is necessary to prevent language loss (p.51).

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Ecology While Menken et al. (2011) stress the pivotal role of teachers (and found varying degrees of resistance in their study, albeit in a secondary school context), others point to the ecology of the school/setting as being crucial. In this context, O’Rourke (2011) describes a project in an Irish primary school, the aim of which was to create a school environment which explicitly valued and recognized the languages these 4- to 5year-old children brought to school, through the incorporation of a range of multilingual and language-awareness activities into classroom practice. She notes the impact of significant socio-economic changes on the linguistic diversity of the country, such that at the time of writing, 167 languages had recently been reported. She goes on to comment that “given the changes in Ireland’s linguistic landscape, it comes as little surprise that Irish schools, particularly urban schools, can be identified as sites of linguistic diversity and thus concerns about the quality of education for children of minority heritage languages now face schools on a much more widespread level than have ever been experienced before” (p.110). Despite the policies that encourage the teaching of both English and Irish, a monolingual approach is taken to immigrant children, whose parents may apply for an exemption from Irish if the child is above a certain age or does not speak English. O’Rourke argues that this ignores the children’s existing bilingual or multilingual repertoire which potentially facilitates the learning of Irish and additional languages (p.111). The project introduced the teachers to practical activities such as making a language flower with their home language at the center, writing hello in a range of languages and integrating multilingual activities across the curriculum, such as making multilingual posters in science about the life cycle of the butterfly. The project had a range of impacts: as in the Kirsch and Aleksic (2018) study, some staff were initially concerned about how to manage the range of languages in their classes and the possible negative effect upon the acquisition of English. The project, however, successfully made the teachers more aware of the full range of languages spoken and more confident in dealing with situations where several languages were present in the classroom both in terms of resources available to them and the types of methodologies they could use (O’Rourke 2011, p.120). The project also had an important effect upon parents, who could, for example, see from displays the work that the children had been doing; they were also included, as teachers asked for support with such things as correct pronunciation. Conversations with the parents also ensued, whereby they were able to ask questions about how best to manage their children’s bilingualism. It then became possible to dispel misconceptions – the author in particular notes how the project was able to change the perspective of a parent who had been advised by an Irish nurse to speak English and not the home language, Romanian, at home. In this context, Bergroth and Palviainen (2016) stress the value of partnerships between practitioners and parents, drawing on their research with nine SwedishFinnish bilingual families and six practitioners in Swedish-medium early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. They found that all stakeholders were happy to support Swedish at the possible expense of Finnish, the latter being the dominant language in the surrounding society. What they note, however, is the trust the parents had in the practitioners and their openness to negotiating language choices.

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The UK also offers many sites for plurilingual learning during the early years. As in so many countries around the world, societal multilingualism is becoming the norm, with an estimated 360 languages spoken and approximately 20% of children in primary schooling having a home language different from English (www.naldic.org.uk). The schools and early years’ settings themselves provide potential sites for plurilingualism and for creating specific ecological context conducive to learning new languages, yet too often the children’s plurilingual development is left to the family. Yet engagement with families can be the key to changing the ecology of school settings. For example, a multilingual preschool in Sweden increased the early years’ practitioners’ awareness of the need to incorporate the children’s wider linguistic repertoire through a project investigating parental views (Axelsson 2008, p.89). The wider family, beyond the parents, can also play a role in developing children’s linguistic repertoires. Williams (2004), for example, shows how sibling play can develop the discourses of school, while other research points to the role of grandparents. Kenner et al. (2004) drawing on an intergenerational research project in east London describe examples of how children learned from grandparents, such as learning the names of fruit and vegetables in Sylheti/Bengali while gardening. School settings can also learn from other contexts. Kenner and Ruby (2012) point to the important role that what we call either supplementary or complementary schools can play in revealing children’s rich linguistic resources (p.3). Conteh (2007) points out that in complementary schools, the teachers are often bi- or plurilingual (unlike teachers in mainstream schools). She describes a situation in Bradford in the north of England where in Saturday classes, the teachers encourage the full use of all the languages in their repertoire. Although the teachers have the advantage of being bi- or plurilingual themselves, like the teachers in the Kirsch study (above), they encourage children to share those languages and involved the parents in the activities (Conteh 2007). The languages included Urdu, Hinkla, Bangla, Mandarin, Gujerati, Punjabi, Malay, and Taiwanese (p.122–3). As in the Luxembourgeois case, some children were reluctant at first to use languages other than English and required encouragement to do so. The outcome, however, was reflected perhaps in one mother’s (who maintained what she called a bilingual household) comment that her 5–year-old child’s confidence had increased as a result of hearing his Saturday teacher using his home language, Punjabi. She also saw a link between complementary and mainstream context as she attributed her child’s increased confidence to the way he had been more easily able to join in with activities in the complementary context and had carried this over to the mainstream one (p.133). Kenner and Ruby (2012) stress the importance of bringing teachers together in complementary and mainstream schooling or preschooling and report upon two projects in London that opened the eyes of mainstream teachers to the rich experience of the children. To recap, we have seen how important the beliefs and attitudes of practitioners are, and, an important and related point, the role of the environment /ecology. Closely intertwined with these notions, however, is the role of parental attitudes.

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Parents A study by Kirsch (2018) demonstrated how actions in the school setting can influence parental perceptions. Her study in Luxembourg showed, firstly, how a preschool teacher develops multilingual practices against the monolingual-oriented policy; secondly, how she influences the language use of a 4-year-old boy, “Daniel”; and finally, how her policy informs the boy’s mother’s language ideologies. The teacher in this instance was herself plurilingual and sought to promote home languages rather than stress Luxembourgish and did so explicitly and in a number of ways, for example, by asking children for a word in their home language and by encouraging oral recording of stories in their home languages on a specially constructed app. Daniel, at the start an emergent bilingual in French and Luxembourgish, with some Italian, needed some reassurance that he could speak French in class and gradually became willing to use a range of languages despite realizing the dominance of Luxembourgish. Over the course of the two preschool years, he became increasingly aware of his own language use. His mother, who herself at home espoused a very strict separation of languages policy, held discussions and meetings with the class teacher and observed Daniel’s language use. As a result, she came to appreciate that this multilingual approach was not undermining his development of Luxembourgish. Mary and Young (2018) also report on a study of an experienced teacher (Sylvie) of children aged three to four in the French state school system, where she employed a number of strategies to challenge the monolingual ethos of the school and in so doing, demonstrated the agency that teachers can have. She invited all parents into the classroom, including those who did not speak the language of the school, and she also used the children’s home languages as pedagogical tools allowing them to play an important role in learning. Despite being a French speaker with limited communicational competence in other languages, Sylvie managed to learn words and expressions in the children’s home languages which she then purposefully used with them to foster understanding and learning throughout the day (pp.323–4). Furthermore, she sought to attempt to win over the school inspector, her hierarchical superior, by confronting her with some of the challenges facing both pupils and teachers working in multilingual contexts. Consequently, as Mary and Young conclude, “her inclusive, practiced language policies of allowing all languages to be used for meaning making at school, encouraging dynamic, bilingual practices and leveraging these practices as resources for learning has positioned pupils as capable developing bilinguals and empowered families to make a positive contribution to their education through the affirmation of their bilingual identities” (p.330). It is perhaps an understandable concern that children’s development of the dominant language may be seen as threatened by plurilingual behavior, but as we have seen, research suggests that these are by no means mutually exclusive and, indeed, beneficial. However, Schwartz (2018), albeit within the context of preschool bilingual programs, stresses the critical nature of the preschool context, one which represents the first step away from home, and underlines the importance of a stressfree environment when encountering a novel language for the first time. This is of

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course equally applicable to all situations where young children are encountering a new language. Furthermore, an early start per se in bilingual education is an insufficient prerequisite for children’s language development, so Schwartz emphasizes the importance of the relationship between children, families, and schools.

Language-Conducive Contexts Taking an ecological perspective alongside a recognition of the importance of interaction points clearly to an environmental contribution to L2 acquisition. In other words, the notion that very young children have an innate predisposition to learn language needs to be treated with caution as this may result in a policy that all that is needed is exposure to the new language (Murphy 2015, p.5). Rather, alongside a plurilingual pedagogy, there also needs to be attention paid to the development of the new language. Södergård (2008) investigated teacher strategies in a Swedish immersion context in Finland, where a group of 26 five-year-olds were exposed to Swedish as a novel language. Focusing on small group work (the 26 children were divided into three groups), she was able to focus on the teacher’s linguistic behaviors, identifying utterances that preceded and followed children’s L2 production. She identified strategies the teacher used to elicit the L2, which preceded children’s L2 production, and feedback strategies, which followed the children’s L2 production. Strategies that elicited the L2 included different kinds of questions, offering an answer and signaling a need to switch to the L2 (Swedish). This was done without explicitly asking the children to use the L2 and gradually the children learned that they needed to use the L2 (p.163). Södergård observed that the children also at times spontaneously repeated utterances of the teacher, noting how observant the children can be of the teacher’s speech and suggesting that this points to the importance of the teacher as a role model. The use of feedback too took several forms: noncorrective repetition, positive feedback, corrective feedback and recasts, either/or questions, and tum-taking in the dialogue, but the most frequently used was noncorrective repetition. Equally, writing in an English immersion situation in Spain, Fleta (2018) shows how the young children’s engagement in L2 production is supported by the teachers’ avoidance of explicit correction and the provision of positive feedback by elicitation, expansion, clarification request, and recast strategies. She also notes the need for interaction with teachers, in addition to their role as model of the new language. The examples above show how teachers can create language-conducive contexts (Schwartz 2018) that are sensitive to young children’s emotional and development needs. In sum, this section has considered some of the dilemmas facing all those who interact with young children in complex linguistics contexts. Reviewing recent research and projects reveals the potential tensions inherent in situations where young children are interacting with teachers, caregivers, and parents within a broader linguistic, educational, and political landscape that privileges some languages more than others. This can render decision making about pedagogic and parental strategies something of a challenge and throws up some critical issues. We will address these in the next section.

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Critical Issues and Topics We have seen in the preceding sections that our understanding of language development, both monolingual and plurilingual, has developed considerably over the last 50 or so years. Differing theories have given differential weight to the roles of input and interaction, but this has gained traction recently, with the important work of, for example, Tomasello and colleagues. Alongside this, our appreciation of bi- and plurilingualism has developed also. We now are more aware of very young children’s sophisticated ability to differentiate the languages in the input, at the same time as realizing that code-switching/mixing is not evidence of confusion but a question of the child drawing upon her available repertoire. As globalization and migration have vastly increased the multilingual nature of so many societies, our need to understand how best to respond to this environment is pressing. The cognitive benefits of bilingualism and the need for harmonious and effective communication are of ever greater focus. Yet the dominance of some languages and the concomitant national and local policies that flow from this create a picture of great complexity. The outcome of these can mean that all too often, the rich linguistic resources of our young children can be rendered invisible and prevented from thriving. Multilingual pedagogies attempt to address this issue, by highlighting and supporting all the languages of young children. The examples of research projects outlined in the previous section, involving not just early years’ practitioners in more formal settings than the home, but also complementary school setting and, crucially, families themselves, reflect the ecological approach endorsed by so many researchers in this field (e.g., Conteh et al. 2007; Hélot and Ó Laoire 2011; Kenner and Hickey 2008). We are a long way in our thinking from the idea of parallel monolingualisms and seeing bilingual children as simply being required to develop the dominant language at possible risk to other languages spoken or, in the case of sequential bilingualism, to leave the first language(s) at the school or nursery gate and learn the dominant language as quickly as possible. And yet, for all that, caregivers, be they early years’ practitioners or parents/family members, may still have concerns about the children’s language development, unsure perhaps that each language has reached an appropriate level. How do we allay such concerns? As we have seen above, projects which involve continuous professional development for teachers, engaging with parents, building links between complementary and mainstream settings and so on, can transform thinking. Thus, the Kirsch and Aleksic study (2018) showed how teachers changed their views as a result of new knowledge and new activities. The practitioners in the preschool setting in Sweden too, for example, changed their views when presented with the parents’ desire for bilingualism for their children (Axelsson 2008); and the mother in Kirsch’s 2018 study was able to reconsider her views as a result of the teacher’s approach. Here, Kirsch (2018) noted “the conversations indicated the strong connection between the mother’s beliefs, emotions, expectations, and knowledge about language learning. The latter was not in line with the latest findings on language learning (which) demonstrates that parents also need support when educating their children

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multilingually” (p.15). This suggests that knowledge can play a real role in developing understandings and expectations that will benefit children. But what should that consist of? The complexity and variety of linguistic setting for very young children around the world mean that it is all but impossible to offer a blueprint for action. However, there are nevertheless some key areas, awareness of which could benefit all caregivers. First of all, as I have argued elsewhere (Macrory 2006), early years’ practitioners need a full profile of the child’s linguistic repertoire (p.167). The European Language Portfolio (MacLagan 2006) is a child-friendly way of setting this out and also offers the possibility of involving the whole family. This could serve as a minimum to counterbalance any perception of the child primarily predicated upon the language of schooling and their development in just that language, but also to give a much more holistic view of the child and her family context. This can also have a positive impact upon the family, who in a desire to promote the language of school as a means of ensuring later academic success, may take for granted the full range of language competence the young child has. A profile/portfolio can point to which language(s) may need more input and opportunities for interaction. It may reveal, for example, that a language a teacher imagines is little used is in fact often used with, say, grandparents; conversely, it may reveal that there is limited input in a particular language. For example, the child has only one parent who speaks language X, this parent works outside the home and there are no other family members who share the language. Where this is the case steps can be taken to identify other children, who share the same language, to provide books and stories in that language or to encourage the child simply to share words they know. Parents may wish in this situation to opt not for one person, one language but to maximize their interactions with the child in the lesser used one. In cases of bilingualism where parents are in a situation where they do not speak the dominant language, or a new language being is being introduced to their children at a young age, parents may lack confidence in using this language. Prosic-Santovac (2017) found that exposing a 4-year-old child to episodes of an internationally popular British preschool animated television series had a positive effect upon her acquisition of English. This is the kind of experience that could be recorded in the kind of portfolio just mentioned. It also suggests that we need to broaden our conception of the range of contexts in which language can be learned and the kinds of input that may be beneficial. Early years settings and families equally need an understanding of the typical process of language development (as do others such as health visitors). In the case of simultaneous bilingualism, an understanding is needed that while the route of development in each language will largely follow the same path as a monolingual child acquiring that language, cross-linguistic transfer is normal. We can both use such instances as opportunities to provide translation equivalents at the same time fostering and encouraging code-switching as a vital communication tool. Where bilingualism is consecutive, there may be a substantial mis-match in the early stages between the two languages so that the freedom to use both lifts a constraint upon communication and helps maintain that language. The continued input in the first language is vital and de Houwer reminds us (2009) of the importance of impact

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beliefs, suggesting that in fact many parents, whether in monolingual or bilingual families, are not aware of the importance of their role as providers of language input to their children (p.95). I would argue that this could equally well be applied to many practitioners in early years’ settings; equally the importance of the input taking place within the context of interaction cannot be over-estimated. While noting earlier, however, that we cannot offer a blueprint for action, this is due in part to the nuanced nature of so many language development contexts but also the fact that as researchers, we need a much deeper understanding of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of any approach we might in some senses “recommend.” Not only are we some way away from offering a blueprint for action, but we should also perhaps sound a note of caution. For example, Jaspers (2017) does not deny that fluid language use in class may have beneficial effects but argues “that such causality cannot be taken for granted because the effect of introducing particular linguistic resources in class always needs to be considered against the background of continuing inequalities, predominant discourses, local circumstances, and personal considerations” (p.7). Hamman (2018) contends that “the uncritical incorporation of translanguaging practices and pedagogies in dual language classrooms may have serious consequences for the creation of equitable learning spaces” and reports upon a study where in a dual language (Spanish and English) instructional context, English was in fact the privileged language (p.22). She found that the native English-speaking students had little exposure to Spanish outside of the classroom and many of the native Spanish speakers were already quite proficient in English and concluded that this certainly contributed to the dominance of English in the classroom. She noted that in other communities, the distinction between English dominant and Spanish-dominant students may be less demarcated and students may have more frequent interactions with multilingual people and texts outside of the classroom. This led her to counsel that in considering translanguaging in dual language classrooms, we cannot assume that pedagogies that work well in one setting will necessarily transfer to another (pp. 37–8). Teachers may feel that they are faced with a dilemma – one where on the one hand, they recognize the value of plurilingual pedagogy but also feel tasked with developing the standard language of the dominant culture upon which examination success is predicated. As Jaspers (2017) puts it, “how do you valorize pupils linguistic diversity without losing sight of socially valued, monolingual, registers? Or, inversely, how do you make pupils learn a collectively valued register without implying that their individual linguistic skills are less important? To resolve this, teachers sometimes resort to makeshift strategies, promoting translanguaging during group-work, for example, but frowning upon its occurrence in other contexts” (p.6). Recognizing this, García (2009) argues that code-switching cannot be random and endorses the practice of “responsible code-switching” suggesting that “teachers should code-switch to offer meaningful instructional support and not merely to give orders, instructions, call attention, discipline or follow the language of the child” (p.299).

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The cautionary notes sounded above indicate not only that we need to consider carefully any advice offered to parents and caregivers but also point to the need for future research.

Future Research Directions A future research agenda needs to take into account a full range of contexts in which 3- to 6-year-olds develop their language skills. This must include a range of national policy contexts, a range of languages, and a range of contexts such as those outlined by Romaine (1995). There are different research agendas to address. We need continued investigation of the ways in which input and interaction affects and promotes language development. Fine-grained research using tools such as CHILDES (MacWhinney 1991) can throw light on to the nuanced interactions between children and caregivers and reveal at a linguistic level how the input relates to production (see Macrory 2007). This might allow us to investigate more thoroughly the impact of plurilingual approaches and that of the more traditional one of “one person-one language,” an important issue given the variety of contexts for language acquisition. More recently, the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) System offers a new tool (LENA Research Foundation 2014), a device that parents can use to easily monitor the amount of language stimulation their child receives. The LENA device is a small, child-safe recorder that children wear for a day at a time. This has sparked interest among researchers, and according to Ganek and Eriks-Brophy (2018, p. 83), it has already provided intriguing results about the natural language environments of children from a number of different linguistic backgrounds and with a variety of communication abilities. In addition to quantitative approaches such as CHILDES and LENA, however, more ethnographic approaches would allow the exploration of the interplay between language, identity, and social context in both homes and school settings and permit us to investigate the ways in which the broader family including siblings and grandparents navigate the linguistic and cultural environment. We need to know more about how families and children experience the transition from home to preschool, about parents’ and practitioners’ beliefs and how they influence the ways in which they interact with young children. We need to note the different implications that pertain from the linguistic competences of caregivers and families, acknowledging that teachers in particular have different training needs depending on whether they are monolingual or also speak the language(s) of the children they teach. Importantly, we need research into the longer term impact of families’ and teachers’ strategies when talking with young bi- and plurilingual children in order to inform policy and also guidance provided to families and schools. But research into the impact of any such guidance itself is also necessary. In setting a research agenda, however, we consult practitioners and families to avoid replicating the top-down discourse that can too easily render invisible the very things we wish to throw light upon.

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Conclusions This chapter has sought to address a number of important issues. First of all, I have attempted to show how differing theoretical perspectives on early language acquisition accord differential weight to the role of input and interaction. This is not simply an esoteric academic argument, but a crucial issue with far-reaching consequences for teachers, caregivers, and parents of young children. I have also highlighted the prevalence of bi- and plurilingualism in an increasingly globalized world, one where growing up with more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In this world, young children possess sophisticated abilities not only to differentiate the languages to which they are exposed but to draw effectively upon their linguistic repertoires as needed. Recent approaches to bilingualism and plurilingualism recognize the importance of the notion of a linguistic repertoire, a far cry from previous conceptualizations of bilingualism as parallel monolingualisms and conceptualizations of languages as individual codes. Yet this welcome appreciation of the linguistic skills that young bi- and plurilingual children possess must not obscure the challenges that this nevertheless presents. In emphasizing the important role that input and interaction play in early language development, we need to find ways in which both (or all) of a young child’s languages can flourish. This means challenging prevailing beliefs about plurilingualism and language hierarchies, recognizing the agency that teachers and caregivers can bring to bear and offering strategies to support them. At the same time, we cannot ignore the potential tensions that reside in this. It behoves us to find ways to open up the spaces where languages are used, something that might in turn begin to disrupt the hegemony of certain languages that threaten to obscure the richness and variety of language in the world. In so doing, we can encourage voices to be heard in more ways than one.

Cross-References ▶ The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reversing Language Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Language Policy and Its Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Planning and Intergenerational Language Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Happylingual Family Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translanguaging and FLP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Community Language Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parent-Teacher Partnerships for Bilingualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FLP and Mainstream Early Childhood Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FLP and Dual-Language Early Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FLP and Complementary Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Using Family Language Policy as its theoretical framework, this chapter examines studies on the interaction between minority language speaking families and educators in mainstream schools and complementary classes in community organizations. When children begin socializing outside the home context during early childhood years, multilingual families ponder more upon how to arrange İ. Bezcioğlu-Göktolga (*) Department of International Business, Avans University of Applied Sciences, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_19

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their family language practices. They find this challenging if their linguistic expectations and mainstream school ideologies contradict. In order to equip themselves with the best linguistic strategies, they consult educators. A successful multilingual upbringing is ensured when families and educators work in partnership. Following an overview of main theoretical concepts influencing Family Language Family, the chapter reviews major studies that examined how teachers in the mainstream schools encourage or discourage home language practices, and how families react to this. It also provides empirical studies of the relationship between families and complementary schools and presents future research directions. The chapter argues that research with families and teachers on how to foster these partnerships is necessary to increase the quality of pedagogical support for teachers and help families to have a successful family language policy. Keywords

Family language policy · External language management · Early language education · Parent-teacher interaction · Parent and teacher agency

Introduction Early years of education are one of the most critical periods for families. Each family has its own values and traditions and its unique way of viewing, thinking, and acting. The same applies to communicating, within and outside the family domains, especially when more than one language is concerned. Children’s linguistic interactions are mediated mostly by their parents in the early years of their lives. Parents find this relatively easy because children socialize primarily within the family, communicate mainly with their parents, siblings, and parents’ close contacts, and their social contact is limited to parental orientations. However, when children start socializing with others outside the home, which begins with preschool, outside factors such as the impact of the school language, expectations of the mainstream society, and communication with friends become more dominant in shaping their language activities. If bilingual/multilingual families desire to maintain the home language while children prefer the mainstream language, this dominance creates conflicts and challenges in these families. Parents aim that their children learn the mainstream language so that they function well in the society, but they also wish that they maintain the home language for various reasons such as identity, cultural maintenance, and communication with extended family members. They might apply specific management strategies in the home domain, such as increasing the frequency of reading in the minority language or persisting in speaking only the minority language in specific contexts. However, they may not always find such strategies sufficient in developing two or more languages, so they seek external support from mainstream teachers and various educational institutions. Looking into the interactions between families and educators helps us to understand how successful family-school partnerships can be

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developed, encouraged, and maintained so that bilingualism is supported by positive connections and children are provided with the maximum support possible. Using Family Language Policy (FLP henceforth) as its framework, with a focus on early childhood years, this chapter provides an overview of how families shape their language practices through their interaction with educational institutions. Families this chapter focuses on are minority language speakers who have bilingual orientations and want to maintain their home language(s) in the family settings. Majority of the families presented in the chapter also struggle to fulfill their aim since they have to take their own initiatives and create their own linguistic opportunities for language maintenance themselves and within their own ethnic community (except for countries with more than one official language). Families are in close interaction with educational institutions since they are the most relevant institutions that they can consult to support their bilingual orientations. These institutions are mainstream and dual-language preschools as well as complementary schools, including after-school/weekend classes, heritage language classes, and community-based classes. After introducing FLP and its components, language ideology, language practice, and language management, the next section provides an overview of the main concepts on the interaction between FLP and mainstream educational institutions and complementary schools. Following that, it presents major research on how mainstream teachers influence FLP of minority language speaking families, and how preschools and other complementary organizations support language management. The following sections touch on briefly at the latest research in the field, by discussing critical issues and topics, and finally suggesting future research directions in order to understand the interaction between FLP and educators better, and to provide the best language learning opportunities for children in educational settings.

Main Theoretical Concepts The interaction between families and educational institutions is one of the most crucial domains in language policy studies (Schwartz and Verschik 2013). Educational institutions have a very powerful impact on parental beliefs, familial language practices, and most importantly, children’s attitudes toward a specific language. This section addresses the main theoretical concepts including the Reversing Language Shift, family language policy, language planning and intergenerational language transmission, happylingual family approach, translanguaging, community language ideology, and parent-teacher partnerships for bilingualism in the multilingual context.

Reversing Language Shift In his model for Reversing Language Shift (RLS), Fishman (1991, 2001) proposes that it is possible to promote language maintenance through efforts for intergenerational language transmission in the family and community level. As Fishman (1991) explains

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in the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), there are eight stages in RLS. In the middle of these stages (Stage 4 and Stage 5) lies the role of education as a critical domain to initiate RLS. Stage 5 on the GIDS represents the presence of literacy in the home, school, and community to some extent, and Stage 4 is realized when education is in the center for literacy transmission. These stages highlight the connection between family and educational institutions for actualizing language practices in bilingual families as the most important indicators of children’s linguistic achievement. In the family context, it is important that parents plan and guide their language activities to achieve expected linguistic outcomes.

Family Language Policy and Its Components Families raising children with more than one language have many questions in mind regarding how to provide a rich linguistic environment for their children in multilingual settings. They struggle to choose what is best since they need to take into consideration the social and political environment in the mainstream society and retain loyalty to own language and culture (Curdt-Christiansen 2013). They create their own language environment and linguistic practices in the family, which plays the most prominent role in maintaining their home language (Pillai et al. 2014). How they engage with home language practices can be understood through the lens of FLP. FLP seeks to understand family members’ explicit and overt as well as implicit and covert language planning in the home domain (Curdt-Christiansen 2009; King et al. 2008; Spolsky 2012). Research on FLP draws heavily on the theoretical model of Spolsky (2004, 2007). Spolsky defines three components of language policy: language ideologies, language practices, and language management. Language ideologies are about beliefs regarding languages and language use. Language practices present what people choose and use among the varieties of their linguistic repertoire. Language management is any kind of observable effort and intervention to effect actual language practices. Language ideologies are the driving forces behind language practices, and language practices make the maintenance of a language possible (Spolsky 2004, 2007). Besides, language management is quite a critical domain in the family, since it involves explicit and implicit efforts of parents to maintain, change, or adapt their target linguistic behaviors. This component is also the most relevant aspect of interactions between FLP and school. As Schwartz (2010) describes, parents benefit from two main control tendencies for language management: internal control and external control. In the former, families control the home language environment. Parents may, for instance, provide their children with a rich literacy environment, or cherish family traditions in the target language. In the latter, parents seek support from their sociocultural community, outside the home context. They may search for outside opportunities for their children to socialize in the mainstream language, consult teachers and other educational practitioners for their suggestions, and involve their children in relevant activities in the mainstream language. They may also receive external support from other educational institutions such as dual-language preschools and

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complementary preschools (also known as weekend/afternoon classes, supplementary schools, community language schools) and other community organizations such as religious institutions.

Language Planning and Intergenerational Language Transmission All of the internal and external family language management activities described above are to realize families’ language policies, which bring forward the concept of language planning. Language planning is about any activity that aims to change the corpus and function of languages and language varieties at (inter)national and community levels (Cooper 1989). Spolsky (2018) argues that the term “management” corresponds to language planning in a more appropriate way, since it involves any modification to change situations. In this respect, language planning involves parents’ explicit and overt management efforts to modify linguistic practices of children. With regard to planning linguistic conditions in the family, the majority of the FLP studies so far have attempted to understand language maintenance and intergenerational language transmission. It is understandable since while children learn the majority language through socializing and schoolings, the minority language is bound to be lost unless extra attention is paid (De Houwer 2007). In this sense, language management in bilingual families is the most important predictor of intergenerational language transmission. Devoted families make use of different management strategies such as teaching literacy, joining extra-curricular activities, speaking only the home language in the family settings to ensure this transmission. These management strategies result in successful family interactions when family members’ interests, preferences, and expectations are valued.

Happylingual Family Approach Linguistic practices in a family are composed of dynamic interactions. If family members want to achieve success in their intended language practices, they need to be mindful to each other’s needs, expectations, and preferences. The concept of Happylingual Approach corresponds to this mindfulness to a great extent. Kopeliovich (2013) argues that such an approach creates a positive attitude toward the complexity of intergenerational language transmission. It also requires that family members respect each other’s language preferences and focus on the linguistic aspects of childrearing. As Kopeliovich further explains it provides an optimistic and flexible approach to FLP by allowing parents to set realistic goals, benefitting from the existing language resources to the full extent, and refraining from criticism. A Happylingual family approach brings a comprehensive understanding of FLP and helps scholars and educators to view FLP as a whole by embracing all family languages rather than picturing them as a fight between languages and between family members. In a sense, it guides them to appreciate the use of all the available languages and linguistic resources in communication among family members.

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Translanguaging and FLP Translanguaging has attracted interest as a part of bilingual pedagogy by researchers and educational experts in recent years. Baker (2011, p. 288) defines translanguaging as “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages.” As García (2009) presents, it aims to increase communication using available resources rather than separate languages. In an educational setting, it means that teachers acknowledge and use all of the available linguistic resources in all the available languages to provide children with the best learning opportunities. Similarly, translanguaging is a useful term for families since it helps family members to appreciate and make use of their language repertoires as a whole, and utilize accessible resources for language and literacy development of children as well as for facilitating communication among family members. This way, families can be more flexible and develop familyspecific language management strategies. Last, knowledge of translanguaging by educators in the preschool years can result in invaluable outcomes for bilingual children. Using translanguaging as a strategy for bilingual pedagogy, teachers can benefit from their existing linguistic resources to involve children in educational and non-educational activities and motivate their learning, which results in maximizing their achievement. Viewing languages as a whole also helps the community to equalize the importance of all languages, and to accept and appreciate the home languages as much as the mainstream language.

Community Language Ideology Family is not an isolated unit; it is in strong interaction with the wider society. Factors such as sociocultural and sociopolitical circumstances as well as state policies have a powerful influence on FLP. Intergenerational language transmission in families attains success when it is supported by the community. Indeed Fishman (2001, p. 459) defines the community as the real secret weapon of RLS. In the FLP context, when the minority and the mainstream communities appreciate the identities, cultures, and languages of each other, intergenerational language transmission is facilitated. Furthermore, when their ethnic background is acknowledged, children become more motivated to learn a second language beginning in their early childhood years. Children’s motivation for learning is strengthened when parents and educators work in collaboration.

Parent-Teacher Partnerships for Bilingualism Partnerships between family, school, and community are important indicators of a successful educational life for children (Epstein 2011). They determine the success of intergenerational language transmission to a very important extent. As Epstein (2011) asserts, the success of bilingualism depends on successful school,

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community, and family partnerships. A good partnership between these educational stakeholders entails communicating mutual needs and interests, appreciating diversity of background, and working together to support children in their bilingual development (Bergroth and Palviainen 2016). Based on Esptein’s model (Epstein 2011), Bergroth and Palviainen et al. (2016) argue that family language ideologies, preferences, and practices, the linguistic realities of the surrounding community, and the school are decisive elements for children’s bilingual achievement in early childhood years. The realization of a successful FLP in which families enjoy language maintenance is possible when partnerships among these elements are established. Overall, various theories and concepts attempt to explain language dynamics in the family context. In light of these theories and concepts, the next section provides an overview of selection of the major studies that contribute to the interaction between families and educators under the conceptual framework of FLP.

Major Contributions Family language policy researchers have investigated various areas such as parental ideologies, language practices, and management in the family (e.g., CurdtChristiansen 2009), the impact of FLP on children’s language skills (e.g., Schwartz 2008), the active agency of children in determining FLP (e.g., Kopeliovich 2013; Palviainen and Boyd 2013), the relationship between FLP and emotions (e.g., Tannenbaum 2012), the role of extended family members on child language practices (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2016; Ruby 2012), and the effects of dominant state language policies on FLP (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2014). However, as a recently developing field of research, FLP has not focused extensively on the interaction between educational institutions and FLP in the early childhood years yet. There are still a few studies that shed light on teachers’ and families’ influence each other’s language policies, and how families consult educators and educational institutions to promote their FLP (e.g., Bezcioğlu-Göktolga and Yağmur 2018a; Mary and Young 2018). This section presents an overview of the major contributions with a focus on the interaction between FLP and mainstream early childhood institutions, duallanguage preschools, and complementary classes.

FLP and Mainstream Early Childhood Institutions While planning their family language activities, the main external resource families consult are the mainstream educational institutions. Various studies investigated the impact of mainstream institutions on the FLP of minority language speaking families. For instance, Pérez Báez (2013) examined the FLP among the speakers of the San Lucas Quavini Zapotec, a community that has migrated to the United States since the 1970s. The study included participant observation as well as sociolinguistic interviews with 26 families in San Lucas and Los Angeles and revealed that early

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educational experiences of children are important indicators that shape the FLP of parents. As children started school, they started to reject Zapotec and Spanish as their home language, and favored English, instead. One of the parents asserted that the intervention of the educational environment resulted in changes in parental language practices, as they also chose English more instead of their home languages. Consequently, mainstream educational institutions gradually modified language policy among families. The data presented in this research showed how families prioritize their children’s school achievement and shape their FLP based on the expectations of mainstream schools. Similarly, a research project of Gkaintartzi et al. (2014) focusing on Albanian immigrant families and educators in Greece provided significant findings on the interaction between the FLP and mainstream teachers who work with children in preschools and early years of primary education. Gkaintartzi and her colleagues (2014) focused on the link between FLP and school language ideologies. Based on ethnographic research with 19 Albanian parents in two schools with high Albanian population, the study revealed that parents have three main types of FLP, and there are discrepancies between their language ideologies and language management. Some parents are “indifferent” to Albanian maintenance as long as their children speak enough Albanian to express themselves. Some parents are “probilingual,” as they maintain Albanian at home, but they do not have any expectations from the mainstream schools to support this. Some parents, on the other hand, are “fighters,” meaning they care deeply about language maintenance and use deliberate language management strategies. Despite different types of FLP, parents of all three groups gave utmost importance to educators’ language ideologies and practices in the shaping of their own language ideologies. Parents also expected that Greek schools promote bilingual practices in immigrant families by including Albanian language courses in the school curriculum. However, they did not think their expectations would come true this, since instead of appreciating Albanian as a home language, teachers even suggested their children should abandon speaking Albanian at home. This is quite a striking finding and puts immigrant families in a very challenging situation since teachers’ suggestions simply enforce families to leave their language and identity behind and adopt the norms of the mainstream society for the sake of their children’s future. To understand the relationship from another perspective, in another study Gkaintartzi and her colleagues (Gkaintartzi et al. 2015) investigated school teachers’ attitudes toward immigrant children’s bilingualism in Greece. The study involved comprehensive data collection using quantitative and qualitative methods. Namely, it included a quantitative questionnaire implemented with 2875 pupils, 1676 parents, and 822 teachers as well as interviews with four teachers. Teachers shared their beliefs on the use of minority language at home and whether state schools should provide minority language instruction. The findings revealed that almost half of the participant teachers believe the knowledge of immigrant children’s heritage language is a hindrance to the learning of the school language. In one of the interviews, one teacher confessed that children have a challenging educational life because of their bilingual background. Another teacher who works at a kindergarten stated that

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teachers at the kindergarten are very strict about the use of Greek only, because it is the only way to learn the language. On the other hand, teachers stated that they do not mind if children learn a minority language after their regular daily school schedule through parental initiatives. However, they did not feel responsible for this, and they believed that minority language teaching should be initiated by the minority communities themselves. Similar conflicts on how teachers impact the FLP of minority language speaking families were noted in a study on the FLP of Turkish immigrant families in the Netherlands (Bezcioğlu-Göktolga and Yağmur 2018a). The study included observations and interviews in 20 Turkish families and interviews with 5 Dutch mainstream teachers working with children from the age of four. The interviewed parents had bilingual orientations. They all agreed that children should receive a high-quality education at schools to become successful adults in the society. To achieve this aim, they were more than ready to accept any advice from educators. For instance, after hearing from teachers that children need more input in Dutch, parents started to involve their children in various activities that help them increase their Dutch skills. Besides, although the use of media at home was mostly Turkish-oriented, they started to initiate watching more Dutch channels and cartoons in the family. Similarly, when they lacked necessary Dutch skills themselves, they hired private tutors for their children. At the same time, although teachers respected the use of Turkish in the families until children are four, which is the age when children start compulsory education, they suggested that parents should favor Dutch and decrease Turkish input in the family. In that sense, parents and teachers did not work in partnership, but had controversy FLP ideologies and practices regarding the use of Turkish as their home language, which is a significant hindrance to promoting multilingualism among immigrant communities in the society. Despite the contradictory ideologies and practices between families and mainstream teachers presented in a number of studies, there are also cases in which educators advocate themselves to create better opportunities for bilingual children. The study of Mary and Young (2018) is one of the most striking ones among them. They investigated the agency of a preschool teacher who works with bilingual children in France. In the study, the teacher, Sylvie, resisted the monolingual and assimilationist ideologies and attitudes of the school system, and welcomed parents from diverse backgrounds and languages in her class even if they did not speak French. In addition, she allowed the use of home languages in her class, using them as pedagogical tools. She also confronted the school inspector and expressed the need to develop a child-centered program for language acquisition. The study shows how a teacher can use her agency and create better learning opportunities for bilingual children and their families, although the educational policies at the state level require monolingual education. Another comprehensive project on the importance of partnerships between families and schools was conducted in four Nordic countries, including Iceland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway (Ragnarsdóttir 2015). The project aimed to uncover success stories for inclusion and social justice of students in different learning spaces. It also worked to take the lead for reform in teaching and school practices to increase social

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and academic conditions for immigrant students. There were various success stories from preschools. In Iceland, for instance, the focus preschools all had child-centered policies, in which they respected and acknowledged all children regardless of their background, and scaffolded them in language learning if needed. In one of the preschools, cultures and languages of all children were welcomed in the educational environment, creating a more equal learning environment. Parents were also content with such practices since they felt their background was valued and appreciated. Similar situations were observed in the other Nordic countries. Policies and practices that value linguistic and cultural diversity are the most prominent supporters of bilingual families in the realization of their FLP. Similar to the successful parent-school partnerships described above, Child2Ling, carried out at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, is one of the most comprehensive projects that explored how language, bilingualism, and bilingual development are negotiated in a variety of contexts including preschools and families. In particular, the project investigated bilingual practices of Swedish-Finnish bilingual children in Swedish-medium preschools through interviews with 18 parents, 10 preschool staff, and 9 children, observations in the family settings and preschools for 6 months, and a document analysis of mass media and policy documents and curricula. The project revealed important findings including a shift to flexible bilingual practices in the classroom by taking each child’s needs and interests into account (Palviainen et al. 2016), the importance of establishing partnerships beginning from the early childhood years to promote bilingualism at home and in the society (Bergroth and Palviainen 2016), and the active agency of preschoolers in constructing the language policies at home and at school (Bergroth and Palviainen 2017). Overall, the findings expanded our understanding of FLP, and the partnership between families and educators. Finally, Schwartz’s (2018) edited book on preschool bilingual education is one of the most recent contributions that illuminate how child’s, teachers’, and parents’ agencies interact in early childhood education from a sociolinguistic perspective. The book provides a comprehensive examination of how children’s willingness and expertise for bilingual learning and teachers’ own initiations for flexible language use in the classroom to address children’s bilingual needs. The contributing chapters under this scope highlight the importance of collaborating with parents in educational settings since understanding and appreciating families’ social and cultural backgrounds, funds of knowledge, allows educators to provide the best learning environment for children. Funds of knowledge refers to “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al. 1992, p. 133). The mutual collaboration between parents and teachers increases the quality of education. Teachers can understand parents’ expectations for increasing children’s language skills and include more literacy activities in their lessons. Similarly, parent involvement in school activities increases teacher motivation. Specifically, in one of the presented studies, DePalma and Zapico-Barbeito (2018) explored the revitalization efforts of parents and educators in order to prevent Galician from diminishing. The study was conducted in two phases. The first phase focused on the perceptions of

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preservice teachers on Galician language teaching in the classroom and was conducted through a survey with 177 preservice early childhood education teachers and an interview with a course instructor on Methods of Galician Language Teaching. The second phase took a detailed look into early childhood education centers, and included a case study in five schools that gives education to students from various age groups including children from 0 to 6 years. The findings showed that teachers and parents worked in partnership to realize Spanish speaking parents’ school choice for Galician preschool education as a part of their explicit family language management. Teachers responded to parents’ school choice in Galician by providing a variety of activities for children such as incorporating literature in the curriculum and introducing arts and language practices. In short, the book provides valuable insights into how the relationship between families and educators can be incorporated into FLP research. The studies summarized above provide significant implications on the importance of mainstream teachers on child bilingual development. If teachers lack awareness of emotional, cognitive, and linguistic advantages of minority language maintenance and bilingualism, misconceptions on children’s use of family languages are inevitable. Hélot and Young (2006) asserted that many teachers do not have any understanding of how it feels to abandon own language in the school environment because of their own monolingual backgrounds. Instead, they believed speaking another language at home hinders integration and learning of the mainstream language (Franceschini 2011; Mary and Young 2018), and they encouraged students and their parents to use only the mainstream language at home and at school for better academic achievement even before school age (Pulinx et al. 2017; Strobbe et al. 2017). On the other hand, pedagogical support to raise awareness on cultural diversity and bilingualism among teachers result in better academic success as well as stronger relations with parents (e.g., Bodur 2012; Early et al. 2001; Hughes et al. 2005). Therefore, it is essential that teachers receive necessary theoretical and practical training during their preservice studies as well as in-service practices (▶ Chap. 22, “Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education”). This way, they can guide families much more successfully on their FLP.

FLP and Dual-Language Early Education Besides mainstream educational institutions, families consult dual-language preschools for the bilingual development of their children. The interaction between families and such schools is expected to be positive, since the primary aim of these schools is to help families in specific and communities in general to preserve their own background values. That is also linked to various reasons such as compensating for lack of support for home languages in the mainstream society, maintaining home languages, preserving identity, and transmitting own culture and traditions to the next generations, promoting the bilingualism of society. In Israel, there are preschools offering education in dual languages including English-Hebrew, Russian-Hebrew, and Hebrew-Arabic. Families send their children

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to such schools in order to realize their FLP, which mostly involves bringing up bilingual children who are aware of other cultures and identities. For instance, a Hebrew-Arabic preschool offers children and their parents to promote Arabic and Hebrew development both as L1 and L2, as well as increasing tolerance and respect between these groups beginning from a very early age (Schwartz and Gorbatt 2016). Parents are motivated to choose Hebrew-Arabic preschool to complement their FLP, and they want that their children know more about the identity and culture of the other group (Schwartz et al. 2013). In line with Hebrew-Arabic preschools, Russian immigrant families in Israel choose to send their children to Russian-Hebrew dual-language preschools or monolingual preschools based on their language ideologies and intended language practices (Schwartz et al. 2011). Schwartz’ (2013) study revealed significant findings on the importance of the relationship between FLP and educators. She conducted questionnaires with 260 parents as well as interviews with 7 parents and 6 pedagogical staff working at a Russian-Hebrew preschool. The Russian-Hebrew preschool adopts First Language First model, meaning children receive input only in Russian up to age 3, and then they are sequentially introduced to Hebrew. In the preschool, the primary aim is to maintain Russian language, culture, and traditions, and to increase the teaching of Hebrew gradually. The findings of the study revealed that the preschool language policy match with the FLP of the parents, especially in the early years of preschool education, since maintaining Russian as the home language was a very significant part of their identity and family culture. At the same time, parents who did not have experience with bilingualism were concerned about the gradual increase in Hebrew input at school. They thought their children could not learn it well; however, teachers believed children learn Hebrew easily after they acquire basic linguistic structures and lexicon in Russian. Teachers recommended a gradual transition to Hebrew to ensure children could adapt to it smoothly; they reassured parents about the success of their educational policy. Contrary to the teachers in the mainstream preschools, teachers in this Russian-Hebrew preschool saw the acquisition and improvement of the home language as an asset, and they were aware that this facilitates children’s learning of the second language easier. In another study, Sawyer et al. (2017) examined language ideologies of parents and teachers in a Spanish-English dual language preschool in the United States. Interviews with 14 parents and 17 educators revealed noteworthy findings on the importance of developing parent-teacher relationships, limited vision on parentteacher collaboration, barriers to parent-teacher relationships, and collaboration. Parents gave ultimate importance to teacher sensitivity for the function of the Spanish language and culture in the classroom. Resources such as language learning software and language learning community classes and, most importantly, consulting a person to overcome language barriers during communication were found to be helpful for parent-teacher collaboration. From the teachers’ side, learning a few words in children’s home language and benefitting from bilingual and Spanish books in the preschool were expected as useful strategies to help children. On the other hand, there were barriers between parents and teachers for collaboration. Neither teachers nor parents could provide specific suggestions for collaboration,

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since they lacked knowledge on how to initiate a partnership. Parents did not always consider their linguistic knowledge and expertise in their home language as a resource or they did not know how to use this resource to help their children. All in all, teachers should be very aware of their agentic role to guide and help parents and children for their bilingual development. To recap, the impact of teachers in dual-language preschools seems to be more supportive than teachers working in mainstream institutions for the realization of FLP among minority language speaking families. These teachers are more tuned to bilingual education and development due to their professional background and teaching experiences that are obtained in different circumstances and aims from the mainstream teachers. The presence of such support results in a more positive language learning environment both in the families and in the preschools and facilitates language acquisition and learning for children in a more successful way.

FLP and Complementary Classes Besides mainstream and dual-language preschools, families consult complementary organizations such as heritage language schools, weekend/afternoon classes, and religious organizations in order to support their children for language maintenance. Parents with strong beliefs for the benefits of multilingual upbringing in a rich and meaningful language and literacy environment take advantage of such classes (Riches and Curdt-Christiansen 2010). The function of complementary schools goes beyond the teaching of the home language. Parents and teachers perceive that the purpose of such schools also involves the promotion of one’s own cultural understanding, identity, and community (Francis et al. 2010). In that respect, such schools are very significant external language management settings in realizing FLP of minority language speaking families. Shibata (2000) presents an invaluable example of how the need for external language support for a family can start a big initiative to establish a community school for Japanese children beginning from the early years of education in the United States. Shibata (2000) documented that a family moving to a small town in the United States observed that their son started to show a lack of interest in speaking Japanese. The family wanted to provide their son with an environment where he could make friends and socialize in Japanese, while also enjoying various cultural activities in the community. Being concerned about this, and not knowing many Japanese people in town, they initiated interaction with a Japanese lady who had an extensive network. With her motivation and the family’s expertise, they established a Saturday school. A church offered them its facilities on Saturday mornings, and teachers were employed among parents and college students. Financial support was obtained through local funding and the Ministry of Education in Japan. In a short time, the school became a center of Japanese language and cultural activities with more children enrolling every semester. The study sheds light on the power of the parent agency on the realization of FLP in an educational setting, and shows that

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parents should be aware of their active role in finding the right external language management for their children. Besides initiating the establishment of formal language classes, families also make use of religious places as complementary schools within their own community in order to realize family ideologies. Revis (2017) investigated the interaction between religious practices and FLP among Ethiopian community in New Zealand through ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 14 Ethiopian caregivers. Participant families, who had children from preschool years until 12, were members of an Orthodox church. The church was their community of practice. Their religious ideologies and practices brought them together there primarily, but they also gathered weekly to share and celebrate many other occasions, speaking only Amharic during all these gatherings. Parents indicated that the church helps children to practice Amharic and maintain own identity and culture. They sent their children to the church for language lessons, during which children learned the alphabet, read the Bible, and sang in Amharic. However, details such as the frequency of these language lessons or whether a program was offered by trained language teachers are not presented in the study. All in all, for Ethiopian families, it was a place to which they felt they belonged, and where their children had the opportunity to practice Amharic language and Ethiopian culture as in Ethiopia. The study presents important implications on the power of religious places to promote multilingualism. Immigrant families benefit from religious places to maintain their sense of identity and culture, which are no doubt the core aspects of language maintenance. As long as components such as the quality and continuity are ensured, language classes in religious places can offer significant advantages for multilingualism. In addition, Kenner’s (2004) study of six-year-old children who learn Chinese, Arabic, or Spanish in complementary schools in London presents a significant example of bilingual children’s script learning in early childhood years. Kenner observed 6-year-olds in a variety of locations including home, primary schools, and complementary schools for over a year. The observations included settings in which parents helped children with complementary schoolwork, children learned the alphabet, and the characters of their home language and worked on sound-symbol relationships. The findings showed that besides supporting minority language speaking children with language maintenance and home language literacy learning, complementary schools helped them gain an awareness of different languages, alphabets, and writing systems even in the early years of education. Children in these schools were aware of the differences between English and their home language. They were also alert to the relationships between different forms and meaning of words. Lastly, they were able to use both languages simultaneously as a resource in their linguistic repertoire, such as expressing their ideas combining verbal and written resources available to them. In this sense, parental motivation for complementary early education settings helped children enjoy the coexistence simultaneous learning of the mainstream and home languages. Finally, another study (Kenner et al. 2010) examined how the partnership between the teachers of the mainstream and complementary classes improves cultural and linguistic awareness among children. The project brought together teachers

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by arranging visits to each other’s schools. The mainstream teachers found this experience very surprising because contrary to their expectations, schools were very devoted and successful. Complementary school teachers developed strategies to engage children in multiage and multilevel groups using their own course materials. Besides, mainstream teachers observed a strong relationship between children, parents, and complementary school teachers because of their shared cultural background and motivation to bring up a successful community through educating young children. The visit of complementary school teachers was also rewarding, since children started to respect their teachers more, and viewed complementary schools as a part of their whole educational life, rather than a separate unit. The visits resulted in a topic-based joint program in which families were also involved. Home languages were accepted at the mainstream schools. For instance, family members were interviewed in the classroom, and any resources such as songs, poems, and various bilingual texts were utilized in the program. At the end, both minority language speaking children and mainstream took the opportunity to develop a bilingual understanding through games in different languages and translanguaging activities. The project illustrates how partnerships between the stakeholders of education, including families, researchers, and teachers bring schools together and increase cultural awareness, respect, and collaboration.

New Projects Given the fact that studies on FLP have mostly revolved around parental language ideologies and practices so far, there are not many projects that specifically focus on the relationship between FLP and educators in the early childhood years. Still, scholars have recently conducted studies on how parents and teachers in the early years of education collaborate for child bilingualism. An ongoing project on the FLP of three ethnolinguistic communities (Chinese, Polish, and Somali) in the UK examines how FLP is shaped and implemented at the community level and how languages are practiced, managed, and negotiated at the family level. In particular, the project aims to investigate how families with more than one language can be supported and provided with linguistic and educational resources for successful multilingualism at the family and school levels (Familylangugepoli 2019). A recent paper by Curdt-Christiansen and La Morgia (2018) showed that parents from different ethnic backgrounds had diverse aspirations for familial language activities and language management. To illustrate, Chinese parents do not see English as their medium of interaction with family members. On the other hand, Italian and Pakistani parents regarded English as the primary language in the family. Regarding language management, while parents of all groups read to their children in English on daily basis, only a small number of Chinese and Urdu-speaking Pakistani parents read in their heritage language. To summarize, while the interaction between families and educators has recently received attention in FLP context, more research in early language education settings

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will bring new insights into understanding how to provide the best support for children’s bilingual development.

Critical Issues and Topics Minority language speaking parents seek support from teachers and other professionals to provide their children with the best language learning opportunities both in the mainstream and in the home languages. They consult teachers in mainstream schools, and look for support from complementary schools. The most critical issues to increase the quality of the interaction should be to ensure collaboration between educational institutions and families, to offer professional training to teachers, and to help educators understand the roles and functions of home languages. These concerns will be elaborated below. Firstly, a successful collaboration is not possible between families and teachers in many cases, since bilingual FLP orientations of families and monolingual school orientations in the mainstream country contradict. Resulting from monolingual state ideologies of many countries such as France and the Netherlands, teachers expect all children to speak only the official language in the classroom, disregarding any other languages, especially less prestigious ones. They do not have enough information about the family backgrounds, culture, customs, and traditions of the children they work with, and they are not aware of any linguistic interactions that children are part of in their family settings, let alone FLP and parents’ target language orientations. Consequently, it is highly probable that they misguide families for their FLP objectives. To illustrate, despite language maintenance orientations of Turkish immigrant families in the Netherlands, and despite the encouragement of professionals such as pedagogues and speech therapists to use Turkish at home, teachers in the mainstream schools suggest parents prefer Dutch to Turkish even at early ages (Bezcioğlu-Göktolga and Yağmur 2018b). In this context, Schwartz and Baladzhaeva (2015) note that educators generally do not know about diverse children’s culturally specific ways of learning. Funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992) is a very important concept for educators. Through an understanding of funds of knowledge, teachers can raise awareness of children from different backgrounds, so they can address their needs and interests better, which result in a stronger relationship with parents and better academic success for children (Bodur 2012; Early et al. 2001). To illustrate, Bodur (2012) presented in his research with preservice teachers that teachers who received courses on multicultural preparation had a more in-depth understanding of how to support children from a diverse linguistic and cultural background. More strikingly, while preservice teachers attributed the poor school performance of such children to factors such as the language barrier and family characteristics, teacher candidates who received relevant training viewed this as challenges of students that teachers can address through their professional qualifications. Secondly, the majority of the complementary schools are established and managed by minority language speaking communities themselves. In some cases, they

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have teachers who have professional backgrounds from their country of origin or in the mainstream country (Chatzidaki and Maligkoudi 2018). In many other cases, instruction in complementary school setting is voluntary-based. Parents or other adults from the community manage language teaching activities. While these schools provide opportunities to promote FLP for language maintenance, and while families may be content with the presence of such facilities, professional preparation and external support from the mainstream institutions can be beneficial for language development of children. For instance, mainstream institutions can support complementary schools with well-equipped classrooms, allowing them to use public schools for after-school lessons, and educational materials. In addition, complementary school teachers can be trained to have an in-depth understanding of the educational curricula of the mainstream schools. There can even be a collaboration between these institutions such as teaching children similar themes and guiding teachers to provide individual guidance to children who need extra attention. If the mainstream institutions see minority languages as a resource rather than an obstacle, then mutual support and collaboration become more achievable. Such collaboration is of great significance to perpetuate FLP of families who refer to such schools as a part of external language management. They believe that collaboration increases the likelihood of language maintenance and improves second language learning. From an academic perspective, the collaboration will yield substantial benefits for children’s bilingual development. Namely, considering the interdependence between L1 and L2 (Cummins 2000) investing in complementary schools for language maintenance of children will help them reach a certain threshold in their own language and so children will learn the mainstream language better. To recap, it is critical to establish a strong connection between families and educators, and teachers have a significant responsibility to achieve in this. As most of the efforts for collaboration to bring up bilingual children are invested by the families, it is important to raise awareness among teachers to understand the advantages of bilingualism, recognize and appreciate home languages, and support bilingual families. Professional training is necessary to understand and guide families to manage their target FLP in a successful way.

Future Research Directions In order to provide the best learning opportunities for children’s language development within and outside the family, FLP as a research field is in need of more studies to explore the interactions between families and educators. Extensive focus on how FLP is negotiated, how families are supported by educators, and how family language ideologies and practices can be integrated into school life of children. First, teachers may lack enough background knowledge and experience to help families in their bilingual practices. Comprehensive research projects that bring together teachers with families to raise mutual awareness and guide teachers to understand the diversity of languages as resources, such as an intervention project based on the needs, interests, and characteristics of specific groups, or a pedagogical

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practice projects followed by academic research, would be one way to do this. Families from different backgrounds have different learning and teaching strategies and traditions. Parents’ expectations of the teachers can go in the same line especially if they are unfamiliar with the educational system of the mainstream country. If both sides know more about each other’s attitudes, needs, and motivations, they build up more realistic expectations for each other, and organize educational and family language activities for the best linguistic environment for children. Second, as both mainstream educational institutions and complementary schools have mainly monolingual ideologies, they challenge the use of the other language in classroom settings. The reality in the families does not reflect this, though. In many cases, languages are intertwined and used to teach the other language. Cummins (2005) challenges the monolingual ideologies of schools, and suggests bilingual instruction in the mainstream, dual-language, and complementary schools. Such bilingual instruction includes, for example, letting children discuss the similarities and differences between their home and the mainstream languages such as cognate words and help them gain language awareness. In addition, dual language books and other multilingual media devices can be produced, and collaboration between children who have other home languages can be initiated. Comprehensive research on how languages are practiced by children in the family and in educational settings can be a very useful guide to understand how children negotiate in languages in interaction so that the suitable opportunities for a better educational environment are provided. Finally, teachers suggest that families, especially immigrant families who have recently moved in their new accommodation, should participate in school activities as much as possible. This way, families can understand the school system, adjust their family language activities accordingly, and start to think about language management activities. Research is needed on how teachers can facilitate parent involvement at this stage. Acknowledging home languages and cultures and accepting home language use in the school environment are very important initial attempts to achieve in this. Teachers need to initiate motivation among parents, and get them involved in language activities in their family environment, such as reading newspapers together, and discovering the library in their town to learn the majority language, but also get involved in linguistic activities in their home language, since children can transfer literacy skills in their home language to the majority language (Stagg-Peterson and Heywood 2007). Overall research into how such interaction is established and negotiated can provide valuable insights to cultivate stronger relationships between families and educators.

Conclusions Minority language speaking families face various challenges regarding how to support their children’s bilingual development. Besides their own efforts to provide their children with a rich language learning environment in the home context, they consult educators both in the mainstream schools and in complementary classes

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beginning from early childhood years. This chapter provides an overview of the interaction between families and educators in FLP context in early language learning and discusses the partnerships between families and early childhood institutions are essential to provide children with the best linguistic and educational opportunities at home and at school. Partnerships between families and early educational institutions as well as between mainstream and complementary schools working with young children help all of the stakeholders of education to become more aware of each other’s interests, values, and expectations. Projects as in the case of the success stories in the Nordic countries (Ragnarsdóttir and Kulbrandstad 2019) can guide educational practitioners, teacher trainers, and even policy makers to create favorable opportunities for a successful FLP. Besides, the inclusion of any contexts that involve diverse external management for home language maintenance including religious practices should be encouraged by early childhood educators. For the realization of success in these partnerships, teacher training is essential. Teachers both in the mainstream institutions and in complementary schools should be informed about bilingualism, language acquisition processes, as well as recognizing home languages and cultures to bring up successful bilingual children. Finally, future investigation on the impact of teachers on FLP in early language education, the negotiations between families and educators as well as the interaction between mainstream and complementary schools are suggested in order to facilitate mutual understanding as well as to improve FLP as a separate research field.

Cross-References ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

References Baker, C. (2011). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (Vol. 79). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bergroth, M., & Palviainen, Å. (2016). The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling: Collaboration between bilingual families and pedagogical practitioners. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19 (6), 649–667. Bergroth, M., & Palviainen, Å. (2017). Bilingual children as policy agents: Language policy and education policy in minority language medium Early Childhood Education and Care. Multilingua, 36(4), 375–399. Bezcioğlu-Göktolga, I., & Yağmur, K. (2018a). The impact of Dutch teachers on family language policy of Turkish immigrant parents. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 31(3), 220–234. Bezcioğlu-Göktolga, I., & Yağmur, K. (2018b). Home language policy of second-generation Turkish families in the Netherlands. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(1), 44–59.

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Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Educational Partnerships of Schools and Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Multicultural Education and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingualism, Multilingualism, and Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Research Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

According to research, many immigrant parents and their children are marginalized and not given an opportunity to take an active part in their children’s education. However, there are positive indications that within early childhood education in various countries, successful practices are being developed to sustain active participation of immigrant children and partnerships with their parents for bilingualism and multilingualism. The main aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of and discuss findings of major contributions in contemporary research on educational partnerships of teachers, parents, and children in diverse, multilingual preschool contexts in various countries as well as providing examples from case studies in some of these preschools. The chapter will also introduce ongoing research projects. The theoretical and conceptual framework of the chapter includes critical H. Ragnarsdóttir (*) School of Education, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_20

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approaches to education, bi- and multilingualism, and writings on educational partnerships of preschools and families. Findings from recent research indicate that many preschools in different countries have succeeded in forming a collaborative and inclusive culture with parents and children, actively building on their diverse heritage languages. The preschools have developed different strategies and practices in collaboration with parents and in implementing inclusion and social justice. However, some challenges and issues need to be resolved. The chapter will conclude by discussing critical issues and future research. Keywords

Educational partnerships · Preschools · Parents · Diversity · Language and communication · Bilingualism · Multilingualism · Critical multicultural education · Empowerment

Introduction Research has shown how many immigrant parents and their children are marginalized, silenced, and how these parents are not given an opportunity to be active agents in their children’s education and wellbeing (Cummins 2004; Ragnarsdóttir 2008; Robinson and Díaz 2006). However, there are positive indications that some preschools in various countries are developing successful practices to sustain active participation of immigrant children and collaboration of their parents. These include an emphasis on partnerships for bilingualism and multilingualism. The theoretical and conceptual framework of the chapter includes writings on educational partnerships of schools and families, critical multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogy, funds of knowledge, bilingualism, multilingualism and communication, and transformative leadership for equity in diverse preschool contexts. The chapter starts from addressing the main theoretical concepts. The main aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of findings of major contributions in contemporary research and ongoing research projects on educational partnerships of teachers, parents, and children in diverse, multilingual preschool contexts in various countries as well as providing examples from case studies in some of these preschools. Reviewing these projects and addressing critical issues is important in contributing to a better understanding of partnership among scholars, educators, and families in diverse, multilingual educational contexts. The chapter discusses these research projects critically and addresses research limitations as well as future research directions.

Main Theoretical Concepts The main theoretical focus of the chapter is on educational partnerships of schools and families (Banks 2013; Brooker 2002; Epstein 2011) as well as critical multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogy (Banks 2010; Gay 2010; Nieto

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2010), and funds of knowledge (Esteban-Guitart and Moll 2014; Moll 2019; Moll et al. 1992). An additional perspective is literature and theories on inclusive and empowering educational strategies for meeting cultural and linguistic diversity of children and families (Banks 2010; Gay 2010; May and Sleeter 2010; Noddings 2005a, b, 2008), bilingualism, multilingualism and communication (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012; Cummins 2004), and transformative leadership for equity in diverse preschool contexts (Ragnarsdóttir 2018; Shields 2010; Svavarsson et al. 2016).

Educational Partnerships of Schools and Families School communities in many countries become increasingly diverse as a result of changing demographics. There is an urgent need to respond to this diversity and reach out to parents to support bilingualism and multilingualism of families. Cummins (2004) emphasizes the need for investing in social justice in educational communities and gaining understanding on how policy making, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations exclude some children while welcoming others. In relation to this, Robinson and Díaz (2006) warn against positioning children and families within discourses of deficit. They note that some children and their families who come from minority sociocultural backgrounds or non-nuclear families are often perceived as being culturally or linguistically deprived. Furthermore, they argue that it is crucial that early childhood educators build on the cultural, linguistic, and social capital of children, families, and staff from diverse backgrounds. This critical comment is in line with an idea of “funds of knowledge.” This concept refers to “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al. 1992, p. 133). In line with the discourses of deficit, Crozier and Reay (2005) claim that too often, parents are perceived by teachers either as a homogeneous mass or reduced to a simplistic binary between the good and bad. They note that both approaches neglect complex differentiations of class, ethnicity and gender as well as the powerful impact of the economic status of families. Furthermore, they note that cultural influences are often reduced to deficit models of working class and minority ethnic parents. Brooker (2002) conducted research on the different experiences of children from diverse families in the UK as they attempted the transition from being a child in the family to becoming a pupil in the school. The findings of her study shed light on the circumstances of these families as well as their home practices. Brooker notes that parents bring up their children “in accordance with their own culturally appropriate rules” (2002, p. 11) and that there can be disadvantaging effects of these rules when, for example, a child from a minority background enters a majority educational setting. The practices of diverse families may be in direct opposition to the practices of the school. One of the challenges in such cases is to develop strategies that are effective in involving families. Banks (2013) claims that as schools and societies become increasingly diverse it is important to consider not only the ethnic, racial and linguistic diversity of families and children, but also the diversity

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of experiences and range of these families, such as their histories and socioeconomic status. This requires an understanding of the circumstances of the families and their worldviews (Banks 2013). Banks (2013) notes that the diversity of parent and community groups which may be reflected in different interaction styles, expectations, and concerns complicates but does not negate the need for parent involvement in schools. She argues that if parents are not involved in schools, educators will lose an important voice for school improvement. Parents can provide teachers with unique and important views of their students and provide various resources. Parent involvement is also associated with student achievement and social behavior. Banks further argues that parent and family involvement in schools can also benefit the family members themselves. Partnerships with diverse parents can counteract their families’ marginalization (Ragnarsdóttir 2018). Epstein’s (2011) work on school, family, and community partnerships has emphasized that there are no quick-fix solutions, but rather multiple strategies and methods for establishing and maintaining communication with diverse families. She notes that it is important to appreciate family diversity, including family histories, cultures, values, religions, and talents. Activities in partnerships between schools and families that illuminate family backgrounds and strengths will help students, families and educators to understand and appreciate similarities and differences (Epstein 2011). These activities include parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and collaborating with the community (Epstein 2011). Bergroth and Palviainen (2016) have developed Epstein’s concept of educational partnership of teachers, parents, and children further to include bilingual aspects of partnerships. They describe early childhood education and care (ECEC) partnerships as formal and informal relations between families and ECEC services, including all aspects related to the child in the setting, such as “questions of secured and balanced growth, warm relationships, and the child’s unique personality” (p. 649). Partnerships for bilingualism as explained by Bergroth and Palviainen involve parental and practitioner discourses on partnership and on obligations, desires, abilities, and competencies involved in acting on a bilingual childhood. Referring to Epstein (2011), such partnerships, according to Bergroth and Palviainen, lie in the intersection of family language policy and the language policy of the ECEC. While Epstein’s model accounts for the experiences of parents, teachers, and students as well as dynamic development over time, Bergroth and Palviainen have adapted Epstein’s model with the child at the center to include the aspect of bilingualism, including the bilingual family, minority language ECEC, and bilingual or majority language community as overlapping spheres of relations. Oostdam and Hooge (2013) discuss the potential challenges in educational partnerships between teachers and parents, as, rather than adopting an open approach, teachers tend to tell parents what they should do or keep them at a safe distance. They argue that at the same time, parents are becoming better informed and more critical and that there is much to be gained in forming educational partnerships between parents and schools. By introducing examples from educational contexts in the Netherlands, they illustrate different types of partnerships of active parenting and

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innovative practices. They distinguish between pedagogical partnership, where “the emphasis is on cooperation between parents and the school in order to avoid a situation in which school and home are two separate worlds” and a didactical partnership, which “is geared towards enhancing the effectiveness of education by keeping parents well informed about, and involving them in, their child’s learning process.” In the context of active parenting, they claim that schools can cooperate with parents on various levels and that the school can be seen as a junction of relationships. They note that in their vision for interacting and communicating with parents, it is important that schools seek an appropriate balance between professional distance and proximity, i.e., “distance where boundaries protect the necessary autonomy of teacher and parent, and proximity where the relationship between parents and school grows through acknowledgement, appreciation and empathy.” In relation to this, Banks (2013) emphasizes establishing two-way communication, enlisting support from staff, students and community, developing resource materials for home use and broadening the activities included to increase parent involvement in schools. Successful partnerships between schools and families will also benefit from empowering school cultures and holistic approaches towards diversity of students and families. In this context, critical multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy are two related educational approaches which have proved to be successful in developing empowering school communities for all students.

Critical Multicultural Education and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Critical multiculturalism addresses power relations within particular school settings and ways to ensure equality, empowerment, and participation (Banks 2010; Nieto 2010). This focus differs from multiculturalism where the emphasis is on diversity without critically examining inequities and power relations (May and Sleeter 2010). Critical multicultural education similarly focuses on the position of minority groups in education systems from a critical perspective and analyzes the factors in these systems which cause and maintain unequal status as well as presenting approaches to counteract inequity and empowering diverse students (see May and Sleeter 2010; Nieto 2010). According to Banks (2010), educational systems need to ensure voice, dialogue, equality, social justice, and empowerment for their individual students and their families. Nieto (2010) similarly emphasizes that empowering multicultural learning communities should be developed within educational systems in multicultural societies. Such approaches can be implemented through various strategies, including culturally responsive pedagogy and multilingual practices which empower students and their families. According to Gay (2010), culturally responsive pedagogy builds on and uses the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and meaningful for them. This is in line with the ideas of funds of knowledge (Moll et al.

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1992) and funds of identity, which refer to the “historically accumulated, culturally developed, and socially distributed resources that are essential for a person’s selfdefinition, self-expression, and self-understanding” (Esteban-Guitart and Moll 2014, p. 31). Teachers who implement culturally responsive pedagogy build on their students’ funds of knowledge and funds of identity. They emphasize the development of all their students’ strengths on a daily basis and have a whole child approach rather than focusing on a limited ability or aspect of the child or its deficits. These teachers aim to develop a community of culturally diverse learners who celebrate and affirm each other and work collaboratively for their mutual success. Empowerment thus replaces powerlessness (Gay 2010). Care is also important in such contexts. Noddings (2005a) claims that a caring relationship is one where both the cared-for and the carer contribute. In the case of the youngest students, particularly preschool children, this relationship could be seen to extend to the parents, emphasizing the importance of good communication and cooperation between home and preschool. It also has wider societal implications because as Noddings (2005b, p. Xxii) notes: “To care means to respond to needs, and needs do not stop (or start) at the schoolroom door.” This is reflected in cases where preschool principals and teachers make efforts to initiate contact and communication with parents (see f.ex. Hellman et al. 2018). Although teachers play an important role in developing educational partnerships with diverse families, it is also essential for successful partnerships that school leaders support these and develop initiatives to reach out to parents. Transformative leadership (Robinson 2017; Shields 2010) is considered to be an important approach for working with diverse families, as, this begins with questions of justice and democracy, critiques inequitable practices, and addresses both individual and public good. According to Svavarsson et al. (2016), in transformational leadership, both leaders and followers, such as teachers, are united in pursuit of common higher-level goals, the emphasis is on finding a common ground and shaping the school in a new direction. The principals in this study (Svavarsson et al. 2016) had a vision of pupil wellbeing and achievement and were proactive in reaching out to the families. To summarize, as schools and societies become increasingly diverse it is important to consider the ethnic, racial and linguistic diversity of families and children and apply culturally responsive pedagogy which builds on their students’ funds of knowledge and funds of identity as well as developing educational partnerships between diverse families, schools and communities.

Bilingualism, Multilingualism, and Social Justice Cummins (2004) claims that in order to create learning spaces that respond to the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse groups of children and their families, schools need to develop ways to implement inclusive and socially just practices where diverse backgrounds, identities, and languages are welcomed. In order to develop such practices, it is important to build on children’s prior experiences and knowledge. Chumak-Horbatsch (2012), who has developed linguistically

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appropriate practices, claims that most immigrant children are “emergent bilinguals” who “arrive in the classroom with some proficiency in their home language and some familiarity with literacy” (p. 23). Chumak-Horbatsch notes that these children add the classroom language to these language skills and experiences and begin their bilingual journey. She argues that by viewing these children “as emergent bilinguals whose two languages are evolving, we recognize the importance of their home language and literacy accomplishments, set aside the many single-language labels that hamper their progress, and concentrate on their bilingual potential” (p. 23). Parents of many young children also wish for them to learn the new or majority language while developing and expanding their home language and literacy (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012; Mosty et al. 2013). Transition into a preschool where the linguistic environment and educational practices do not match the child’s former experiences can have negative results for their language and literacy development if not addressed. Chumak-Horbatsch (2012) argues that monolingual practices implemented in multilingual settings silence immigrant children’s voices, often with serious consequences. In such cases, children quickly feel and understand that their language has no meaning, is sometimes not allowed, and that their way of speaking is less important than that of the children speaking the majority language of the preschool. Chumak-Horbatsch argues that inclusive linguistic practices are needed to enhance the learning of all children in linguistically and culturally diverse learning contexts. Such practices focus on multilingual, multi-literate, and multicultural lives of children on a daily basis and provide language and literacy materials in the home languages while maintaining close cooperation with parents. Some examples of these will be provided in the section on new research projects on successful educational partnerships with parents in diverse preschool contexts. Devarakonda (2013) has further suggested that it is important that children in early childhood settings and their parents are encouraged to be firmly rooted in their own culture and/or bicultural. Therefore, practitioners should make sure that they do not provide any spoken or unspoken messages that the mainstream culture is superior to the children’s home culture. Furthermore, she emphasizes that all children should be taught to be critical thinkers, especially with regard to prejudice and stereotypes. To summarize, schools need to develop ways to implement inclusive and socially just practices where diverse backgrounds, identities, and languages are welcomed. Developing inclusive and linguistically appropriate practices is important in order to respond to the linguistic diversity of children and to enhance the learning of all children in linguistically and culturally diverse learning contexts. The theories and approaches summarized in the three subchapters above provide an important basis for developing educational partnerships with diverse families as well as suggesting empowering practices for schools and teachers for bilingualism and multilingualism. Holistic and caring-centered approaches to learning and creating learning spaces and communities which empower diverse groups of children and their families are by many scholars considered essential for implementing social justice, equity and inclusion. Below, findings from some contemporary research on educational

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partnerships of teachers, parents, and children in diverse preschool contexts will be presented.

Major Contributions A number of recent studies have explored various opportunities and challenges of educational partnerships between parents and schools in diverse settings. Some of these are presented and discussed below. Inequities in partnerships in diverse school contexts emerge in various ways but often appear to be related to the lack of professionalism of teachers or a tension between teachers and parents which can be related to different pedagogical approaches. The aim of Bergroth and Palviainen’s (2016) research was to examine the sociolinguistic possibilities and implications of the concept of an “early childhood education and care (ECEC) partnership for bilingualism” in the context of offering bilingual children a bilingual childhood within mainstream minority language ECEC. Bergroth and Palviainen (2016) suggest that partnership is a useful concept in understading possibilities and challenges involved in promoting bilingualism in ECEC. They adapt Epstein’s (2011) model of family, school, and community partnerships to the bilingual educational settings. Bergroth and Palviainen’s study included interviews with parents in nine Finnish–Swedish bilingual families and six pedagogical practitioners at three Swedish-medium minority language ECEC units in Finland. Their findings indicate that the family languages (Finnish and Swedish) did not seem to be given equal importance; Swedish, the minority language in Finland and the language of the ECEC, was foregrounded at the expense of Finnish. The authors note that despite the cultural similarities between Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking Finns and a generally positive attitude towards bilingual language acquisition in Finland, the languages in question did not seem to be given equal importance when parents and practitioners were working together for the best interest of the bilingual child. This is in line with what Cummins (2004) and Chumak-Horbatsch (2012) have warned against, the danger of silencing heritage languages. It indicates that multilingual practices are needed to enhance the learning of all children in linguistically and culturally diverse learning contexts. Rouse (2012), writing about the Australian Early Years Learning Framework which acknowledges the importance of educators working in partnership with families, discusses some challenges in the implementation of the framework in Victoria. The study, while only focusing on a small cohort of early childhood educators working in one long day-care center in Melbourne, presents some findings that are of significance when examining the capacity of the sector to empower families as partners in the care and education of their children. While empowerment is a central component of family-centered practice, in line with emphasis on empowerment in education such as Banks (2010), Banks (2013) and Nieto (2010) have presented, Rouse (2012) argues that not all early childhood educators are equally positioned to empower families or, in fact, even demonstrate empowerment in some of the relationships they have with the families of children in their care. She argues

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that this raises questions as to the capacity of these educators to support the empowerment of parents, while the educators themselves are coming from a position of disempowerment due to their professional status. In another study from the Australian context, Hu et al.’s (2014) study explored five early childhood educators’ negotiation of the complex terrain of working in partnership with Chinese parents regarding their children’s language work use in early childhood settings. Their study included semi-structured interviews with educators to explore their views on children’s home language usage in early childhood settings, their perception of Chinese parents’ language expectations and their strategies in resolving the tension between parental expectation and educator views on children’s language usage. The educators reported that many Chinese parents expected their children to use only English in early childhood settings. This would not align with educators’ views of allowing children to use languages freely. The educators in the study developed different strategies to address the tension between their desire to achieve positive outcomes for children and their need to work in partnership with families. Reporting on their cross-country research, Hujala et al. (2009) claim that societal conditions impacting on parenting have radically changed during the past two decades and that there is a variation between and within societies depending on social, cultural, political, and economic factors. They note that today, ECEC services play an increasingly important role in supporting families with young children from birth to the age of compulsory education. They present findings from the International Parent–Professional Partnerships (IPP) research which focuses on the contemporary challenges of the parent–teacher partnerships in early childhood education from a cross-cultural perspective. The purpose of the research was to examine parent–teacher partnerships in ECEC services in Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Norway, and Portugal by looking into the national contexts and comparing these findings with each other. The research utilized both quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey data collected in the participating countries. The survey questionnaire focused on teachers’ views of parents’ involvement in ECEC centres. The results, based on around 1.200 returned questionnaires from the five countries showed that there are differences in teachers’ approaches to parent–teacher partnerships between societies as well as within each country. Parents also differed in their capacity to develop and maintain partnerships with teachers. It seems that there are cultural differences in the professional status of the teachers in each country, which are, in turn, connected to the parents’ role in the parent–teacher partnerships in ECEC services. Hujala et al. (2009) note that due to changing social, political, and economic circumstances in each country, it is possible that parents no longer have time to engage in educational partnerships within ECEC centres. Furthermore, that on the whole, national legislation, administrative structures, and leadership guidelines define the basic tasks of ECEC professionalism and the role parents play in ECEC centres. They conclude by suggesting that early childhood professionals need to develop a variety of flexible and family sensitive models for co-operation. This is in line with the writings of Banks (2013) and Gay (2010) on the importance of culturally responsive approaches to families and children, and the understanding of their circumstances.

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Another research study with teachers conducted by Firstater et al. (2015) offers an in-depth examination of the experiences of early childhood educators, focusing on their work with Ethiopian immigrant children and their families in Israel. Using narrative methodology, the analysis of findings is based upon 20 stories written by 10 early childhood educators. The aim of the study was to describe and analyze the teachers’ insider views vis-à-vis the challenges faced by these children and their parents in the Israeli preschool system. According to Firstater et al. (2015), the Ethiopian immigrants experienced a sudden transition from a rural, agricultural culture to a Western, industrialized society and were required to cope with many changes, resulting in confusion, misunderstanding, the sense of a lack of control, and weakening of mutual familial support. The findings indicate that for the teachers, the chief struggle was their relationship with the parents of their Ethiopian children, one characterized by difficulties, frustrations, and burdens. The engagement with parents of Ethiopian children exhibited a range of possibilities: from the expression of patronizing, hierarchical viewpoints, to a search for ad hoc ways of coping with a persistent cultural gap, to the attainment of genuine, successful partnerships. Lack of sufficient knowledge and understanding of the unique cultural attributes of the Ethiopian community appears to be the basis for the teachers’ view of the parents as lacking faith in them and in the educational system as a whole. The factors which Banks (2013) has pointed out seem to be missing in this context, that it is important to consider not only the ethnic, racial and linguistic diversity of families and children, but also the diversity of experiences and worldviews of these families, their histories and socioeconomic status. To summarize, recent research has indicated that various challenges appear in developing educational partnerships in diverse multilingual preschool contexts, resulting from lack of professionalism and knowledge of teachers as well as tensions between teachers and parents which can be related to different pedagogical approaches or misunderstanding related to cultural precepts. However, there are many opportunities for developing successful and stable educational partnerships with parents. Below, new research projects which focus on successful educational partnerships in diverse preschool contexts will be presented.

New Research Projects Many research projects conducted in recent years have shed light on innovative practices in educational partnerships with parents in multilingual settings. In a recent edited volume (Ragnarsdóttir and Schmidt 2014), findings from research in schools in Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Scotland is presented. The schools have in common that they have developed successful educational practices and partnerships with parents in diverse school communities where the emphasis is on promoting social justice and empowerment. Another new edited volume (Ragnarsdóttir and Kulbrandstad 2018) emanates from a Nordic research project which was conducted in Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in 2013–2015. The main objective of the project was to draw lessons from success stories of individual immigrant students

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and whole school communities at different levels that have succeeded in developing learning contexts that are equitable and socially just, thus turning attention to good practices and what can be learnt from these. The book presents and discusses the main findings of the so-called Learning Spaces project on the three school levels – pre-, compulsory, and upper secondary – and contains chapters on research methodologies applied in the project, relevant educational policies, leadership, and implementation of the project. A chapter by Hellman et al. (2018) in the above addressed volume presents findings from nine preschools in the four countries in the Learning Spaces study. Generally, the preschools in the study developed educational partnerships with parents where parents’ views and perspectives were highly valued. The educators participating in the study made an effort to show the parents respect and understanding. They realized that working with immigrant parents could be different from working with other parents and that it is important to find a way to work with them even if they do not share the same language or read the majority language. Parents in all the preschools shared the view that the preschool setting should be open and flexible and foster a feeling of security and competence in the children. They preferred teachers with personal, open and relaxed attitudes. More specifically, the parents in all the preschools were generally satisfied with their children’s preschool. Most of the parents emphasized that they felt welcome and content with the preschool. Most of the preschools in the study can be described as inclusive learning communities where children of diverse backgrounds thrive in an environment that supports and facilitates their learning and personal growth. Emphasis is also put on active communication with the parents and involving them in the school community. Different practices are used to achieve this and to enhance educational partnerships with the parents. Some of these involve interpreters for meetings with immigrant parents. Furthermore, so-called communication books which include pictures of the child during different learning activities displayed along with texts about the activity are used to communicate with the parents. Individualized educational documentation of children’s development, learning, experience and creation, is also a practice widely used in Nordic preschools. In the preschools in the study, information for parents was disseminated in the majority language and additional languages to support good cooperation with immigrant parents. The intercultural competence of the teachers was obvious in many of the preschools. The principals of some of the preschools conscientiously reached out to parents to offer them assistance with different matters regarding their children and themselves. Findings from the interviews with the parents indicated that they sensed trust, acceptance, understanding and respect. The educators developed knowledge and understanding by reflecting on everyday educational practices, simultaneously creating a true learning community. Caring in the preschools was strongly emphasized by the parents in the study, and they discussed a warm, flexible, educated, trustworthy and positive pedagogy. As addressed above, according to Noddings (2005a, b), an ethic of caring relationships can create a more effective learning environment for children and allows for the active participation and empowerment of all members of the school community. The parents also seemed to value the teachers’ competences in working with a diverse

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group and were generally satisfied with the work done in the preschools, such as their focus on developing practices towards justice. Each child’s equal rights and access to care, knowledge and learning as well as the children’s mother tongues and religions were taken into account when planning activities. The parents generally expressed satisfaction with the communication and interaction with the preschool educators. They described the educators as being open and easy to communicate with. It was very important for the parents to feel like equal partners in discussions concerning their children’s education. To summarize, the findings from the study indicate that the observed preschools have generally developed learning spaces for inclusion and social justice, where equity, democracy, diversity, and care is emphasized in daily practices (Gay 2010; Noddings 2005a, b). Other recent studies have revealed teacher initiatives and innovative practices to encourage the participation of multilingual children and their families. Chapman de Sousa’s (2017) study analyzed the use of Instructional Conversation (IC) in a multilingual preschool context. It sought to identify scaffolding strategies that promoted the contributions of multilingual children to IC. The findings of the study revealed that translanguaging emerged as an important strategy to encourage the involvement of multilingual children in IC. The findings demonstrate alternative ways of talking with young multilingual children and indicate a need for a pedagogical focus away from teacher-directed practices to joint activities and responsiveness. This is in line with Cummins’ (2004) and Chumak-Horbatsch’s (2012) writings on the importance of developing ways to implement inclusive and socially just practices, building on children’s prior experiences and knowledge, including their languages. Such approaches are also apparent in Mary’s and Young’s (2018) research in France, which focused on the ways in which one preschool teacher working with 3 and 4 year old emergent bilingual children asserted her agency in the classroom despite institutional constraints. It investigated the beliefs, experiences, aspirations, and knowledge which underpinned her sense of agency, the ways in which her actions empowered the children and parents, and discusses the implications of the study for initial teacher education and continuous professional development. The findings indicate that the preschool teacher pursued her ideals of an equitable education system accessible to all for the emancipation of all and by continuing to believe in the capacities and potential of her pupils and their families. The findings of Protassova’s (2018) study on the experience of a Finnish-Russian bilingual day care center in Helsinki also shed light on inclusive linguistically responsive practices. The findings revealed that educational policy, political situation, and composition of the children’s groups and staff are factors influencing the flexible linguistic strategies of the teachers. Furthermore, these factors affect the teachers’ attitudes toward children with various family linguistic backgrounds (Finnish-speaking, Russian-speaking, bilingual, or multilingual). Protassova notes that bilingual adults serve as examples and role models for children who acquire both languages simultaneously. Various activities in the day care center support language use and enlarge vocabulary and understanding. The findings also indicated that the parents were mostly content with the bilingual day care and their children’s linguistic and cultural development. Furthermore, the parents considered bilingualism to be normal and practical and that it would give the children positive opportunities for

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their future. Teachers in the daycare center negotiate between parents’ agency and preschool’s targets. The satisfaction of parents is monitored every year and is above the average for the Helsinki area. In the case of bilingual learners, the expectation was that both languages would be enhanced. Other studies have revealed the use of specific tools to enhance the language development of young multilingual learners and encourage the participation of their parents. The purpose of a recent qualitative study (Saneka and De Witt 2019) in an early childhood center in Durban, South Africa was to look critically at the language development of young second-language learners within their social context, in relation to theory and practice. Parent partnership in sustaining the mother tongue was sought and explored in focus group interviews, using an action–reflection cycle to understand the dilemma of young second-language learners in South Africa. Ways of overcoming language barriers using the strengths of the child were explored using persona dolls. Persona dolls are used as a tool for the implementation of anti- bias education in dialogue with the children about the persona doll’s life-story. Each doll has its own family history and individual identity. This approach is seen as a non-threatening way to include issues of language, identity, culture, race, class, and other anti-bias issues. In Saneka and de Witt’s (2019) research, these methods helped to develop sustained, shared thinking between children, their parents, and the researcher. The findings indicated that young children found their own means of engaging in meaning-making processes both at home and at school. Parental participation in sustaining the mother tongue was encouraged while children learned English as a second language. These educational practices adhere to the culturally and linguistically appropriate approaches presented by Gay (2010) and Chumak-Horbatsch (2012). Beaumont-Bates’ (2017) qualitative research in New Zealand explored teachers’ and parents’ perspectives on whether e-portfolio software could support and enhance collaborative partnerships. Located in an early childhood setting in Aotearoa/New Zealand, two of the key themes that were identified through thematic analysis of data were (1) communication: a key characteristic of collaborative partnerships, and (2) eportfolios as a tool to enhance partnerships. According to Beaumont-Bates, all the participants in the study agreed that e-portfolios made a positive contribution to collaborative parent-teacher partnerships in the setting. The findings indicated that the teachers believed that partnerships with children improved as a secondary result of enhanced collaborative partnerships with parents. However, the study also identified some key characteristics of collaborative partnerships that are absent for children in this online context. These are shared decision-making, inter-dependency, and mutual respect, which are in line with the writings of Epstein (2011) on school, family and community partnerships where she emphasizes that activities in these partnerships that illuminate family backgrounds and strengths will help students, families, and educators to understand and appreciate similarities and differences. Robinson and Díaz (2006) have also noted that it is crucial that early childhood educators build on the cultural, linguistic, and social capital of children and families from diverse backgrounds. To summarize, recent research on teacher initiatives and successful educational partnerships with parents in diverse multilingual contexts has revealed a variety of educational practices which promote social justice and empowerment. In these

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partnerships, parents’ views and perspectives were highly valued, teachers made an effort to show the parents respect and understanding and sought various ways of reaching out to the parents. Furthermore, they encouraged parental participation in sustaining the mother tongues and implemented joint activities and responsiveness.

Critical Issues and Topics The overview of main findings from research presented in this chapter has indicated the importance of developing and sustaining strong educational partnerships with parents in diverse multilingual early childhood settings. Many studies have indicated that various challenges appear in such contexts, but that there are many opportunities for developing successful and stable educational partnerships with parents. Although theoretical writings on educational partnerships with parents in diverse early childhood settings have suggested that critical approaches to education, such as critical multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy (Banks 2013; Gay 2010; May and Sleeter 2010) which emphasize voice, dialogue, equality, social justice, and empowerment for their individual students and their families and build on their prior knowledge and experiences are of high importance, few studies have found such practices in place in early childhood education settings. However, findings from recent research have indicated that where such educational practices are implemented, educational partnerships with parents and families become strong and both families and children benefit from these. There is an urgent need for further research on educational partnerships with parents in diverse early childhood education settings and to develop practices to ensure empowerment, dialogue and social justice for diverse parents and children. This includes exploring how early childhood education settings apply culturally responsive pedagogy which builds on the children’s funds of knowledge and funds of identity, how they implement inclusive and socially just practices where diverse backgrounds, identities and languages are welcomed and how these settings respond to the linguistic diversity of children and enhance the learning of all children. With further research, scholars can help provide guidelines to improve educational partnerships between parents and early childhood education settings. This could empower families and children in diverse educational settings and counteract their marginalization. Furthermore, teacher training should be adjusted to the needs of changing societies worldwide.

Future Research Directions A number of research studies have been conducted on educational partnerships in multilingual preschool context, many of them revealing inequities and lack of professionalism. However, recent studies have indicated that culturally and linguistically appropriate practices and educational partnerships can counteract inequities and marginalization of bilingual and multilingual children and their parents. More

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research is needed on such initiatives and the possibilities of applying these more broadly and systematically. Furthermore, research which takes into account family language policies and how these interact with educational practices in preschools is important. Multidisciplinary approaches engaging educational anthropologists, social linguists and other could also strengthen the field of educational partnerships. Child agency as a part of educational partnerships is an under-researched domain which could also be strengthened in research. Finally, intervention studies and diverse research methodologies combining qualitative and quantitative methods could be applied as these are few in the area of educational partnerships.

Conclusion Research presented in this chapter has indicated how important strong educational partnerships with parents are in diverse multilingual early childhood settings and the challenges encountered in such settings. There is an urgent need to develop educational partnerships of teachers, parents and children in early childhood settings where voice, dialogue, equality, social justice and empowerment is ensured and the prior knowledge and experiences of children and parents are acknowledged. Such approaches are in place in early childhood education settings in some countries as has been presented in this chapter, and these can serve as models for implementation in other settings.

Cross-References ▶ Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education ▶ The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education

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Language Teacher Education and Professional Development Gunhild Tomter Alstad

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Increasing Focus on Teacher Knowledge and Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variations in ECEC Professional Qualifications and Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Different Organizational Structures for ECEC and Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scope of Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Domains, Forms, and Aspects of Teacher Knowledge About Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Underpinnings for Language Teaching and ECEC Teacher Education . . . . . . . Preservice ECEC Teachers and Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In-Service ECEC Teacher’s Knowledge, Beliefs, and Language Teaching Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Professional Development of In-Service ECEC Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sociopolitical Context of ECEC Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interventions in Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scope of Language in ECEC Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Knowledge Base in ECEC Language Teacher Education: Curriculum and Syllabus . . . The ECEC Language Teacher Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Preparing teachers for early language education is crucial for the quality of early childhood education and care. In the recent decades, the role of teachers and, consequently, education of teachers have been a major, increasing G. T. Alstad (*) Faculty of Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_22

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concern both politically and in research. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of research on language-related issues and education for teachers in early childhood education and care. Teacher education involves developing the knowledge base both for preservice and in-service teachers, i.e., what teachers need to know and learn in order to support children’s language and literacy. The major research contributions to early childhood teacher education include theoretical discussions on which knowledge domains and topics to include in initial teacher education and professional development and empirical studies on innovative course designs and preservice and in-service teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and teaching practices. The empirical studies highlight teachers’ uncertainty associated with supporting children’s language development and also indicate that teachers’ language teaching to a large extent is experience-based and based on a holistic approach to young children’s learning and well-being. Professional development, given substantial extent, seems to have impact on teaching practices and consequently on children’s language development. All in all, the requirements for the teachers’ knowledge base related to language seem vague and unarticulated, and the younger the language learners, the lesser the requirements of the knowledge base. The chapter finally foregrounds more research on the educational level, scope, and scientific and theoretical knowledge base of language in early childhood teacher education. Keywords

Early childhood teacher education · Teacher training, Professional development · Teacher qualifications, Knowledge base · Teacher cognition · Teacher beliefs

Introduction Worldwide, there are huge variations in how to prepare teachers for the complexity of language education in early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts. In contrast to research on teacher education for primary education and for language education in general (Burns et al. 2015), research on early childhood teacher education is limited, particularly when it comes to language-related topics. This chapter provides an overview of research on early childhood teacher education, in particular what teachers need to know and learn in order to support 0–6-year-old children’s language, multilingual, and literacy development. As we will look at in the following section, one important factor influencing teacher education is the increased expectations of the teacher role and teacher knowledge. In addition, there are other factors specific to ECEC teacher education, such as views on teacher qualifications for teaching young children as well as organizational structures in the ECEC field.

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Increasing Focus on Teacher Knowledge and Professional Development The qualifications of staff working with children in ECEC settings are crucial for children’s language learning experiences. The demands placed upon teachers are increasing (Cochran-Smith 2013). As a consequence, the field of research studying teachers and teacher education in general is growing, in particular for primary and secondary teacher education, but still, there is less research on teacher education for ECEC teachers. The ECEC field is rapidly changing in several countries around the world, and consequently, the focus is increasingly on teachers and their professional prerequisites for facilitating language learning settings for the youngest children. Language issues in education have changed in many countries as a response to societal changes, implicating more focus on emergent literacy, an increasing number of second language (L2) learners and emergent multilingual children, and lowering the age for introduction of a foreign language. Teacher education programs have responded to such changes but to different extent and degree in different countries.

Variations in ECEC Professional Qualifications and Standards According to the UNESCO global education monitoring report (2018), the amount of children attending preschool the year before entering primary education ranges from around 42% in low-income to 93% in high-income countries, with a global average of 69%. This is a slowly but steadily increasing trend. Despite an increase in the number of children attending pre-primary education around the world, the UNESCO report underlines the lack in equity of access and poor quality of provision as major concerns. Defining quality in ECEC settings is challenging; however, there seems to be consensus about certain conditions, such as the use of L1 in education, opportunities to learn through playful interactions with adults and other children, appropriate learning materials, and a context where young children have space to be physically active. Poor quality in care leads to poor outcomes in language, sociability, and cognitive abilities (UNESCO 2015). Professional qualifications and standards are inconsistent across and within countries, often resulting in uneven provision of quality care. Preparing pre-primary teachers is key to increasing quality in ECEC settings. Hand in hand with lack of or inadequate teacher education, there are often poor working conditions of ECEC teachers. The teachers have a low educational level and low level of wages. Combined with fewer curriculum regulations, young children are often assigned the least educated teachers due to the low status attached to this educational level (UNESCO 2015). Studies and reports from both European, American, and Oceanian contexts have revealed that teachers are prepared at variable levels and kinds of knowledge (Arrow and McLachlan 2017; Cunningham et al. 2009; Eurydice 2019; UNESCO 2015). The composition of staff also varies widely within the different ECEC provisions in terms of level of education and number of staff with professional teacher qualifications (Eurydice 2019).

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The requirements for admission to teacher education also vary. The UNESCO report (2015) points out that, for example, some preservice teachers in Kenya have not completed primary education, while in other countries the only requirements for admission are a clean criminal record and a driving license. While teacher education for primary and secondary education in some countries has specific admission requirements, the requirements are to a lesser extent the case for ECEC teacher education.

Different Organizational Structures for ECEC and Teacher Education ECEC teacher education organizational structures vary widely from country to country (Eurydice 2009, 2019), according to the country’s respective ECEC provision system. There are various educational institutions for children aged 2–6, mainly following one of two major models. One model, used in most countries, has a form of provision for the youngest children (under 2–3 years), labelled daycare, childcare service, crèche, etc., followed by a pre-primary provision (children over 2–3 years). The other model is a unitary model that has a combination of upbringing, care, and education for children 0–6. Following these two ECEC models, most countries with a split ECEC provision have two distinct paths of professional development – one for staff working with the children under the age 2–3 years and another for the pre-primary sector for children aged over 3–4 years. Other countries, such as the Nordic countries, have a single, comprehensive education for ECEC teachers, which includes upbringing, care, and education for the entire age group of 0–6 years. While institutional staff for children under 3 years often are under the jurisdiction of family and/or health and social care authorities, staff for children aged 3–4 and older are most often under the jurisdiction of educational authorities, and most professional staff are educated at university level with some exceptions (such as the Czech Republic, Austria, Romania). At the pre-primary level, initial teacher education programs in Europe qualify teachers as generalist teachers, including courses covering general education (sociology, arts, and sciences), professional studies including educational psychology and child development, and practical training with work placements (Eurydice 2019). It is reasonable to assume that these European conditions are similar to conditions in other countries around the world. Continuous professional development is a high priority or even mandatory in many countries. Consequently, when there are large variations in whether professional development is mandatory or not, it contributes to major differences in educational level and qualifications of teachers for the youngest vs. teachers for older children (i.e., the younger the children, the lesser qualified staff). Following Murphy and Evangelou (2016), this is in contrast to the emphasis on the importance that ECEC has for later school performance.

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Main Theoretical Concepts The notion of teacher education is defined as developing the knowledge base both for preservice and in-service teachers (Freeman 2009). The discussion in the following section will relate to three main theoretical aspects of the knowledge base: domains of teacher knowledge; the relation between knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions about language; and different kinds of knowledge, such as declarative and procedural knowledge.

The Scope of Teacher Education Teacher education in general is a social institution characterized and shaped by its context (Freeman 2009). Political and social conditions have greatly influenced how ECEC education institutions and respectively teacher education are organized, being responsive to changing societal needs and new research paradigms. According to Freeman’s conceptualization of teacher education, it comprises the training and professional development opportunities that teachers undertake as the preparation of their teaching and throughout their career as teachers. This definition includes both in-service and preservice education, both formal and informal education, regardless of duration. Teacher qualifications are not fixed entities, as teachers are continually developing professionally throughout their careers. The focus in the following chapter is on the formal preservice and in-service professional development, provided by higher educational institutions, and also formation of knowledge and experiences as a result of their experiences and practices. Currently, discussions on teacher qualifications in ECEC contexts and language education revolve around the subject content, i.e., what teachers are expected to know about language and how they should teach their students, i.e., what skills they need in order to provide fruitful and productive language learning opportunities. Martin-Jones (2009) underlines the importance of posing why questions when researching language(s) and learning in educational settings. We often discuss the content and what and how this content should be taught or learnt, but we also need to have a more thorough discussion on why this particular content is important for future ECEC teachers and their specific educational contexts. This discussion of “why” is connected to the different aspect and domains of knowledge about language and will be addressed in the following section.

Domains, Forms, and Aspects of Teacher Knowledge About Language There are three main recurring theoretical discussions related to teacher’s knowledge base in the research literature: domains of teacher knowledge; the relation between knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions about language and language learning and

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teaching; and different forms of knowledge, such as declarative and procedural knowledge related to language. The following section discusses these aspects of teachers’ knowledge base.

Domains of Teacher Knowledge One general discussion in the research literature concerns the domains and categories of knowledge that constitutes teacher knowledge (Shulman 1986). A common approach is to include subject knowledge, i.e., knowledge about language. Shulman focuses on how different content elements such as subject knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curriculum knowledge are parts of the teachers’ knowledge base. Shulman defines pedagogical content knowledge as a specific component different from content knowledge: “the particular form of content knowledge that embodies the aspects of content most germane to its teachability” (Shulman 1986, p. 9). The question of the applicability of language content knowledge or teachability of language has concerned language teacher researcher in decades (Rice and Schiefelbusch 1989). This discussion is particularly interesting in the ECEC context and closely related to the general questions of how children acquire language(s), what is possible to teach, and what is acquired without teaching. Knowledge, Beliefs, and Assumptions About Language The second discussion evolves around the distinction between knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs about language. The distinction is not obvious, and the phenomenon is referred to as teacher thinking, teacher language awareness, or language teacher cognition (Borg 2015). Borg defines teacher cognition as non-observable, mental constructs, i.e., what teachers know, believe, and think. Since the mid-1990s, a great body of research has focused on the language teacher’s mind, including beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about language. Freeman and Johnson (1998) point out that much of what teachers know about language teaching comes from their different backgrounds, personal stories, beliefs and understandings of the world, the subject matters, and the educational setting in which they teach. Other researchers have pointed out that beliefs serve as lenses, or filters, frames, and guides for acquisition of new knowledge (Fives and Buehl 2012). Consequently, some kinds of new knowledge and experiences about language teaching are more adaptive for students and teachers, presumably because this is congruent with what they already think, know, and do. Conceptualizations of the language teaching mind has evolved from its early beginnings (Burns et al. 2015), in part due to redefinitions through research and in part in response to the wider arena of theorizing in educational research on teachers in the social sciences more broadly. Even if the different ontological generations of the language teaching mind have moved the research community in the direction of the lived complexity of the work of language teaching, how that work is learned, and how it is carried out, the object of study is basically studied in a linguistically articulated form, as teacher’s articulations of their beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge.

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Declarative Knowledge, Procedural Knowledge, and Practical Wisdom While the discussion about knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions relates to the teachers’ mind, the third discussion refers to the relation between theoretical epistemic knowledge (know-that) and practical knowledge (know-how). Despite researchers’ emphasis on the mutual relationship between those two aspects of knowledge, they are often investigated as separate phenomena or as a phenomenon where one aspect is added more weight than the other is. Epistemic, theoretical, or declarative knowledge embraces linguistically articulated and decontextualized knowledge. The practical or procedural knowledge is local, contextualized, often tacit, and action-oriented knowledge. Both these forms of knowledge are pivotal elements of teachers’ knowledge. Shulman (1986) introduces a third form of teacher knowledge, inspired on the Aristotelian term fronesis, strategic knowledge, which is the form of discernment and assessment of knowledge used by the teacher in specific teaching situations, i.e., knowledge as practical wisdom. The wisdom of the pedagogical practice is not necessarily in verbal knowledge or action knowledge in itself, but in the kind of knowledge that involves doing the right thing in the right moment. A related perspective is concerned with development of agency in language teaching in ECEC contexts (Schwartz and Yagmur 2018), i. e., the capacity of teachers to critically shape their own ability to respond in different situations. This form of practical knowledge is expressed through judgments and action, and the prerequisite for practical wisdom will be strongly related to both knowledge of words and action knowledge. According to Biesta (2015), teacher education should not only qualify teachers by providing the declarative knowledge and practical skills they need – nor socializing and initiating them into the professional culture. Teachers need the practical wisdom to be able to consider what knowledge domain that is appropriate and how to act in the specific teaching situation. This practical wisdom makes the educational virtuosity of teachers, i.e., the ability to make wise educational judgments about what is to be done in specific teaching settings. Teacher education is fundamental to developing new forms of knowledge, both declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and practical wisdom. Language teachers’ practices are complex, embedded in values, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, feelings, and social relationships. Researchers have argued that knowledge of such language teaching practices, both in terms of the judgments teachers do, their beliefs about language teaching, and knowledge about language use, language systems, and language learning, should constitute a more significant part in teacher education (Johnson 2009a). Teacher educators and teacher education programs emphasize different knowledge domains of language in different ways, i.e., topics as multilingualism and/or emergent literacy teaching. In addition, there is an ongoing discussion on what kind of knowledge that should be emphasized in ECEC teacher education, i.e., declarative knowledge or procedural knowledge or both. As will be shown in the following sections, there seems to be a tendency to emphasize procedural knowledge rather than declarative knowledge.

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Major Contributions The major research contributions relevant for teacher education and professional development for teachers in early language education which will be addressed in the following relate both to discussions of the general theoretical knowledge base for language teacher education in general and to empirical studies of preservice teacher education; empirical studies of in-service teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and teaching practices; and studies of ECEC teachers’ professional development.

Theoretical Underpinnings for Language Teaching and ECEC Teacher Education In the research literature, there are several discussions related to language teacher education and language teachers’ knowledge base (Adger et al. 2002; Andrews and McNeill 2005; De Jong and Harper 2005). Much of this literature is concerned with the declarative content knowledge and, more specifically, what subject knowledge about language teachers need for their teaching practices. Wong-Fillmore and Snow (2002) suggest that, in general, language teachers need to have knowledge about phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary, and texts and indicate seven possible courses that all together cover basic issues for emergent literacy and language teaching: language and linguistics, language and cultural diversity, sociolinguistics, language development, second language teaching and learning, academic language, and text analysis. Wong-Fillmore and Snow’s proposals are based mainly on subjectmatter knowledge about language, implicitly assuming that such knowledge form the basis of procedural classroom practices.

Sociocultural and Critical Approaches and Declarative Knowledge Within recent second language research, several researchers have questioned the teacher education knowledge base. Johnson (2009a) argues that a mentalistindividualistic definition of language has heavily influenced the knowledge base of second language teacher education and therefore advocates a second language teacher education based on sociocultural theoretical perspectives. Such perspectives include attention to the teaching process itself; “not only disciplinary or subject matter knowledge that defines how languages are structured, used, and acquired, but it must also account for the content of L2 teaching; in other words, what and how language is actually taught in L2 classrooms as well as teachers and students’ perceptions of that content” (Johnson 2009b, p. 21). Others have suggested a critical language teacher education with more emphasis on supporting critical practices related to social action, language issues related to power, ideology, and educational change (Hawkins and Norton 2009). García (2008) claims that most teacher education programs pay little attention to multilingualism and multilingual awareness, educating their teachers as if all students were native speakers of the dominant language of the nation-state. She describes how both knowledge about language and language awareness in teaching have been used to

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encompass three understandings in what she calls multilingual awareness. Multilingual awareness comprises not only what teachers need to know and be able to do in multilingual educational contexts, independent of the teacher’s own language proficiency. According to García, teacher education needs to pay attention to the important role that the first language (L1) has on the development of the second (L2), and of the interdependence of both languages, and finally how power and identity might have impact on bilingualism. García suggests four types of understandings that multilingual awareness should incorporate. The first understanding is knowledge of language (language proficiency). This aspect focuses on the language user and includes language use and pragmatic knowledge of language(s). The second understanding is knowledge about language and implies subject-matter knowledge about forms and functions of language systems – grammar, phonology, and vocabulary. The third understanding includes pedagogical practice (pedagogical content knowledge about creating language learning opportunities). Additionally, she proposes that there is a need to include the fourth understanding, namely, the understanding that language is socially created and, thus, socially changeable to give voice and educate all students equitably. Thus, García includes both sociocultural and critical approaches in second language teacher education. These discussions on the theoretical underpinnings for teacher education are not addressed in particular for the ECEC contexts but are still relevant as the literature relates to general issues of the knowledge base. As mentioned above, the theoretical basis for working with languages in ECEC is less discussed in research literature. In contrast to language teacher education in general, the elements of language in ECEC teacher education are more variable in terms of content and scope, as ECEC teachers are most often generalist teachers and not specialists in language teaching. This in turn raises questions about the relevance of the challenges in language teacher education and to what extent it is transferable to ECEC teacher education. In light of Wong-Fillmore’s and Snow’s suggestions presented above, Bredekamp points out that ECEC teachers’ knowledge about language is important, “but not as important as what they do with children” (Bredekamp 2002, p. 63). She therefore suggests that procedural knowledge should be emphasized, in particular such as how to engage in cognitively challenging conversations, how to promote phonological awareness, and how to foster vocabulary acquisition.

Psychological-Pedagogical Knowledge Base Versus Linguistic Knowledge Base Another discussion related to procedural knowledge is the discussion of more general ECEC knowledge about age-appropriate teaching methods and general psychological-pedagogical knowledge. Portiková (2015) reports that pre-primary and primary second language teacher education curricula in Slovakia comprise either psychological-pedagogical aspects or academic aspects of second language. According to Portiková, these disciplines should be complementary rather than competing. She therefore suggests that the teacher education curriculum should be integrating the language subject knowledge and language teaching methods and

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courses of educational psychology and pedagogy, instead of isolating them as separate study fields. Portiková underlines both the importance of phonology, grammar, and teaching methods and the importance of age-appropriate language teaching methods. In addition, she emphasizes the role of culture and literature for developing preservice teachers’ attitudes to multilingualism and awareness of ideologies related to language issues in different sociopolitical contexts.

Preservice ECEC Teachers and Teacher Education As Borg (2015) points out, there are relatively few empirical studies of preservice language teachers and initial teacher education. This also applies to ECEC preservice teachers. The few numbers of studies will be addressed in the following. Some of these studies document students’ self-reporting of learning outcomes after completing their education or course, while others explore how different types of experiences applied in courses or course designs contribute to the preservice teachers’ learning and awareness-raising about diverse language learning and emergent literacy. These studies are from the USA, with the exception of some studies from Spanish and Norwegian contexts.

Preservice Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Language and Emergent Literacy Some studies report preservice teachers’ perspectives on their own learning and knowledge about language. In a survey from Norway, 898 preservice ECEC teachers reported their declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge about literacy (Gjems et al. 2016). The students reported that they were satisfied with their declarative knowledge about children’s language acquisition (e.g., vocabulary), but they reported less procedural knowledge. In another Norwegian study, Alstad and Danbolt (2018) investigate how 73 ECEC and primary preservice teachers emphasize work with emergent literacy in the transition from ECEC to primary school. The study highlights different views on emergent literacy in ECEC and primary school, especially related to read-aloud practices, the relation between play and literacy, and the different conceptualizations of “play.” Whereas many of the primary preservice teacher considered “play” as playful activities related to reading and writing skills, ECEC teachers tended to relate “play” to a state of mind that provides children with a variety of language experiences with relevance for emergent literacy, such as decontextualized language use in role-play. Innovative Course Designs Several studies aim to develop innovative courses in ECEC teacher education. The purpose of Parkinson’s study (2005) was to bridge emergent literacy theory with a practical experience, by investigating the experiences that 20 preservice teachers gained as they participated in a weekly pen pal letter sharing project. The students gained confidence in integrating literacy theory while interpreting children’s emergent literacy, appropriately applying concepts with corresponding terminology to

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discuss professionally what sense they were making from their observations, such as focusing on a child’s competences, understanding how elements influenced motivation and performance, discovering different developmental levels within one classroom, and the relevance of real-life experiences for learning. In a study of 105 preservice teachers volunteering as tutors for linguistically diverse students in ECEC, Szente (2008) documents how these experiences broadened the students’ understanding of real-life problems related to teaching in linguistically diverse contexts. Another example of exploring different experiences in education is Hall’s studies (2016) of preservice teachers’ writing processes, where the purpose was to shift preservice teachers’ beliefs and practices related to writing instruction in ECEC classrooms. The findings show that a course focused primarily on preparing preservice teachers to teach writing may influence definitions of writing, the importance they place on writing instruction, their self-efficacy related to teaching writing, and their tools for instruction. Similarly, in an explorative study of preservice teachers, Kidd et al. (2008) report how perceptions of students’ different program experiences contributed to shifts in their culturally responsive dispositions and teaching practices. At the time of the study, participants were engaged in a program designed to prepare teachers to work with culturally, linguistically, socioeconomically, and ability-diverse young children and their families. The findings suggest that five types of experiences had impact on teaching practices: material resources, diverse internship experiences, interactions with diverse families, critical reflection, and discussion and dialogue. Other studies similarly reveal how innovative experiences contribute to the preservice teachers’ awareness of and confidence in teaching in linguistically diverse settings. Hooks’ (2008) qualitative study included 44 preservice teachers with no previous experiences with second language learners. In order to challenge their concerns on how to collaborate with parents with limited second language proficiency, the preservice teachers were partnered with participants from a communitybased adult English language class and engaged in mock parental conferences. The analysis of the preservice teachers’ written pre- and post-experiences of the mock conferences revealed an increase in confidence. Hooks also points at the students’ expanded awareness and appreciation for diversity and an increased commitment to involving parents in their children’s education. In another study from Spain, related to the revitalization of the minority language Galician, 65 preservice teachers were involved in a researched-based university course where they were invited to observe practices and interview teachers about language use in classrooms and later to intervene with a storytelling project in Galician (DePalma et al. 2018). The researchers suggest that the preservice teachers’ critical self-reflection on linguistic trajectories and competencies and understanding of the sociopolitical linguistic realities in the Galician society and schools were crucial for their future language teaching. So far, all the empirical studies mentioned have focused on preservice teachers, not teacher educators. However, McCrary et al. (2011) investigate the journey and experiences of a university-based team of six teacher educators and their preparations in educating preservice teachers to provide quality education for young second

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language learners. The faculty members participated in a visiting scholars program (lectures given by researcher in the SLA field), literature reviews of subject knowledge, outside conferences, classroom visits, and course revisions. Similar to the intervention studies in initial teacher education, this study underlines the importance of connecting declarative knowledge, i.e., what to support to procedural knowledge and how to support language development.

In-Service ECEC Teacher’s Knowledge, Beliefs, and Language Teaching Practices The studies of in-service ECEC teachers’ development of beliefs, knowledge, and practices related to multilingualism, emergent literacy, and second/foreign language address a wide range of topics, such as the use of L1 in foreign and second language teaching settings, early bilingual development and emergent literacy, linguistic diversity, and multilingual teaching practices, methods, and curriculum.

Language Choices in Multilingual Settings A common feature of the studies conducted throughout different countries and settings is that teachers are advocating flexible language practices and child-centered approaches in terms of language choices and the use of L1 in L2 teaching (e.g., Garrity et al. 2015; Gort and Pontier 2013; Palviainen et al. 2016; Schwartz et al. 2010). In Gort and Pontier’s study of Spanish/English preschool teachers’ language practices in US dual language preschool classrooms, teachers demonstrate flexible and strategic use of each language to support children’s bilingual development, such as code-switching, simultaneous tandem talk, and various scaffolding techniques (e.g., use of gestures and visual reinforcement of concepts). Palviainen et al. (2016) examined the language practices and agentic behavior of five bilingual teachers working within three different sociolinguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context). In addition to different flexible language practices, teachers modelled bilingual use for the children. Some studies also point to the teachers’ ambivalence or avoidance of using L1 in multilingual language settings. In Schwartz’ and Gorbatt’s study (2017), the teachers avoided direct translation and use of the children’s L1 (Hebrew). This avoidance of L1 use was intended to actively boost the children’s L2 (Arabic) involvement and use. In a study from Indonesia, involving 270 teachers for 5–7-year-old children, Vaish (2012) reveals that most teachers believe in an immersion approach with strict separation of languages. However, they also believed that L1 supports in learning English. The more experienced teacher, the more likely to believe that the L1 can support the teaching of English. Another finding is the stronghold belief that the younger the children are, the more likely the teachers are to use L1. Similarly, in a study from Wales (Hickey et al. 2014), it is documented that the teachers translated Welsh into English for young children from English-dominant families because they believed that interpretation would facilitate communication, provide more comprehensible input, and reduce distress. However, there was tension between the

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teachers’ use of translation from Welsh to English and the school’s commitment to full immersion in Welsh. In addition, the study uncovered the teachers’ concerns about whether translations were appropriate in a full immersion program. Other studies have looked into the teachers’ purposes for using the L1 in foreign language teaching contexts. One purpose is of organizational nature, for example, to make sure that the students understand the instructions and messages that are given. Another purpose is to use the L1 as an instructional tool, such as explanations, translations, or meta-language comments and comparisons (Inbar-Lourie 2010). Yet another purpose is the affective purpose, using positive feedback in the children’s L1, encouraging and motivating them in their L1 (Inbar-Lourie 2010; Schwartz and Asli 2014). These studies of teachers’ language teaching strategies in bilingual settings reveal an uncertainty or sometimes ambiguity related to language choices and the use of L1 on L2 teaching. Teachers do not know if or to what extent to use L1 to support L2 teaching. Some teachers use L1 actively but are uncertain whether this is appropriate. In cases where L1 is used, it seems to be based on the teachers’ experience-based knowledge, and not on the basis of theoretical knowledge. This point is underlined by a recent study (Ramírez et al. 2018), suggesting that extent of teacher education and years of teaching experience may impact bilingual learners’ literacy and math development. The teachers in the abovementioned studies have little formal, declarative knowledge about multilingualism and multilingual pedagogy. Searching for effective ways to promote L2 by using L1, it seems that teachers to a large degree have to rely on their own experiences and confidence in teaching. This in turn raises the question of whether teacher education has addressed this question of language choice in ECEC bilingual education.

Monolingual Settings and Multilingual/L2 Development In mainly monolingual settings where the teachers do not share children’s L1 and where children are second language learners, there are other prominent issues than in bilingual settings where teachers share the children’s languages. Some studies report that when the teachers do not master the children’s L1, the children’s L1 competence is silenced (Andersen et al. 2011; Axelsson 2009). However, these studies show that teachers are positive about multilingualism but that there is a lack of competence on how to make the practices and settings more linguistically diverse. Lee and Oxelson (2006) found that teachers with proficiency in a language other than the medium of instruction (English) were more sensitive to issues of linguistic diversity than other teachers and also that monolingual teachers in English expressed negative or indifferent attitudes to language minority children’s home languages. Another finding was that the more trained or experienced teachers were, the more encouraging they were to build on and scaffold the emergent literacy skills in the children’s L1. Other case studies demonstrate how teachers in monolingual settings develop alternative teaching practices, based on their experiential competence. In a case study of a monolingual English-speaking teacher for second language learners in the USA, de Oliveira et al. (2016) elaborate how the teacher develops proficiency of

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Spanish in order to scaffold her students’ second language learning, specifically when emphasizing instruction, reinforcing key concepts, checking comprehension, managing the classroom, relating to students, and providing encouragement. Following the same principles, a Norwegian ECEC teacher models a wide range of multilingual language use for the children (Alstad 2018; Alstad and Kulbrandstad 2017). Despite not sharing the children’s L1, the teacher used different experiencebased approaches, such as meta-conversations about language, her own multilingual and multidialectal competence, and other children’s language competencies in order to support the children’s multilingual identities. The purposes of empowering children’s multilingual development are similar to settings with teachers sharing the children’s L1.

Teachers’ Perspectives on Language Learning Activities There are also studies exploring how teachers evaluate and emphasize the importance of different language learning activities, for example, meal times, storytelling, outdoor activities, or free play (Alstad 2018; Norling and Sandberg 2015; Smith 2001). Norling and Sandberg (2015) investigated 165 Swedish ECEC staff members’ perspectives on language learning opportunities in outdoor environments. The outdoor environment was to a little extent considered as a language learning environment, which indicates that facilitating children’s language development is mostly understood in terms of the indoor environment, i.e., reading books for children. Their study indicates that the potential of the outdoor environment in language teaching is underestimated. Alstad’s study of three teachers’ second language teaching practices (2018) shows the teachers’ different preferences in choosing activities for facilitating children’s second language development. While two teachers preferred teacher-led, formal activities with fixed goals, the third preferred informal, improvised activities like meal and play. All three adjusted the second language teaching activities according to what they considered as appropriate for each child. These studies indicate that teachers’ preferences of activities are strongly linked to the sociocultural, contextual understandings of children and language learning and what is considered as appropriate language learning and teaching activities. Teachers’ Role in Children’s Emergent Literacy McLachlan-Smith (1993) examined 12 New Zealand ECEC teachers’ perceptions or implicit theories of their role in children’s emergent literacy. In general, ECEC teachers perceive their role as facilitators of children’s interaction with the environment, waiting for “teachable moments,” and that children learn best when they are ready. A follow-up survey with 107 teachers (McLachlan et al. 2006) shows that experienced teachers did not change the perceptions of effective literacy teaching practices with the introduction of a new curriculum, but used approaches more independently, regardless of curricula. Contrary to this study, which illustrates that ECEC teachers seem have confident practices, two other studies from Canadian and Australian contexts (Lynch 2009; Ure and Raban 2001) display that ECEC teachers report little knowledge about children’s emergent literacy and that they are uncertain about their own role regarding children’s emergent literacy.

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Several surveys address ECEC teachers’ emergent literacy teaching practices in the light of teacher education and experience. A study by Lim and Torr (2007) included 79 preschool teachers in multilingual classroom in Singapore. Virtually all teachers reported and considered their most important work as facilitating the child’s ability to communicate and express themselves. They believed in using a flexible, child-centered approach rather than focusing on one or other “method.” In another study questioning the influence of experience versus formal education, Yoo (2005) compared 130 teachers at ECEC settings in South Korea. Yoo reports that teachers with a high educational level seem to prefer whole language approach, i.e., a constructivist approach with focus on making meaning in reading and writing. Other studies show that experience weighs heaviest in academic priorities. In a survey with 28 preschool teachers, Hindman and Wasik (2008) explore correlations between the teachers’ level of professional competence and experience and the emphasis on various literacy-related skills such as phonological awareness, oral language skills, reading, and writing. While all teachers agreed on the importance of oral language proficiency and book reading, there was more variability concerning code-related and writing beliefs. The most experienced preschool teachers considered oral language proficiency and vocabulary as most important for emergent literacy. Taken together, the studies of in-service teachers’ knowledge base highlight that there may be some uncertainty associated with supporting children’s multilingual development in terms of language choice in bilingual education and in terms of teaching methodology in monolingual environments. Other common features are that language teaching in ECEC to a large extent is contextual and experience-based and that teachers consider the linguistic support in light of a holistic approach to young children’s learning and well-being, involving aspects as age, maturity, emotions, and motivation for language learning.

Professional Development of In-Service ECEC Teachers There is considerable variability across countries with respect to professional development of in-service ECEC teachers (Ellis 2016; Eurydice 2019). In some countries, professional development is mandatory (Eurydice 2019), while in other countries it is not. Either ways, there seem to be high expectations related to ECEC provisions and children’s learning outcomes, and consequently the authorities are investing heavily in professional development in language-related topics. The following section will look into research on professional development, both empirical studies and meta-analyses of such studies. The majority of studies on professional development have been concerned with what effects the studies have, either on teachers’ declarative or procedural knowledge about language (Neuman and Cunningham 2009; Wasik 2010) or on the effects on children’s language development and in particular skills as vocabulary or phonological awareness (Bowne et al. 2016; Mohler et al. 2009; Piasta et al. 2017). Whereas some studies show that teachers benefited from their involvement in the professional development activities (Armstrong et al. 2008), other studies demonstrate a more

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limited impact (Dickinson et al. 2008; Neuman and Cunningham 2009). Cunningham and her colleagues (2009) suggest that ECEC teachers tend to overestimate their own knowledge, and this constitutes an obstacle for participating in professional development because the professionals may not see the need for it, which might be an issue in countries without mandatory professional development. Zaslow et al. (2010) gave an exhaustive literature review in 2010, suggesting that professional development has impact on declarative knowledge and some impact on procedural knowledge. In a meta-analysis including 25 studies, Markussen-Brown and his colleagues (2017) investigated effects for procedural knowledge, structural quality (i.e., improvements of the physical classroom literacy environment), and declarative knowledge and effects for children’s outcomes, namely, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge. The findings indicate that professional development produced a medium effect for procedural knowledge and a large effect for structural quality. However, there was no effect for declarative knowledge. Professional development also produced a small to medium impact on phonological awareness and a small impact on alphabet knowledge, but these gains were not related to teachers’ outcomes. According to this meta-analysis, professional development is a useful tool in improving language and literacy processes and structures in ECEC but needs to be substantial to ensure that it has some effect for children’s development of certain language skills such as receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge. Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of professional development, through different designs, intensity, and extent. There is consensus that in-service teacher education has impact on classroom practices and consequently on children’s emergent literacy skills. Other aspects of language, including professional development concerning teachers’ language ideologies, knowledge about second language learning and teaching, and multilingual development, are less researched. However, the few studies in this field document through teachers selfassessment how courses for in-service teachers strengthened the teachers’ selfconfidence in teaching foreign language and second language (Ellis 2016; Hardin et al. 2010) and changed their attitudes to children’s home languages and commitment for facilitating linguistic diversity in classroom settings (Kirsch 2018). The studies also indicate the needs of continued support in their teaching practices in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. In light of the variations in teachers’ professional confidence in language teaching (including teaching of emergent literacy and second language teaching) that we have seen above, it seems obvious that there is a need for confirming practices and knowledge about language.

New Projects There are several ongoing projects and recent trends in research on teacher education and teacher qualifications, and the research field is growing. In particular, there are two trends that characterize current research: research related to the sociopolitical context and research involving teachers in professional development.

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The Sociopolitical Context of ECEC Teacher Education One tendency is to look at educational fields and teacher education as a political field, as ECEC teachers and teacher educators practice and negotiate (Burns et al. 2015; Zein 2019). Several current projects look at the sociopolitical setting in which ECEC teacher exercises their profession, such as Palviainen and CurdtChristiansen (▶ Chap. 7, “Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education,” this volume) and Kirsch et al. (2020). The latter project underlines that effective professional development programs support teachers in interpreting policies and developing new practices. In the same way that researchers that have argued that this form of critical knowledge of sociopolitical issues must be included in teacher education programs (García 2008), it is also necessary to highlight how implicit or explicit language policies and ideologies influence teacher education.

Interventions in Professional Development A common approach in professional development has been to send teachers to universities to take courses – involving a top-down intervention where language teaching strategies are typically predefined by researchers and not grounded in the day-to-day experiences of professionals (Dickinson et al. 2008). Although that strategy may provide the desired subject knowledge learning outcome, these courses seem only to a limited extent to be connected to the actual classroom lives of teachers and consequently may have limited impact on improving practices. Therefore, some recent studies have used other methods of professional development, such as mentoring in the workplace, or live or distance (Lane et al. 2013), teacher collaboration (Mourăo and Robinson 2016), or teacher study groups (Cunningham et al. 2015). Cunningham and colleagues explore a model where a small group of teacher colleagues meets regularly with a more competent facilitator, using a design-based research methodology, which allows modifications in the intervention. The purpose was deepening subject knowledge and integrating research-based practices in teaching emergent literacy. The interventions resulted in a significant growth in teachers’ knowledge about phonological awareness and changes in classroom practices, i.e., increasing the amount of phonological awareness activities and consequently in children’s learning outcomes. In a similar ongoing Swedish project, Norling and Sandberg (2017) aim to develop pedagogical tools to support children’s multilingual development and emergent literacy. By conducting this project as an action research project, the teachers are actively involved as research participants. Based on analysis of the teachers’ statements, four important conditions for emergent literacy have emerged so far: learning environment, language practices, text practices, and play activities. In sum, the active involvement of teachers’ perspectives in professional development is necessary, as teacher education is increasingly required to be researchbased (Cochran-Smith 2013), and researcher-teacher collaboration may contribute to this.

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Critical Issues and Topics The Scope of Language in ECEC Teacher Education Teachers’ qualifications are considered crucial for the quality of ECEC settings. There are increasing demands on the role of teachers and increasing complexity in the field of education in terms of language-related issues such as emergent literacy, second language teaching, and emergent multilingualism. Černá (2015) states that the younger the second language learners, the higher the importance of teacher qualifications. Nonetheless, the requirements for the teacher’s qualifications related to these language issues seem vague and unarticulated.

The Level of Education and Status for the ECEC Teacher Education There is a need for a fundamental discussion on what kind of purposes and status ECEC teacher education should have. Despite the increasing expectations to the professionalizing of the ECEC field, the level and status of teacher education in general and for language issues in particular have not increased accordingly (Eurydice 2009, 2019). In some countries, teacher education programs are university-based, sometimes at a lower education level, i.e., upper secondary education. An increasing number of linguistically diverse learners and second language learners are some of the major challenges in education (Cochran-Smith 2013). This challenge is followed by a shift of notions of teachers’ accountability. As Cochran-Smith argues, the problem is not the accountability itself, but the reductionist views on the complexity of teaching and learning, where teaching is reduced to follow pre-scripted manuals, which potentially affects emergent literacy and numeracy the most. To resist a reductionist view requires a high degree of competence. Researchers have pointed out that teachers’ beliefs are resistant to change (Borg 2015), and previous studies have documented that the extent of professional development is significant for changes of teaching practices (e.g., Markussen-Brown et al. 2017; Kirsch 2018). The Complexity of ECEC Teacher Education An increasing number of empirical studies investigating language teaching practices in ECEC settings include a summary that pinpoints implications for teacher education, indicating what is lacking in ECEC teacher education, such as knowledge about language systems or language use. When focusing on one linguistic domain, it is easy not to see the totality and complexity of teacher education. Following the advices of adding something to teacher education, the education program will be more comprehensive than what is feasible. As Richardson (2002) underlines, adding one topic or course means subtracting another, as the teacher education often has a limited number of credits. Thus, it is necessary to consider more closely the connection between initial teacher education and in-service professional development.

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Teacher Training Versus Teaching Education The use of the terms training versus education is controversial in the research literature, though the terms teacher training, teacher education, and teacher development are often used synonymously (Garton 2019). ECEC teacher education is sometimes referred to as teacher training. The term “training” may contribute to – consciously or unconsciously – a preference for procedural knowledge over declarative knowledge. This term may also contribute to a de-professionalizing teacher, reducing them to mere technicians who are supposed to perform specific pre-scripted activities without making professional assessments and drawing on their scientific knowledge base. Still, as was highlighted above, teachers need to know both how to teach, what to teach, and why they teach what they teach. They need a solid foundation for decision-making and enacting the practical wisdom or educational virtuosity (Biesta 2015). One of the characteristics of the ECEC field is the combination of improvised, spontaneous, and planned, formal learning activities. Qualified improvisation requires solid skills, knowledge, and a rich methodologic repertoire in order to make wise, qualified decisions in moments that might occur. Biesta (2015) suggests that teachers may become more capable of educational virtuosity through studying the virtuosity of others.

The Knowledge Base in ECEC Language Teacher Education: Curriculum and Syllabus As presented above, there are large variations worldwide in how language is treated in ECEC teacher education and variations accordingly in ECEC provisions. There are few overviews of the ECEC teacher education, and the amount and kind of knowledge about languages included in preservice teacher education are unknown. As a result, we know only to a little extent the knowledge base in ECEC language teacher education and consequently the formal qualifications for the language teaching practices in ECEC.

The Underlying Norms and Implicit Definitions of Language One critical issue is that some concepts in the curricula might be taken for granted and are not made explicit – such as language, emergent literacy, and multilingualism. The trends in SLA/multilingual and emergent literacy research change (i.e., the social turn, the multilingual turn, the complexity turn), but it varies to what extent this has influence on the knowledge base in education. Johnson (2009b) claims that the traditional definitions of language and language learning as individual processes, for example, presented through cognitive and structural language theories where language structures are considered as bounded units, have dominated the content of second language teacher education rather than the emphasis on language as a social practice. This is highly relevant for ECEC language teacher education, as the prevailing research perspective is that children learn languages and literacy by interacting with others, integrated in meaningful contexts. Another recurring issue

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is the monolingual assumption underlying the teacher education programs. Such underlying norms may be congruent with existing beliefs and practices of many of our preservice teachers, and in harmony with more general accepted norms in society, and therefore difficult to discover and change. There is a need to address such norms and values underlying language education in ECEC and discuss the implications for different understandings of language, emergent literacy, and multilingualism. A majority of teacher education programs in higher education are required to be research-based. Cochran-Smith (2013) points out that the term “research-based” in some settings is considered synonymous with “evidence-based.” However, evidence-based studies, comprising language and literacy research, use countable, limited aspects of language (vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge). This implies less focus on other relevant perspectives such as multilingual language practices, language and identity development, and broader sociolinguistic issues.

The Particularity and Complexity of Language Teaching in ECEC Contexts The professional basis for language teaching in ECEC contexts seems to have a vague identity and academic foundation, which consequently reflects challenges for language-related subjects in teacher education. Following this unclear foundation for ECEC language teacher education, two major approaches in ECEC language teaching seem to occur, a top-down and a bottom-up approach. In the top-down approaches, ECEC language teaching relies primarily on the knowledge base, traditions, and methodologies of language teaching at higher educational levels, with certain adaptions to the age-appropriate level of ECEC. However, such approach seems to be based on an assumption that teaching language to young language learners is simpler and less complex than teaching at higher levels, because young children seems to easily acquire language and the linguistic complexity is apparently simple. Mourão discusses the unclear teacher requirements for teaching English in pre-primary, whether it is “a pre-primary professional who speaks English well enough, or an English teacher who has training in early years pedagogies” (Mourão 2019, p. 428). According to Mourão, teachers working with such young children require an understanding of the principles of ECEC pedagogy and child development, age-appropriate foreign language methodologies, as well as a competence in English that gives them confidence to speak fluently and spontaneously to children in the L2. This implies that language proficiency in English alone is not sufficient for teaching English to young learners, since teaching English should not be seen as a separate subject within an ECEC curriculum that generally takes a holistic approach to children’s learning. The bottom-up approaches are based on the knowledge base of ECEC general pedagogical principles, theories, and methodology, adding some linguistic aspects, though not as thorough and extensive compared to language teaching. So far, ECEC teacher education programs seem rarely to have developed particular educational pedagogies for ECEC settings where individual, psychological, linguistic, and social perspectives merge on the premises of the complex ECEC teaching context.

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The ECEC Language Teacher Educators Another issue in teacher education context is the competence of the teacher educator and the level and type of professionalism of the teacher educators in teacher education programs. In some cases, it might be required to have experiences from ECEC settings. Sometimes, language specialists are required to teach courses. Few previous studies have examined the teacher educators’ competencies. One exception is a study of a university teaching program in the USA (McCrary et al. 2011), which describes the personal and professional background of the staff: the six members in the ECEC team – two full, two associate, and two assistant professors, four of whom were women and two were men. All were native English speakers, and neither was multilingual nor had previous bilingual/ESL experiences. They represented expertise in a number of different areas: child development, early childhood and emergent literacy, diversity, and special needs education. In foreign language education, one concern is the qualifications foreign language teachers should have in order to be able to teach a foreign language – language specialist or generalist teachers. Another concern is the academic level of teacher educators. Early and Winton (2001) state that the majority of faculty members in early childhood programs in the USA have a master’s degree, but not a doctorate. The same tendencies are documented in Scandinavia (Følgegruppa 2015). In ECEC teacher education, there are fewer staff with doctorate than in teacher education programs for primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. The commission of a generic teacher education that expects specialist language teachers to have the ability to teach all levels with an equal level of competence has been widely criticized in various teaching contexts (Enever 2014). This discussion is equally relevant for teacher educators. There is just as much need for specialists ECEC language teaching with a high level of education in ECEC teacher education as in other teacher education programs.

Future Research Directions Unlike the research field of language teacher education in general, ECEC language teacher education is still an under-research field. We still need to have a broader understanding on how preservice and in-service teachers learn and develop their professionalism and more sophisticated views about the complex processes involved in developing as a language teaching professional in ECEC contexts. Firstly, there is a need for overviews of the level of education for future ECEC teachers, as well as the extent to which topics related to languages are involved in education, i.e., whether in separate courses or integrated into other courses. Furthermore, there is a need for more insight into the knowledge base in these courses, for example, what kind of view of language, either implicit or explicit, which forms the basis of the curriculum literature and curricula. There is a lack of research on language qualifications of ECEC teachers. Case studies from different countries around the world show that native English ECEC teachers without qualifications in second language teaching are considered qualified as teachers for second language

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learners (Murphy and Evangelou 2016). Murphy and Evangelou point to the need for more qualified second language teachers in ECEC and consequently more focus on second language teaching in initial teacher education. However, there are no systematic reviews of how language-related topics such as multilingualism, second language development and emergent literacy, social justice, ecology of language learning, and family language policy are included in the ECEC teacher education or whether these topics are addressed as separate course modules, whether they are integrated into the more general courses on children’s development, or whether these topics are neglected. It is particularly important to investigate whether there are wide or narrow definitions of language, multilingual, and literacy. These questions are also linked to different scientific traditions and whether teacher education is founded in a more evidence-based, positivist approach, focusing on “what works,” or, in the other end, a more post-modern approach, in line with the fundamental discussions in educational linguistics in recent years, seeking to provide students with a set of analytic tools that they can use to view practices from different perspectives, providing alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and acting on the same situation (Ryan and Grieshaber 2005). In addition to more knowledge about the content of education, we also need more knowledge that looks at the teacher educators, those who teach, since their knowledge base/academic background also forms an important premise for the content of teacher education.

Conclusions The discussion of what teachers need to know in order to teach language and emergent literacy is a long-lasting discussion. We need to prepare teachers for a changing world. This is not only related to what teachers should know but, as Darling-Hammond and Bransford (2007) point out, also what teachers should learn, which indicates a continuous professional development. Future teachers need to have a command of critical ideas and skills and, equally important, the capacity to reflect on, evaluate, and learn from their teaching so that it continually improves. According to the UNESCO report (2015), the quality of education for very young children remains a serious issue, and consequently, the knowledge, status, and pay for ECEC childhood teachers must be addressed. There is increasing attention to the significance of the knowledge and beliefs of teachers related to language teaching and learning issues in ECEC settings. There seems to be an assumption that the younger the children, the lower the degree of teacher qualifications is needed. Alongside and quite paradoxically, there is another strong assumption about language learning and teaching, namely, that “the younger the language learner, the better,” both when it comes to emergent literacy and multilingualism. Such assumptions raise the core issue of ECEC teachers’ language knowledge base, whether they primarily need general pedagogical knowledge about children and learning or more specialist declarative and procedural knowledge about language teaching. Definitely,

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ECEC teachers need knowledge from both fields but far more integrated than today. In second language teaching research, there is more and more focus on all teachers as language teachers and that teaching second language should be integrated in all subjects. These discussions also apply to the ECEC, which can be a promising approach for further development of the ECEC language teacher education.

Cross-References ▶ Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

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From Preprimary to Primary Learning of English as a Foreign Language: Coherence and Continuity Issues

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Teaching Policy Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curriculum and School Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Classroom Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Teacher Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parental Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Young Learners’ Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The chapter focuses on transition between the preprimary to primary level of English as a foreign language (EFL) education with coherence and continuity as key factors. Although the focus is on EFL, most issues discussed pertain to other foreign languages (FL) taught at the two educational levels as they have to follow the same guidelines laid out in European documents on FL teaching. Coherence is discussed in terms of structural integration, consistency in learning conditions, parents-educationalists relationship, conceptual integration of curricula, and consistency in pedagogical approaches to EFL teaching in the preprimary and primary classrooms. Continuity is considered as the guarantee that young learners can J. Mihaljević Djigunović (*) · S. Letica Krevelj Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_23

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continue learning the FL they started at the preprimary level. Insights into transition processes are described from the perspective of the following key domains: policy, curriculum and school, classroom, FL teacher, parents, and young learners. Since research focusing specifically on the preprimary to primary transition in EFL education is scarce, major contributions discussed in the chapter rely on relevant studies on transition points in general education and those on transition from the primary to secondary level in FL education. The critical issues that are made particularly salient include: (1) the need for policy makers to be attuned to research-based data and to provide support in creating necessary conditions for a smooth transition, (2) the need for the vertical articulation of the two curricula, (3) the need for the additional insights into the roles of parents and teachers during transition, (4) the need to study young learners’ characteristics such as resilience and motivation for FL learning which may be particularly important during the transition. The proposed research framework at the end of the chapter suggests including numerous variables in order to capture the complexity of the transition process. Keywords

Transition · Coherence · Continuity · Young EFL learners · Parents · Teachers

Introduction Preprimary education has been spreading universally in the belief that it will secure children a better start to their schooling life. Research (e.g., Berlinski et al. 2009) shows that, for example, children’s attention, class participation, and discipline are behavioral skills which can be positively affected by preprimary schooling. These skills have been found to facilitate self-control and socialization which are necessary for primary school learners to benefit from classroom learning (Currie 2001). Educational psychologists (e.g., Malaspina and Rimm-Kaufman 2008), however, warn that transitions from one education level to another can be a big challenge for many children and that negative experiences they can encounter during early transition points may cause problems in children’s later social and academic development. In some contexts, such as Denmark, this is perceived as such a pressing issue that school authorities make efforts to reduce the number of school transitions by, for example, offering educational programs from preprimary to end of compulsory education. This implies unifying the previously separate education structures of preprimary and primary levels under the governance of the public school system (EFA 2006). Although research into the effects of school transitions is still not comprehensive enough, there is some evidence of different factors, such as sociodemographic (e.g., gender, ethnicity, mother’s education), playing important roles in children’s adaptation to school transitions. It is also stressed that for preprimary education to be effective, it needs to be part of a broader educational framework which would be linked to primary education as well as to the young learner’s home (e.g., Bertrand and Beach 2004).

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Early childhood is considered to be a crucial time for the development of many skills and for language development as well (Marchman and Fernald 2008). FL learning at the preprimary level can be instrumental in developing children’s identity and values, and their awareness of the existence of different languages and cultures (European Commission 2011; Schwartz 2018). Research evidence suggests that early FL learning may contribute to the development of social-emotional and behavioral skills which, in turn, can predict development of FL competence (e.g., Sun et al. 2018). Social-emotional and behavioral skills become salient in peer relationships, and are important for successful adjustment to different environments (Eisenberg 2006). When transitioning from preprimary to primary school, young FL learners need to be able to manage new peer relationships as well as cope with a more learning-focused and tightly structured FL teaching than they have experienced before. In order to address the issue of coherence and continuity in transition from preprimary to primary EFL learning we first define theoretical concepts and provide an overview of available research findings relevant for the topic. Many individual learner characteristics as well as social and contextual factors emerge as important during this transition period. These are discussed through six different domains: teaching policy, curriculum and school, classroom, teacher, parent and young learner. Next, we list and announce some new projects on early transition germane to EFL learning and summarize critical issues and topics. Before conclusion, we suggest some avenues for further research and provide a framework which could be used as a comprehensive tool in research on the early transition. The framework rests upon the idea of a holistic approach to transition and integrates numerous psychological, social, and contextual factors (identified as relevant in the chapter).

Main Theoretical Concepts There are different theoretical conceptualizations of transition between educational levels. Some authors define it by relying on ecological theories (e.g., Bronfenbrenner 1981), others on theories of critical life events (e.g., Filipp 1995) or on stress theory (Lazarus 1981). An approach that is often referred to in literature is the one developed by Griebel and Niesel (2004). It is considered useful because of its multiperspective character (it takes into account the roles of all the participants in the transition process), its co-constructive nature (it considers efforts from everyone involved), and, perhaps most importantly, it views it as a process which begins before the actual transition starts and which finishes only when the participants have completely settled into the new educational environment. Additionally, insights into transition periods to date suggest one important thing to keep in mind: transition between educational levels is a process which takes time. According to Edelenbos et al. (2006), effective teaching of a FL to young learners requires institutional support, the appropriate place of the FL in the curriculum, and a guarantee of continuity of language learning throughout different school levels. In the literature on young FL learners, continuity and coherence are among the key criteria which should be met in order to secure effective early teaching of FLs

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(e.g., European Commission 2011; Rokita-Jaśkow and Ellis 2019). Continuity is the more straightforward concept of the two and implies a guarantee that very young learners can go on learning the FL they started with during preprimary education. This, unfortunately, is not always possible due to many reasons which will be discussed later in the chapter. Coherence (sometimes referred to as consistency) implies that what children are exposed to is felt by them to be logically and naturally integrated and consistent. It can be observed at different levels, as well as in their interaction, and materialized in different ways (Neuman 2002). One way of promoting coherence in the school domain is through structural integration (e.g., including preschool and primary school into the same educational unit, exercising collaboration between the two educational levels, etc.). An interesting initiative is taking place in Portugal, where a number of integrated basic schools (involving 9 years of compulsory education starting at age 6 and normally divided into three cycles) have been formed, enabling children to remain in the same environment from preschool to the end of compulsory education. In this way, children are provided with consistent learning conditions. Curricula coherence is extremely important too. Not only is it relevant within the curriculum for one educational level, but there also needs to be conceptual integration between different levels. A good example is an innovation taking place in Sweden, where preschool, compulsory school and upper-secondary school curricula are conceptually linked and based on a coherent approach to knowledge and development promoting the same fundamental values. An interesting educational innovation, increasingly frequent at the preprimary level, is the emergent curriculum (e.g., Stacey 2009). This type of curriculum is framed by the teacher as a response to children’s interests, and is constantly being developed through collaboration with children. Thus, it is flexible, dynamic and emergent as opposed to traditional planning, which is set in advance. However, this approach to planning of teaching hardly exists at the primary level. Transitioning from a preprimary institution with such an approach to a primary level class with a pre-planned curriculum, usually taught to a much larger group of young learners, can be an additional problem during transition. Coherence may be crucial in the parent–teacher relationship domain. Coherence in this highly beneficial educational partnership (Epstein 2011) can be materialized in different ways. In regular parent-teacher meetings, teachers can discuss the teaching methods they apply in class and suggest ways parents can help their children with homework (e.g., Višnjić Jevtić 2018). The insights parents could get in such meetings are particularly valuable in preprimary FL learning, where parents’ involvement needs to be high. Establishing good cooperation with young language learners’ parents is one of the FL teacher competences frequently stressed in recent literature (e.g., Pamuła-Behrens 2016). Discussing children’s FL development with parents provides grounds for addressing any misunderstandings or discrepancies between teachers’ and parents’ expectations and perceptions of what constitutes effective learning. Finally, coherence in the classroom domain may be viewed as the result of coherence achieved in the domains mentioned above as it is often stressed in educational literature that teaching staff are the “key to ensuring coherence in the lives of children” (Neuman 2002, p. 16).

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In the next section, coherence and continuity in transition from preprimary to primary education are discussed in more detail based on available theoretical and empirical research pertaining to various domains.

Major Contributions Although most publications on very early FL learning (e.g., Kinkead-Clark 2016; Rokita-Jaśkow and Ellis 2019) mention the importance of understanding what happens during transition periods and how transitioning from the preprimary level impacts on FL learning in primary school, systematic research of transition issues such as coherence and continuity connected to FL learning is conspicuously missing. Therefore, at this point we can mostly rely on (1) insights from the numerous studies carried out within the field of general education and (2) research focusing on transitional issues from the primary to secondary level FL learning. General education studies hardly ever refer specifically to preprimary FL learning and teaching and what happens when preprimary FL learners become primary FL learners. This, of course, is not surprising as preprimary FL learning is a very recent phenomenon. However, many studies and insights provided are highly relevant for the early transition in FL learning and teaching. A review of studies on transition from primary to secondary FL learning and teaching suggests that many of the issues identified are worth looking into in more detail at the earlier transition period as well. Still, their findings need to be considered with caution and cannot be generalized uncritically to the earlier transition. In the subsections below we will discuss the key issues of transition from preprimary to primary school in EFL learning and teaching relative to teaching policy, curriculum and school, classroom, teacher, parents and young learner domains. While we will be focusing on early learning and teaching of EFL, which is by far the most frequent FL learned and taught at the preprimary level, it can be safely said that the issues discussed are pertinent to other FLs as well. The center of our attention will be European contexts.

The Teaching Policy Domain In European documents on language teaching policy (e.g., European Commission 2004), it is stressed that language learning at preprimary and primary levels needs to be effective “for it is here that key attitudes towards other languages and cultures are formed, and the foundations for later language learning are laid” (p. 16). Making preprimary language learning “efficient and sustainable” emerges as particularly salient (European Commission 2011, p. 1). Continuity (and progression) in learning is considered to be a highly important factor in many policy documents, particularly those focusing on transition periods. Thus, in one of the most recent documents of the European Commission (2017) continuity of learner development features prominently among factors which bring

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about the quality of education. Among the ten guiding principles for policy development, five are directly related to transition issues (European Commission 2017, p. 5). These refer to the need for collaboration between the institutions involved during transition, supporting learners and their families in navigating pathways between school levels, creating curricula, and teaching approaches which would help bridge the transition, sharing learner data between institutions, and providing social and emotional support for learners during transition periods. Research into coherence and continuity as key conditions for effective transfer from the preprimary to the primary level has focused on (1) factors that affect learners’ transition to primary school; (2) skills which learners need in order to successfully transition; and (3) identifying those responsible for preparing young learners to transition from preprimary to primary school. The importance of coherence and continuity of FL learning is stressed in literature among the factors without which effects of early language learning may be nullified (e.g., Enever 2015, p. 22). Different ways of achieving coherence and continuity are mentioned. Thus, it is suggested that the FL introduced at the preprimary level should be the one the child would be learning in primary school (European Commission 2011, p. 9). According to the European Commission (2014), demand for publicly funded preprimary education in Europe exceeds the available supply (with Scandinavian countries being the exception). In contexts where preprimary education is not publicly funded, or does not involve FL learning, only those children whose parents can pay for FL courses gather experience in very early FL learning. Thus, continuity in transition is more feasible in education systems where FL learning at the preprimary level is the norm and provided for all children. Although it is not yet common practice, in some contexts (e.g., German-speaking part of Belgium, autonomous provinces in Spain) there is a trend to introduce a FL formally at the preprimary level. In contexts where responsibilities for preprimary and primary education in general and for FL learning in particular are split between different authorities a lack of coordination may emerge and cause problems during transition between the two levels. Still, interesting initiatives to make the transition smoother have been started. For example, in Denmark, where two different ministries are responsible for preprimary and primary education, the two ministries tried to support young learners during the transition period by linking their curricula. This was done through introducing the preschool curriculum in which the concept of development was replaced by the concepts of learning and learning processes in the belief that “the increased focus on learning will contribute [to] a good transition to school and in general a good school experience” (Jensen et al. 2010, p. 252). The effect of such a good initiative, however, was diminished by the introduction of national formal testing at primary level. Academically-focused primary school tests made many preschool teachers resort to more formal teaching at preprimary level, which goes against the basic tenets of teaching languages at the preprimary level (Jensen et al. 2013). It can be concluded that in the EFL teaching policy domain coherence and continuity have been recognized as important conditions for effective transition from the preprimary to the primary level. Suggestions for possible ways of

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developing these two conditions are laid in both European and national policy documents. Still, many emerging problems can be detected in the other domains, as will be seen in the following subsections.

The Curriculum and School Domain For effective transition from preprimary to primary FL learning, continuity and coherence need to be present in language programs as well. Unfortunately, in many contexts this is not the case for various reasons. As previously mentioned, there is still a general lack of legislation or systematic approach to FL education at the preprimary level (European Commission 2011; Murphy and Evangelou 2016). Thus, the status of preprimary EFL learning in different contexts can range from EFL available only to those who can afford it, to EFL available to all, and to EFL compulsory for all and publicly funded. Additionally, the first contact with EFL even within the same socio-educational context can occur at different points during preprimary education and can range from full immersion in EFL to structured teaching of EFL for a few hours a week and to language sensitizing (awareness raising) programs. Consequently, there are cases at primary school where young EFL learners with preprimary experience of EFL learning, or with experience in learning even a second FL, are in the same class with children who have no experience at all of learning a FL or have not even attended preprimary school in the first place (Černá 2015). Finally, there are contexts (e.g., Kersten and Rohde 2013) where young learners who learned EFL at the preprimary level go through a 2-year period of no EFL learning and join true beginners when EFL becomes a compulsory part of the primary curriculum. This means that primary EFL curricula should take into account diverse initial competencies of learners starting compulsory EFL learning (European Commission 2011). Compared to other transition points children pass during their education, in many contexts the lack of legislation and research-based approach to teaching EFL in preprimary makes this primary classroom heterogeneity particularly salient. In a rare study that looks into transition periods from preprimary to primary education from the perspective of FL learning and teaching, Kersten and Rohde (2013) discuss the following different scenarios possible in the German context regarding the learning of the English language: transitioning from a preschool program without a FL to partial immersion one, where some or most of the subjects are taught in a FL; transitioning from a bilingual preschool program to partial immersion primary school program; transitioning from a bilingual preschool into regular school where the same FL is offered either from grade one or from grade three; transitioning from preprimary to primary school after learning a FL that is not offered in the primary curriculum. It is important to emphasize that different programs ideally cater for various socio-educational needs and this diversity in itself is truly desirable. However, it is the aims and outcomes of these programs, e.g., in terms of learners’ FL competence, that should be considered in transition to primary FL learning.

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A stagnation in primary EFL learning of those young learners who learned EFL at the preprimary level is a usual consequence of a lack of articulation between the two curricula, and primary school teaching that fails to stimulate further language development. Consequently, the mixed-ability character of primary classrooms may lead to frustration in both higher- and lower-proficiency first graders and it has been shown to turn enthusiastic preprimary EFL learners into unmotivated primary learners (Murphy and Evangelou 2016). As can be learned from the primary to secondary transition experiences (e.g., Burns et al. 2013; Muñoz et al. 2015; Pfenninger and Lendl 2017), the lack of articulation between educational levels causes abrupt changes in teaching methodology, which learners find hard to adjust to. From the perspective of the preprimary to primary transition, this problem seems even more serious. In most contexts starting primary school means a true start of compulsory formal education, which in itself is a big issue to deal with. Problems arising from being also exposed to a novel approach in EFL teaching may be overwhelming for first graders and this issue is discussed in more detail in the next section. Recently, general education researchers have pointed out that it is not only the child that has to be ready for school, but that school readiness has also to be considered an important factor during transition periods (e.g., Faust et al. 2011). Schools have to be ready for young learners, who will inevitably differ in levels of readiness, to make the most of the available learning opportunities (Arnold et al. 2006). School readiness implies securing coherence and continuity in learning. However, in many contexts, for example in Slovakia or the Czech Republic, these have proved to be very difficult to establish (e.g., Černá 2015; Portiková 2015). In these contexts teaching and learning conditions are far from optimal. Problems include inadequate time set for language learning and inadequate resources without which it is impossible to ensure effective learning in preprimary and continuity between preprimary and primary EFL learning. Some EFL teaching experts even call for reassessment of mass introduction of preprimary EFL before adequate conditions are secured. Others attribute the lack of coherence and continuity to the fact that in most contexts preprimary EFL learning has not yet been formally integrated into the education system. However, there is evidence of efforts made in some contexts by preprimary and primary institutions to make the transition smoother. For example, in the Netherlands, early education institutions include both preprimary and primary schools and cater for education of children aged 4–12, thus ensuring coherence and continuity. Concerning FL learning, in some parts of Germany the local preprimary and primary schools keep in close contact for this purpose in an effort to support primary FL learning. Kersten and Rohde (2013) found that if institutions on both ends employ regulated transition measures, transition problems could be diminished. The regulated measures which have proved effective included different information events with parents, exchange of information between teachers on learners’ development, collaborative planning (particularly with reference to goals and ways of teaching), exchange of materials, children’s and teachers’ visits to other classes, and the like. In this subsection transitional issues referring to the curriculum and school domain have been presented. They range from different starting points of EFL

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learning in different preprimary and primary institutions to lack of articulation between the education levels particularly due to poorly regulated FL education at the preprimary level. Although the problems seem to be persistent, promising solutions are emerging.

The Classroom Domain General education researchers (e.g., Fabian 2013) stress the importance of aligning preprimary and primary pedagogy. However, it seems that primary school learners continue to face sharp differences in the curriculum (Shaeffer 2006) as well as discontinuity in pedagogical practice they are exposed to (Griebel and Niesel 2011). Some experts (e.g., O’Kane 2016) point out that there are cultural differences of a kind (for example, differences in organization and daily regimen, amounts of engagement with individual children) between the preschool and primary school and that they should be taken into account if continuity and coherence are to be established. Continuity in pedagogy is also of crucial importance for securing optimal engagement of young learners and an efficient EFL learning process (Kennedy et al. 2012). During transition to primary school, children need to get used to the changes in how they are being taught EFL. After having used EFL as a communication tool in the playful activities they were enjoying, they now need to get used to new types of activities through which they are taught EFL as a discrete subject. In most cases preprimary EFL classes aim at sensitizing children to other languages and cultures. Teaching is carried out through contextualizing EFL in the here and now of the daily preschool routines and focusing on oracy. The idea is that for preprimary learners EFL should be meaningful and useful. It is best perceived as such when they can use it in playful activities (e.g., Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018) as play is “the child’s natural medium of learning” at the preprimary level (European Commission 2011, p. 14). In the primary classes, on the other hand, EFL teaching becomes more formal and in most cases follows the guidelines set by national educational authorities. Although lower primary learners are supposed to learn implicitly too (Nikolov and Mihaljević Djigunović 2006), the more formal context of learning and an increasing focus on language as the object of learning is a big change and can be a challenge for many first graders. As noted above, in many cases, primary school teachers start teaching EFL from scratch. This, however, can generate numerous issues linked to factors (such as motivation and self-concept) discussed later in this chapter. A more promising course of action would be ensuring continuity for such learners at the same time as catering for the needs of true beginners. This implies differentiated instruction (e.g., Sullivan and Weeks 2018), which would build on what non-beginners already know as well as introducing beginners to EFL. At the same time, YLs with stronger FL skills can help scaffold the learning of beginners. A recommendation for a change of approach to the heterogeneity which EFL teachers have to cope with upon transition periods comes from Kersten and Rohde’s

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study (2013). In their view, heterogeneity should be perceived not as a burden, but as an opportunity for “an inspiring classroom experience” (p. 111). Thus, content-based language teaching (CBLT) has been suggested as a good way of solving transition problems. Since CBLT is not “language-course-oriented” teaching and does not rely on acquisition of linguistic skills which are prescribed as mandatory for the next level of education, it can help avoid pressure (Kersten and Rohde 2013). Such teaching of non-language content through the FL has shown benefits for FL development of preprimary learners evidenced in development of their cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). However, carrying out differentiated instruction in FL education may not be an easy endeavor. Compared to the heterogeneity issue in general education, heterogeneity in language learning seems more complex. Research evidence points to significant effects of many individual learner differences (e.g., language learning aptitude, attitudes to and motivation for learning the language, linguistic self-confidence) as well as their variability and interaction with contextual factors on the learning process and outcomes. Additionally, teachers may come across a number of obstacles, such as very little time available in the primary curriculum for EFL teaching (sometimes as little as 45 min per week) or large groups or lack of suitable teaching materials to cater for a range of abilities. Ensuring coherence and continuity in learning EFL for some learners while teaching true beginners in the same class takes additional training of EFL teachers, which schools should make possible. New developments in classroom teaching methodology at the preprimary level may be more innovative than those applied at the primary level. Differences in the learning conditions, expected learning outcomes, and the number of young learners per class in preprimary EFL require the modification of the teaching methodology applied at the primary level and creates more space for innovation and new approaches to teaching. Studies point to effectiveness of the holistic approach to EFL teaching and success of learning-conducive strategies (see the 2018 volume edited by Schwartz for examples from diverse contexts). Thus, for example, increased frequency and variety of English use by the young learners in their preprimary English classes was found to be an outcome of creating English Learning Areas, where activities through which teachers encouraged children to use EFL creatively and to experiment with it could be carried out outside the regular EFL teaching time (Robinson et al. 2015). To ensure continuity and coherence of language pedagogy it is vital for primary school language teachers to know how to build not only on the existing competences of young learners whose FL learning began at the preprimary level but also on the preprimary ways of teaching, and ideally make the heterogeneity work to their advantage. What some see as a promising solution to the problems that have been described is the application of some sort of integrated pedagogy which would embrace preprimary and early primary classes (Walsh et al. 2010). Thus, there are suggestions that preprimary practices, informal in character, should be extended to grade one so that young learners can slowly and smoothly enter the more formal and academic phase of their education (e.g., Woodhead and Moss 2007). In contrast to these

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suggestions, others believe that the informal character of preprimary teaching should be formalized, i.e., they support “schoolification” of preprimary education (Gunnarsdottir 2014). The difference between the two possibly reflects the differences in perception of early education, many of which are culturally biased, as one that focuses on the building of the school-readiness skills and the one with a focus on a pedagogical goal which emphasizes play and interaction in children’s development (de Botton 2010, p. 7). This is most certainly an issue that needs to be negotiated in the transition. In this section transition problems surfacing in the classroom domain have been discussed. Although some emerging solutions can be detected, it can be generally concluded that more effort needs to be put into securing coherence and continuity of pedagogical practices between preprimary and primary classrooms. Establishing and maintaining links between the two levels seems to be the necessary step to take.

The Teacher Domain Teachers play a crucial role in teaching both preprimary and primary EFL learners. Their attitudes to and beliefs about teaching young learners and learning FLs at an early age shape classroom culture. As Murphy (2004, p. 83) points out, “teachers’ instructional practices appear to be influenced by their deeply ingrained personal beliefs and understandings rather than by the principles of the curriculum.” On the other hand, teachers’ beliefs can be changed and shaped by their practices in the FL classroom. Thus, Lygossy (2018) shows how an EFL teacher, based on her experience in teaching a group of preprimary children, learned that it is more important to rely on what children like to do and to allow “for natural interaction to emerge” (p. 122) than to insist on “prescribed activities” which may not work with particular learners. Research on early EFL learning consistently points to the motivational role of teachers. They have been found to be the source of young learners’ motivation as well as the key factor influencing young learners’ motivated language learning behavior (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019; Vilke 1993). Teachers play an important role in young learners’ EFL learner self-concept, i.e., perception of themselves as EFL learners, which starts to be shaped already at the preprimary level. Teacher awareness of these roles is very important at both the preprimary and primary level. Contrary to popular belief, FL teachers need a complex set of competences in order to teach young learners, including pedagogical competencies, which are of particular importance. These become especially prominent during the early transition period. Preprimary teachers need to know about FL teaching at the primary level to prepare learners for a smooth transition. Primary teachers need to know how young learners have been taught at the preprimary level, what outcomes they have reached, and how to deal with heterogeneity of learners in the classes they teach. Like with the domains discussed in the previous subsections, cooperation between the preprimary and primary teachers, unfortunately often nonexistent, can be crucial for coherence and continuity in early FL learning.

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Although the qualifications of teachers of young learners have often been stressed as the critical factor for the quality of early EFL learning (European Commission 2011), in some countries the reality is far from ideal (e.g., Černá 2015; Portiková 2015). The preprimary teaching staff often have minimal qualifications for language teaching (e.g., Langé et al. 2014), and in many contexts, required qualifications for teachers who can teach EFL at the preprimary level are not specified. The same is sometimes true in the case of primary teachers of EFL. When they are specified, there are usually two options in terms of formal qualifications. At the preprimary level, legislation allows preprimary educators who hold a certificate in EFL at a certain competence level, or an EFL teaching expert with a university degree. At the primary level, it is either a homeroom teacher with an extra qualification in EFL, or an EFL teaching expert with a university degree in English. At both levels, the same advantages and disadvantages are often voiced. The former seem to lack appropriate language competence, the latter lack pedagogical insights and knowledge about child development in the early years (Enever 2011). None of the options described include any training on how to handle transition issues such as coherence and continuity in FL learning (Murphy and Evangelou 2016). A lack of continuity and coordination between initial and in-service education of language teachers contributes to the complexity of the transition problem (Lungu 2016). As responsibility for managing transition often falls on individual teachers (Burns et al. 2013), in-service education should provide the necessary support for teachers in dealing with teaching realities, such as having to adapt learning activities to different ability learners. Integrated initial training of prospective teachers across the age span is emerging as a possible solution to the problem of coherence and continuity. Thus, in some contexts all prospective teachers first obtain a common theoretical base. At the inservice level, teacher education curricula which aim at bridging preprimary and primary teaching or joint training of teachers from the two school levels can reinforce links between teachers and contribute to developing coherence and continuity during transition. Existing insights into transitional issues discussed in this subsection from the teacher perspective point to the complexity of language teaching knowledge. The roles which preprimary and primary EFL teachers need to take on in order to cater for a smooth transition between the two levels are also presented. The importance of teacher education is stressed.

Parental Domain Research has consistently revealed that children’s experiences both at home and at school have an impact on how well they go through the transition period and how prepared they are to function in their new environment (Borg et al. 2001). Parents play one of the key roles in transition from the preprimary to the primary level, which is stressed by both general education researchers (e.g., Borg et al. 2001) and EFL teaching experts (e.g., Rokita-Jaśkow 2013, 2019). Researchers who are now

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focusing on the role of parents during the preprimary and primary levels of education have noticed that until recently parents have been overlooked as participants in the transition processes. Some authors (e.g., Griebel and Niesel 2006; Reichmann 2011/ 2012) point out that parents in fact have two tasks during transition periods. They need to be able to support their children during such challenging periods in life and, as they themselves are affected by the requirements of transition, they need to be able to cope with their own change. There is evidence of positive development upon transition, such as children’s easier adaptation to a new learning environment or a more adequate degree of continuity, when parents participate in transition activities (e.g., Margetts 2002). Thus, strategies for involving parents in learner transitions need to be explored too. Research on parents’ attitudes to school and their support for their children during transition demonstrates that parents generally rely on their own experiences as learners when they have to decide on their approach and strategies for support (Dockett and Perry 2007; Reichmann 2011/2012). Parents’ own experience-based attitudes to school (positive, negative or ambivalent) and to the importance of high performance in school are usually transferred to their children, as observed in comparative research on parents’ and their children’s attitudes to school. Interestingly, as the transition point draws near and as children enter primary school, the influence direction changes: parents’ feelings reflect their children’s feelings, not the other way round, and they start thinking about starting primary school in terms of how they can make this big step easier for their child by catering for the child’s needs (Reichmann 2011/2012). Although there has been little research to date into the role of parents in early EFL education, the emerging findings show it is of paramount importance (RokitaJaśkow 2013). They suggest that parental involvement in early EFL learning is essential for progress to take place and be maintained. Such involvement can take the form of, for example, recreating EFL activities done in classes to prevent forgetting what has been learned (Rokita-Jaśkow 2019), which can also be done during the holidays before transitioning to primary school. Parents may entertain views about the transition period which are different from those of teachers (Kinkead-Clark 2016). During transition to primary school level parents often raise their expectations in terms of more academically focused teaching and may question teacher-led playful activities used in early primary classes. This is a consequence of their not fully understanding the relevance and importance of play for children of that age (Darmody et al. 2010). Therefore, the role and importance of age-appropriate language-conducive strategies (e.g., Schwartz and Deeb 2018) need to be communicated to parents of young FL learners. These strategies are meant to enhance young learners’ willingness to communicate in English and involve different ways of elicitation and encouragement (e.g., through free play, socio-dramatic play, games). In some European contexts, such as Poland, attempts have been made to inform parents of young EFL learners about early EFL learning and how parents can help their children at home. This is done through guidelines published as handbooks or brochures for parents (e.g., Szpotovicz and Szulc-Kurpaska 2004).

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A new strand of research points to the key importance of the home learning environment which, according to some studies (e.g., Sylva et al. 2004), trumps socio-economic status. One of the activities that has been shown to be a good predictor of later EFL learning outcomes is reading to children during early childhood (Vilke 1999). It is now often claimed that what parents do with the child in terms of language learning involvement and stimulation (e.g., offering support, showing interest in their progress) is positively correlated with young learners’ success in EFL learning (Hewitt 2009). This subsection highlights the role of parents as important stakeholders during the transition from the preprimary to primary level of EFL learning. It points out the benefits of parents’ understanding of the FL learning and teaching processes, and discusses how parents can support their children’s EFL learning in the home environment. As previously emphasized, it is the partnerships between parents and other stakeholders that need to be established in order to facilitate EFL learners’ transition from preprimary to primary level.

The Young Learners’ Domain Although transition periods present a challenge for most children, not all young learners deal with them in the same way. Some children are more resilient in the face of life stressors than others. High verbal and interpersonal skills as well as proactive behavior, among other characteristics, have been found to be related to higher resilience in stressful situations (Masten 1994). The motivation of young learners plays a crucial role at the start of EFL learning and it is more complex than expected (Gao 2003). In early EFL learning the key motivator is the EFL teacher, who becomes the source of affiliation motivation, which reflects the learners’ need for acceptance and belonging. The teacher as a motivator influences not only young learners’ motivation but also how their motivated learning behavior will fluctuate during learning (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). Learner motivation at a very young age can be promoted by establishing appropriate balance between playfulness and cognitive challenge in the activities they engage in (Enever 2015). There are very few studies looking into the development of intrinsic motivation of preprimary EFL learners. Intrinsic motivation in FL learning implies that learners engage in an activity because they enjoy doing it, and the activity itself is the reward they desire to obtain. It has been found that for preprimary learners’ intrinsic motivation to develop, certain conditions in the immediate learning environment need to be fulfilled. As Wu (2003) found in her study with 4- to 6-year-olds, the learning environment needs to be predictable, the tasks need to be moderately challenging, learners should be getting instructional support, their self-perceived competence should be systematically developed through assessment processes that stress self-improvement. Learners’ perceived autonomy should be developed through having a chance to choose EFL content as well as expected learning outcomes and ways of reaching them. If young learners manage to develop intrinsic

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motivation during preprimary EFL education and then transition to a first grade class in which some (or all) of the listed conditions are not met, a decrease in language learning motivation accompanied by frustration can be the expected consequence (Nikolov 2008). There is evidence that preprimary learners can promote the development of selfmotivation for learning in primary school. Self-motivation refers to thinking positively about one’s learning in order to protect one’s motivation (Ushioda 1996). It can develop under the following conditions: their teachers should actively include learners in the instruction; share the stimulating learning activities and environment with the learners; foster learners’ self-esteem, self-confidence, and co-operation with others; praise learners’ efforts; and provide concrete suggestions or comments for school action (Brumen 2011). Brumen (2011, p. 731) concludes that in such an environment, learners are “motivated to experience new situations in the foreign language (. . .) which can positively affect the continuity and interest in learning other languages.” Studies on effective EFL teaching at the preprimary level suggest that specific motivational strategies teachers use may boost young learners’ motivation (e.g., Andúgar and Cortina-Pérez 2018). Using CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology at the preprimary level enables holistic learning, which is considered by many authors to be the age-appropriate approach (e.g., Costa et al. 2018; Coyle 2007; Marsh and Frigols Martín 2012). In teaching very young learners at the preprimary level the focus is normally on the oral aspects of EFL, dynamic Total Physical Response (TPR) activities and vocabulary which is contextualized in the here and now. However, as previously emphasized, if an abrupt change in approach is introduced during transition to the primary level, problems may emerge with many first graders. Depending on the EFL learning setting, transition to the primary level may involve facing more formal evaluative feedback from the EFL teacher earlier than children are ready for it. Understanding and interpreting such feedback has been observed to be a challenge even for learners transitioning to secondary school (Courtney 2017). These problems may be reflected in learners’ attitudes and motivation for learning as well as in their self-perception (Letica Krevelj and Mihaljević Djigunović 2021). At a very young age EFL learners also need to be taught how to learn. Evidence suggests that the most effective way for learners to acquire learning strategies is by integrating strategy training into learning activities (Stright et al. 2001). During integrated strategy training, YLs may be asked in class to reflect how they learn EFL best, plan which words to learn during a particular week, describe how they feel during EFL classes, explain why they like or dislike certain activities, etc. (SzulcKurpaska 2001). However, it is advisable to also allow some “space” and time for young learners to develop independent learning strategies through more learnerdirected and learner-controlled activities, for example, by offering YLs a choice of activities or resources to use in an activity (Cullen 1988). Strategy training allows learners to exercise their language learning-based agencies. Research into young learners’ use of learning strategies before and after the transition into grade one has demonstrated that learners displaying strategic

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approaches to learning during preprimary education maintain this approach in grade one, while those with less strategic learning behaviors to learning in preprimary school continue with their less-effective ways of learning in grade one. Changes in use of learning strategies at the two educational levels have been shown to be context- and learning-setting-dependent and to also reflect the type of task as well as the teacher’s management style (Cullen 1991). Thus, for example, due to differences in the social contexts, preprimary teachers can resort to informal interactions while leading children to complete a task, while primary teachers have to deal with higher numbers of learners and use their interactions with individual learners mostly for controlling comments. At the preprimary level a greater variety of settings for learning is provided compared to the primary settings, which are characterized by a more limited provision of resources as well as by a more narrow focus on academic skills development. Compared to the more prevalent interactive teacher management style in a preprimary context, primary school teachers’ management styles are often found to be overly controlling and not conducive to further development of YLs’ metacognitive skills. The growing trend of including children’s voices in researching children’s experiences (e.g., Freeman and Mathison 2009) has spread to early EFL learning as well (e.g., Pinter and Zandian 2015). The inclusion of young EFL learners’ voices allows them to exercise their child agency, and would be particularly useful in studying the transitional processes when many challenges and mixed feelings are at play. It is possible that first graders who were very successful during preprimary learning may face failure in grade one due to any conceivable cause related to transition. Getting to the bottom of these causes is highly important. Such learners need to be protected from the negative effects of failure which may result in a lack of linguistic selfconfidence, i.e., belief that mastering the FL is well within their means. Early EFL learning experts, however, warn that, when considering children’s emotions, it is important to keep in mind that what children report is not necessarily what they actually do. Thus, for example, for the purpose of self-protection, many children hide their feelings, as Pinter (2011, p. 133–134) found while studying young learners’ self-reports on how they liked learning English. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that children’s attitudes and beliefs are rather changeable. As can be seen from this subsection, during transition to primary school young EFL learners may face challenges that some may find hard to cope with. Young learners’ motivation and self-confidence may fluctuate during this period, and those learners whose resilience is not high would benefit from encouragement and help from both their teachers and parents. In order to fully grasp the impact of young learners’ individual characteristics during transitional processes it might be useful to take the ecological view of language learning (van Lier 2010). This view allows us to look into the learners’ roles in EFL learning taking into account their relationships with contextual aspects, both those of the immediate classroom setting (the micro-context) as well as of the broader social, linguistic, and cultural setting (the macro-context). Deeper insights into young learners’ transitional

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problems may be obtained by including them as informants as well as partners in research and thus hearing their voice too.

New Projects Projects on transition from the preprimary to the primary level which focus specifically on EFL learning are hard to find. However, there have been interesting projects carried out in different contexts on transition points in general (e.g., Effective Preschool, Primary and Secondary Education 3-14 Project (EPPSE, 3-14); Early Years Transition programme–EASE; Step by Step Transition–Primary School Programme involving close to 30 Central Eastern European and Commonwealth of Independent States countries). The methodology (mostly mixed-methods) used in these projects can be applied in researching the preprimary to primary transition in EFL learning as well. Many of the instruments used in the projects are age-appropriate and already validated and can be useful for obtaining valuable background data on YLs and other stakeholders as well as contextual information necessary to get a comprehensive picture of transition processes. The project foci and aims (e.g., effects of preprimary education on children’s progress in primary school, developing empirically supported school transition programs) can inspire new studies focusing on EFL transition processes. A notable and highly inspiring project whose research methodology and findings are relevant for the preprimary to primary transition focusing on EFL learning and teaching is the Transition from Preschool to Primary School project organized by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment in Ireland. The project’s findings (O’Kane 2016) demonstrate the usefulness of the interactionist approach to transition and show the benefits of templates and portfolios for transferring relevant information about the children and their transition experiences and development of relationships between the preschools and primary schools, both of which are critical for securing continuity. They also highlight the importance of the national transition policy, and point to the crucial need for particular support of young learners with social and economic disadvantages, special educational needs, and those who learn English as an additional language. A new project, still in its initial phase, has started recently in Croatia and focuses on the young learners’ perspective of transition from preprimary to primary EFL learning. In this mixed-methods study, the researchers are looking at young learners with different forms of experience in EFL learning prior to enrolling into primary school. The primary focus of the project is on young EFL learners’ experiences, learning enjoyment, perceptions of effectiveness of instructional practices, perceptions of themselves as learners, and those of invested efforts in relation to gains (Letica Krevelj and Mihaljević Djigunović 2021). Future projects focusing on EFL transition from preprimary to primary education are necessary not only because they would extend and deepen our theoretical

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understanding of the involved complexities but should also turn it into a smooth process for everyone involved.

Critical Issues and Topics The preprimary to primary transition has emerged as an area of concern in early EFL learning and teaching. As it is highly important but mainly under-researched, it definitely merits full attention of all stakeholders. Dunlop and Fabian (2002) suggest the transitioning child “occupies three environments or microsystems: their home world, the pre-school world and the school world” (p. 149). Insights into the many challenges they meet during transition warn that they should not be underestimated. Viewed from the bio-ecological (Bronfenbrenner 1981) perspective, young learners’ interpretations of transition processes are influenced by their parents and teachers, i.e., inhabitants of their immediate ecological environment (microsystem). The situations young learners participate in – denoting the mesosystem – also affect them, just like events they are not familiar with or cannot control because they take place within the exosystem, i.e., outside their ecological environment. During transition, young EFL learners experience changes in the new environment through the new types of activities they have to engage in. At the same time their view of themselves as learners is likely to change as a result of changed expectations of their parents and teachers. Teachers’ expectations, whose impact is particularly important, reflect the influence of educational authorities and the curriculum. Critical issues have been identified across all domains discussed in this chapter. Both researchers and practitioners seem to agree that, first of all, much more needs to be done in the domain of policy in order to “ensure greater coherence in transition practice” (O’Kane 2016, p. 30). It seems vital that policy makers should commit to funding research and respecting research-based recommendations from EFL education experts. This would make possible effective articulation of curricula at the two levels, turn communication between preprimary and primary institutions into an established norm, and cater for appropriate staff development which would enable teachers and administrators to handle transition issues effectively. Both parents and teachers need to provide assistance to children going through transition to primary school. The parents’ role has only recently started to be acknowledged (e.g., Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018) and large-scale studies into the impact of their individual and collective agencies are still missing. Teachers have always been considered a key to what goes on at the preprimary level but systematic research into how they impact transition processes is also missing. Insights from research on primary school EFL learners show that parents play a decisive, though indirect, role in young learners’ motivation, while teachers feature as main direct motivators in classroom learning until young learners are about eight (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). It can be concluded, by implication, that the roles of parents and teachers, while important throughout the early EFL learning, are even more significant during the preprimary to primary transition.

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Evidence from general educational research indicates that attention should be paid to children’s levels of resilience and versatility since these characteristics can determine how easy or difficult transitioning may be for them. Motivation for EFL learning has been found to be particularly endangered during transition periods (Burns et al. 2013). Based on insights from research into the primary to secondary school transition, it can be assumed that motivation can be strengthened if young learners’ existing knowledge is recognized and the current scheme of work takes it into account (Bolster 2009). As addressed above, children’s diverse EFL learning experiences at the preprimary level, or total lack of such experiences, create diverse needs which their EFL teachers should cope with in the primary classroom. EFL teachers need to be able to make possible a steady progression for all learners, which in many cases poses a huge challenge (Tinsley and Comfort 2012). If teachers are unprepared for such diverse learner needs or for teaching heterogeneous classes, they may experience what is known as teacher stress (Kyriacou 2001). We can safely conclude that there are not enough studies on the transition period between preprimary and primary EFL education. Additionally, in existing research, attention is paid to some aspects of transition processes, while others are neglected. Thus, it has been observed that while a lot of attention may be given to social and emotional aspects of children’s experience, coherence and continuity of the involved curricula are disregarded (Galton et al. 1999). By focusing on coherence and continuity in this early transition period it became evident that it may be even more complex than the later transition stage. This is primarily due to a greater variability found in the initial conditions, such as in the ways young learners may be exposed to EFL (in terms of onset, length, and intensity of exposure, inclusion or exclusion of L1). What is more, the form of provision of teaching of and in EFL is highly dependent on the micro or macro social context (language policy, institutions, institutional resources) and, due to the lack of legislation, there are great differences between the programs that go by the same name. Therefore, in order to learn more about the transition process, the focus should be on individual transitional periods taking into consideration the numerous factors that are at play. In sum, the issues listed in this section are all critical to effective transitioning from the preprimary to primary level of EFL education and should be considered valuable topics of research.

Future Research Directions As research reported in this chapter suggests, transition from preprimary to primary school needs further attention and more systematic research. Being a rather new phenomenon in EFL learning and teaching, it involves many topics that need investigation. In order to understand the complexity of transition processes in EFL learning, it might be necessary to develop a comprehensive research framework which would not only include all the key elements involved, but also indicate their interactions.

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One useful and highly comprehensive model of transition from the preprimary to the primary level has been developed in the general education field (the Transition Systems Approach model, Dunlop and Fabian 2002, p. 151). Its comprehensiveness is reflected in the four-system interconnected layers (meso-, micro-, exo-, and macrosystems) including relevant factors and influences. At the heart of the framework is the child co-constructing transition on a daily basis with parents and teachers. While very relevant for the study of transitions in the case of most school subjects, it may not be informative enough in case of EFL as a school subject. It is generally acknowledged that learning a FL differs from learning other school subjects: the FL is both the means and the aim of learning and motivation for FL learning is qualitatively different from motivation for learning other subjects. That is why the relevance of factors which should be included and their interactions are arguably different. One possible framework which could be used as a tool in future research is suggested in Fig. 1 below. As can be discerned from Fig. 1, transition from the preprimary to the primary level of EFL education is nested in the social context in which the young learner lives. Both the micro and macro aspects of the context need to be taken into account. Societal values and attitudes to EFL learning play an important role in the policies which determine if and when FLs are to be introduced to young learners. At a more

Learner variables:

Social context (micro and macro) education policy

FL education policy PRIMARY

PREPRIMARY

learner

beliefs at titudes needs motivation resilience versatility self-concept emotions language apt itude learning strategies metacognitive awareness and control

INSTITUTION

INSTITUTION

preprimary

transition

primary teacher

teacher FL curriculum

coherence /art iculat ion/continuity

FL curriculum

Out-of- school / home FL input Parents' variables:

parents

societal values Preprimary and primary teacher variables: beliefs at titudes motivation for teaching teaching qualif ications teaching competence

Fig. 1 Visual representation of the framework

attitudes to FLL

own experiences as learners attitudes to FLL and FLT expectations SES support for children support for themselves

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specific level transition is impacted by the overall education policy, which defines the role of learning FLs and their place in the curricula, and by the FL education policy, which reflects the approach to FL learning and teaching in a more concrete sense. Within the framework the key participants to be focused on in researching transition are young learners, their parents and their preprimary and primary teachers. Many authors who focus on transition issues (e.g., Fabian and Dunlop 2002) stress the need to investigate cooperation among parents, preprimary and primary teachers. Interactions among them are highly important for understanding the transition process. Thus, each participant’s relevant characteristics should be considered in relation to other participants and also the micro and macro context. As can be seen from the framework, motivation is considered important in defining the behavior of both the young learner and EFL teachers. Some other variables characterizing the participants such as beliefs about and attitudes to EFL learning are relevant in relation to all participants involved. The characteristics pertaining to the young learner include needs (physical and emotional), personality characteristics (resilience and versatility), and those specific to language learning. The most important characteristics specific to FL learning emphasized in the framework are: EFL self-concept, language aptitude, language learning strategies, metacognitive awareness, and control. The EFL teaching qualifications and experience of the preprimary and primary teachers are presented in the framework as variables which may impact how the transition process proceeds. They may influence the teachers’ approach to, for example, solving heterogeneity problems upon transition, or dealing with issues caused by parents’ different beliefs and misunderstandings about EFL learning and the way it should be taught to young learners. The role of parents is mainly reflected in the support they give to their child and in how they handle their own transition-related issues. It could be informative to view these two important factors taking into account their own experience as learners. The parents’ socio-economic status may be reflected not only in their attitudes to EFL but also in their expectations regarding their child’s EFL learning outcomes. The roles immediate environments play in the transition involve the two educational institutions (preprimary and primary) as well as the out-of-school and out-ofhome environments with which the young learner interacts during the transition. These two types of environment are relevant because they may provide young learners with additional EFL input (each to a different extent) and, also, because learners’ beliefs, attitudes, and motivation may be influenced and valued by others, such as relatives and peers. The impact of the educational institutions does not transpire only through the two EFL teachers but also through the curricula. The extent to which continuity and coherence, the extremely important features in transition, are present in these guiding FL education documents needs to be closely considered in order to fully understand transition. As regards sources of research data, all the participants (young learners, parents, preschool EFL teachers, primary EFL teachers, school administrators, and policy makers) as well as policy documents can be valuable resources. Such complex

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research can arguably benefit from applying a mixed-methods approach, and including the young learners’ voices may be highly revealing. What may be crucial for future research into the variables involved in transition from preschool to primary school is looking into their interactions as well as their interdependencies because this is where their true role may be best revealed. We believe that this holistic approach may contribute to deeper understanding of the complexity of early transition processes in FL learning.

Conclusions This chapter has focused on the transitioning of young EFL learners from the preprimary to primary level of education in the European context, with particular attention to two key factors: coherence and continuity. As repeatedly shown in the chapter, this transition is a highly complex process which involves many stakeholders. Since studies on what happens during this early transition period are hard to find, discussion of the main issues relied mostly on what is known about it from general education research and on insights from studies of the transition of EFL learners from the primary to the secondary level. The complexity of the early transition period was explored from the point of view of the different domains involved during the transition: FL policies, curriculum and school, EFL classroom, EFL teachers, parents and young learners themselves. It can be seen from the discussions that the included domains are interconnected and overlapping, indicating the need for more holistic research. Since studies on transition from the preprimary to the primary level of EFL learning hardly exist, the chapter proposes a framework that could guide future research into the many aspects involved in the transition. It is concluded that such research needs to be comprehensive and should explore interactions among the involved variables as well.

Cross-References ▶ Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overuse of Socially Dominant Language and Fixation of Receptive Bilingual Skills . . . . . Language-Conducive Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Input-Interaction-Output Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intentional Teacher as a Proactive Agent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Didactic Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter provides a theorization of language-conducive strategies (Schwartz M, Preschool bilingual education: agency in interactions between children, teachers, and parents. Springer, Dordrecht, 2018) as a pedagogical concept, combining several types of teacher support in early language education. A twofold classification of language-conducive strategies is proposed: didactic and management strategies. These strategies are designed to induce preschool children’s novel language production. To ground the language-conducive strategies in theory, the chapter presents a formulation of the two phenomena observed in preschools regarding novel language learning in different countries: children’s overuse of socially dominant language and their fixation of receptive bilingual skills. M. Schwartz (*) Department of Research Authority, Oranim Academic College of Education, Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_24

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The chapter begins with a theorization of language-conducive strategies. It then goes on to propose and illustrate the classification of these strategies, addresses some issues in assessing the effectiveness of LCSs, and suggests directions for future research. The chapter concludes by summarizing the educational implications of the empirical evidence presented and highlights the proposed classification schema as a facilitative tool for teachers’ curriculum planning, language instruction process, and classroom management. Keywords

Language-conducive strategies · Novel language learning · Didactic strategies · Management strategies

Introduction In general, the nature of preschool teacher–child relationships predict growth in language skills (Pianta et al. 1997; Piker and Rex 2008). In this chapter, languageconducive strategies (hereafter LCSs; Schwartz 2018) are conceptualized as ecologically based, weaving together several types of support by teachers in early language education. The aim of this chapter is to synthesize existing research on teachers’ LCSs and their reported influence on children’s novel language production by a twofold classification of didactic and management strategies. Here, a novel language is defined as a language that is neither acquired nor maintained at home and is nondominant in the child’s close environment. Novel languages may be foreign languages, such as English or French that are widespread in certain Central and Eastern European countries; immigrant languages, such as Spanish in the United States; ethnic minority languages, such as Swedish – an official language of Finland – for native speakers of Finnish, and Arabic – an official language of Israel – for native speakers of Hebrew, as well as languages defined as socially nondominant, such as Irish, for native speakers of English outside the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland. Throughout this chapter, “novel language” is used as an umbrella term for minority language, majority language, second language (L2), or foreign language. In addition, for reasons of convention and brevity, “early language education” is used as an umbrella term for dual language education, heritage language education, L2-immersion education, or L2-medium education. Both novel language and early language education will be specified below, as appropriate to the languages and contexts under study. Similarly, in this chapter, for terminological and conceptual coherence, the term bilingualism will refer to both bilingualism and multilingualism. The first part of the chapter introduces and theorizes a concept of LCSs, followed by their classification and illustration. Based on the research analysis and on my personal experience as research-observer in preschool classrooms, a twofold schema is proposed to categorize teachers’ language-conducive strategies for children, for implementation in bilingual and monolingual preschool education frameworks: (1) didactic strategies, and (2) management strategies. Finally, some challenges in

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evaluating the effectiveness of LCSs are addressed and directions for future research are recommended.

Main Theoretical Concepts In this section, two phenomena are introduced: children’s and teachers’ overuse of socially dominant language and their fixation of receptive bilingual skills as possible sociolinguistic explanations for young children’s slow progress toward novel language production. This is followed by theorization of a concept of LCSs with reference to related concepts such as Gass and Mackey’s (2007) input-interactionoutput hypothesis and Epstein’s (2007) concept of intentional teacher and teacher agency.

Overuse of Socially Dominant Language and Fixation of Receptive Bilingual Skills Young children bring a biological and cognitive predisposition to language learning (Kim et al. 1997). Although age is an important factor for language learning, recent studies have shown that an early start per se is not a sufficient condition for developing productive skills in a novel language. Thus, even after 2 or 3 years of substantial high-quality teacher input in the target language, many children do not make the progress expected of them toward productive language use in the classroom context (e.g., DePalma 2010; Hickey et al. 2014; Murphy and Evangelou 2016; Schwartz and Gorbatt 2017; Schwartz 2018). This phenomenon challenges the claim that early age is the ultimate prerequisite for progress in a novel language and highlights the need to address sociolinguistic factors such as the nature of children’s social interactions with teachers and peers as well as the quality of teachers’ pedagogical strategies as critical to their actual speaking a novel language. Two phenomena that may be sociolinguistic explanations for young children’s slow progress toward L2 production are overuse of socially dominant language as a “common denominator” by children and teachers and children’s fixation of receptive bilingual skills. The first phenomenon was identified by Baker (2007), within a minority–majority context of Spanish–English dual language learning (a form of education in which students are taught in both languages) in the United States, as a tendency among children as well as teachers to overuse English as the majority language. Hence, due to its superior status, the majority language becomes the “common denominator” (Baker 2007, p. 138). In Baker’s (2011) example of a two-way Spanish–English language program, in which a mix of L1 Spanishspeaking and English-speaking children are taught in both languages to become bilingual, young L1 Spanish-speakers had to switch to English to work cooperatively with young L1 English-speakers in the same class. This resulted in marginalization of Spanish in the classroom. The phenomenon was observed also by Hickey (2001) in an early Irish immersion context, in which young L1 Irish users were

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surrounded by peers who spoke the majority language, English, which had higher status in the social context. Children as young as 4 years old appeared to show awareness of the status accorded to the languages in their environment. Thus, although the aim of this educational setting was to support Irish as an endangered language, the results showed that even young native Irish users code-switched to English with the L2 Irish learners rather than stimulating them to speak more Irish. The second phenomenon, fixation of receptive bilingual skills in the process of novel language learning, has been observed recently in the following three early language learning contexts: learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) (e.g., Lugossy 2018; Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018); learning a societally nondominant, minority language in the context of dual language education, and learning a societally dominant language in the context of monolingual education. The first context was reported regarding a widespread modern trend, in certain Central and Eastern European countries, to teach English in early educational settings due to parental pressure to introduce this language as early as possible. This trend is based on parents’ belief in “the younger the better” – that younger children would find learning EFL easier and would make faster progress than older children (Nikolov 2016). However, recent research reveals that, even after 2 years of intensive exposure to English in classrooms, young EFL learners’ productive language use considerably lagged behind their comprehension skills; thus, a phenomenon of receptive bilingualism fixation was largely evident (e.g., Lugossy 2018; Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018). For example, Prošić-Santovac and Radović (2018) showed that in a context of the “English only” rule during English time in preschool, L1 Serbian-speaking children showed collective agency by ignoring this rule and used their L1 to communicate with the English teacher. In this case, the children’s refusal to speak English was attributed to their protest against the imposed rule. In addition, Schwartz and Gorbatt (2017) observed the “common denominator” issue in the majority language in a bilingual Hebrew–Arabic-speaking preschool, where a clear discrepancy in L2 use was noticed between the children who were speakers of Hebrew (majority language) and Arabic (minority language). This resulted in slow progress in productive Arabic use among Hebrew-speaking children, even after 3 years of enrolment in this preschool with relatively large input in Arabic. The slow progress was attributed to the Hebrew-speaking children’s relatively low motivation to use L2 Arabic because the Arabic-speaking teachers and peers understood them in Hebrew. The second context is evident in monolingual early education settings, including children from diverse home linguistic backgrounds (e.g., Drury 2000). For example, in a recent study, Gorbatt-Brodstein (2012) focused on examining the stages of transition from different mother tongues (e.g., French, Russian, and Amharic) to L2 Hebrew among immigrant children in Israeli preschools. The data showed that, in many cases, it took more than 6 months for the 3- to 5-year-old novice L2 learners to start using Hebrew. This pattern was attributed to the amount of language input and output, the quality of teaching, and teacher
child and peer interaction during the first year of L2 learning. Thus, it appeared that although children demonstrate their understanding of teachers’ instructions by nonverbal communication (gestures, body

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language, vocal variations, and smiling), when stuck in the receptive stage, children rarely initiate verbal interaction in a novel language. To conclude, the contexts described above were characterized by relatively substantial input of the target language. However, children’s progress in productive use of their novel language was still relatively slow. The researchers believed that the children’s slow progress in production in the novel language was due to the quality of teachers’ instructional strategies (e.g., Gorbatt-Brodstein 2012; Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018; Savić 2016). Germane to these situations is the fact that the teachers’ awareness of these phenomena is not yet developed, even though the literature identifies the importance of children’s productive use for acquiring robust language and literacy skills in the target language.

Language-Conducive Strategies In this subsection, a definition of LCSs will be presented as well as my argument for introducing this novel concept instead of a concept such as language-support practices. Language-support practices were defined as general developmentally appropriate language practices, i.e., language-modeling and interaction-promotion, based on responsive teacher–child relationships and influence of language skills on children’s educational success (Burchinal et al. 2008) in a monolingual education context. At the same time, LCSs could be defined as concrete intentional classroom teaching acts aimed to conduce novel language production implemented by the teachers as proactive agents. Thus, this concept puts teacher agency at the center, positioning them as active agents, who are aware of the need not only to supply input in the target language but also to conduce its output. Thus, the teachers, as agents, aim to advance children from receptive bilingual skills to productive language use as a target and as a desirable stage in the language learning process during classroom interactions. As agents, teachers intentionally create ecological conditions that are conducive to productive use of the target language by means of specific strategies elaborated “to enhance children’s willingness to communicate” in a novel language (Schwartz 2018, p. 16). In line with an ecological approach toward novel language learning, Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov (2019) recently observed that, among preschool children, this willingness has a more central role than in the case of older learners “because the younger the learners are the more it matters what happens in the classroom” (p. 516). Moreover, their motivation for early language learning is related to the extent to which teachers are motivated to create a low-anxiety atmosphere leading to self-confidence and L2 production without fear and mental barriers (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019; Schwartz 2018). Haugen (2001) stressed that ecology of language is not how phonology, morphology, grammar, and lexicon of the novel language are taught and learned, but “a study of interactions between a given language and its environment” (p. 57). In the same vein, van Lier (2004) went on to claim that ecological language learning must be positioned in a learning environment. He asserted that language perception is a context-embedded process that “includes the combination of visual and auditory

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(and other: multisensory) information within a context of activity” (p. 84). Drawing on sociocultural theory, van Lier (2004) views the process of novel language learning and its perception as mediated by diverse teachers’ strategies (e.g., elicitation, verbal, and nonverbal encouragement) and physical and social environments (e.g., free play activity), which create a context conducive to learning the target language.

Input-Interaction-Output Hypothesis In the early 1980s, the field of second language learning was dominated by the comprehensible input hypothesis (Krashen 1984). Krashen asserted that “we acquire language in only one way: when we understand messages in that language, when we receive comprehensible input” (Krashen 1984, p. 61). Swain (1985) raised doubts about the validity of the comprehensible input hypothesis (Swain 1985), specifically about the argument that comprehensible input was “the only true cause of secondlanguage acquisition” (Krashen 1984, p. 61). Following her studies of French immersion students, Swain found that even in a case of substantial longitudinal L2 input, L2 French learners in Canada showed relatively low speaking and writing abilities. In this respect, Swain (2005) claimed that “output,” meaning an act of production, an action, or process is essential for learning a novel language. Furthermore, Swain (2005) stated that the L2 learners’ L2 production permits them to test their hypotheses about “how to say. . .their intent” (p. 476). Gass and Mackey (2007) synthesized previous research and underscored the centrality of interaction in L2 development. They formulated the input-interaction-output hypothesis to describe the L2 development process. When carefully planned and situated in classroom contexts, interactions “transcend individual factors and have been shown to be far more predictable for success among all learners, young and old” (Pica 2010, p. 5). Communication held in L2 engenders negotiation of meaning that helps L2 users become attentive to how effective they are in the attempt to convey messages. This attentiveness is critical to the learning process in an interaction, as it may lead the learner to reformulate inaccurate or unclear messages. In addition, classroom interactions provide an opportunity for the natural occurrence of repetitions, comprehension checks, receipt of feedback, requesting clarification, and recasting (Gass and Mackey 2014). Thus, the learner is actively engaged in metalinguistic reflection and negotiation of meaning. Turning back to the early language education context, teachers may use classroom interactions to enact strategies conducive to drawing out children’s production in a novel language. Through these interactions, children receive feedback from teachers and more competent L2 peers. As claimed by Swain (1985), this feedback is critical in the sense of “delivery of a message that is not only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently, and appropriately” (pp. 248–249).

Intentional Teacher as a Proactive Agent In order to develop and apply the LCSs, teachers must be intentional in their function. Epstein (2007) defined intentional teachers in general, not exclusively to the early

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language learning context, as those who “act with specific outcomes or goals in mind for children’s development and learning. Teachers need to be mindful of the role that they play in helping children to draw out their productive L2 skills. They must know when to use a given strategy to accommodate the different ways that individual children learn and the specific content they are learning” (p. 1). The overarching significance of this concept for my focus on the LCSs is that of teachers’ agentic intentionality. Thus, the teachers must meet the needs of children who show reluctance or unwillingness to use a novel language as well as of children who show interest and curiosity toward a novel language. Therefore, intentional teaching means appreciating where each child stands in terms of his or her L2 progress and the child’s degree of motivation to learn a novel language, and having a plan as to how to create the LCSs for the individual child (Epstein 2007). In this chapter, the notion of intentional teacher is comparative to a teacher as an active agent in early language education. In summary, this section formulated the two phenomena observed regarding novel language learning in preschool education in different countries: children’s overuse of socially dominant language and their fixation of receptive bilingual skills. This presentation was followed by a conceptual theorization of the LCSs and by a brief overview of the concept’s related prominent theoretical frameworks. The next section presents some prominent research contributions that anchor this concept, illustrating conceptualization of the LCSs.

Major Contributions In this section, a classification of the LCSs will be presented followed by illustrations of major contributions in this research domain. Based on the research analysis performed for the purposes of this chapter, a twofold schema for categorizing teachers’ LCSs for children is proposed that could be implemented in diverse preschool education settings: (1) didactic strategies, and (2) management strategies (see Table 1). Due to space limitations, the number of illustrations of each strategy was restricted to two. To paint a more comprehensive and authoritative picture of research on LCSs, the inclusion criteria for this analysis were diversity of sociolinguistic and educational contexts and the research methodology used as well as the novelty of data obtained. In the following sections, each category and its respective strategies will be described.

Didactic Strategies The first group includes didactic strategies deliberately aimed at conducing L2 production during diverse classroom activities and focuses on the teaching–learning process itself. The following didactic strategies will be discussed: elicitation, ritual repletion, use of body movement and the Total Physical Response method, and teacher mediated sociodramatic play.

Ritual repetitions

Elicitation strategies such as questioning and stimulating children’s utterances were observed. The study points out that production of more complex utterances in L2 was elicited by means of Why and How questions as opposite to Yes/No questions

Södergård (2008) aimed to gain insight into how language learning can be promoted in a Swedish immersion context among young Finnish users in Finland. The data were collected longitudinally by conducting ethnographic observations of the immersion teacher’s strategies in natural classroom interaction Fleta (2019) investigated the potential use of picture books for eliciting children’s spontaneous speech production during face-to-face conversational interaction. Data were collected for a 2.5-year study of four Spanish-speaking children learning English as L2 in immersion classrooms with 90% of the instruction in L2

Analysis of the recorded conversations with children showed that the interactive discussions around picture books drew out L2, and fueled children to use it productively. The most successful type of picture book to elicit L2 from the children was the pop-up picture book with flaps. Behind these flaps, the visual representation of the words was presented. Fleta assumed that “this type of book brought the element of surprise to the sessions, increased the conversations and kept children more interested and more interactive orally and kinesthetically” (p. 257) The researcher identified three components of the routine format: the sequential structure with children taking turns to hold the English-speaking puppet, greeting the classmates and the target child responding to their questions. After 1 year of short weekly exposure to the routine format, children were able to reproduce it confidently not only in the morning circle time context with the English teacher, but also outside the English sessions, during free play and, in particular, in familiar circumstances such as when the weather was windy and stormy

Annotations

Context

Mourão (2015a, b) Mourão explored the role of routine language activities in monolingual preschools in Portugal with weekly low-exposure English teaching during short sessions

Fleta (2019)

Strategy Study Didactic strategies Elicitation Södergård (2008)

Table 1 Selected studies on language-conducive strategies in bilingual and monolingual education of bilingual children

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Body movements and Total Physical Response

Rodas Reinbach (2011)

Tellier (2008)

Hannan (2016)

Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education (continued)

Drawing on Clarke’s (1996) concept of “routinised formulae,” Hannan elaborated on a concept of scripted routines. Scripted routines were defined by the researcher as classroom routines providing a stable context for “same sequence of formulaic phrases, and frame and cue the response expected from the child routines and formulaic language” (p. 314). Whereas the teacher’s part in the routinized script enactment was repetitive and formulaic, the children went beyond what was scripted and gave responses drawn from the wider linguistic repertoire to which they were exposed. Thus, the teacher’s intentional implementation of this language-conducive strategy afforded productive Italian use The innovation of Tellier’s (2008) study was in Although the study did not focus directly on teachers’ exploring whether gestures affect active knowledge of strategies in early language learning settings, it has L2 vocabulary. In this experimental study, 20 L1 French- important implications for language-conducive speaking children (age range 4;11–5;10) were taught pedagogy. It showed that the gesture group did eight English words: one group (10 children) learned the significantly better than the picture group in the words with pictures and another group (10 children) assessments measuring productive knowledge of the learned the words with accompanying gestures. Each novel L2 words. The author concluded that when child underwent four training sessions (one session per children imitate gestures and operate them as a motor week) and was asked to repeat the English words he or modality, they have a stronger impact on novel word she heard. In the gestures group, the children were asked production than pictures (a visual modality) to imitate the gestures while repeating the novel words Total Physical Response Storytelling as a strategy for The results showed that, in general, children enjoyed teaching English as a foreign language to preschool moving around and playing when they were repeating children (ages 4–5). This strategy was applied to a group and acting out the novel words. More specifically, of 13 children in 18 sessions over a period of 3 months. introducing the mini-story with illustrations and puppets During these sessions, the intervention program urged the children to ask yes/no and WH questions about combined storytelling as an age-appropriate activity, the story. In addition, with time, a growth in language

This empirically rich longitudinal case study was conducted in an Italian preschool in Australia from 2009–2016. The project explored the author’s personal pedagogical experience as a preschool classroom teacher of Italian as L2 and environmentally nondominant language for young native speakers of English as well as a heritage language for children with Italian heritage and who, in some cases, were introduced to it for the first time in the preschool, and were therefore learning Italian as a novel language

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Study

Annotations

Drawing on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, the study explores how teachers as proactive agents struggle to promote the use of L2 Arabic as a minority language by L1 Hebrew-speaking children in a dual language (Hebrew–Arabic) preschool in Israel. Weekly ethnographic observations were conducted throughout one academic year, including video recordings of the teacher
child conversations and in-depth interviews with teachers and children. The quantitative analysis examined the frequency of the teachers’ observed mediation strategies and was combined with their qualitative analysis

using TPR to make learning interesting and meaningful production was measured by children’s answers to WH for children. The new vocabulary was presented through questions visual and verbal explanations and was limited to a few words in a mini-story through picture books and TPR

Context

The explicit request that the Hebrew-speaking children use the social minority language Arabic was the teachers’ most frequent L2 mediation strategy. The Hebrew-language teacher reported her awareness of the weaker position of Arabic due to overwhelming dominance of Hebrew in the children’s linguistic environment. This awareness resulted in her persistent support of the use of Arabic by the L1 Hebrew-speaking children in tandem with the Arabic-language teacher’s efforts. Importantly, the Hebrew-language teacher was a behavioral model of the adult L2 learner. As the teachers observed, this behavioral pattern motivated the Hebrewspeaking children to use Arabic Teacher mediated Elvin et al. (2007) Elvin et al. (2007) reported an analysis of the “Polly Put The observations showed that Polly and the children sociodramatic play the Kettle On: English in Kindergarten” project, which became sociodramatic play partners. The teacher ran in Norway through 2002–2006 for preschool supported English production by dramatization of children. The aim of the project was to expose children British cultural experiences such as participating in a tea to English through developmentally appropriate party or going on a picnic. Through repeated strategies. It was enacted twice a week during one participation in these cultural scripts, children learned academic year by a native English-speaking teacher, words and expressions connected with drinking tea and Polly, in game format with role plays, song games, and having a picnic. In addition, after a while, some children language mediated activities such as films and pictures progressed from using formulaic phrases such as “yes, please” to asking questions spontaneously and expanding formulaic utterances

Management strategies Explicit request to Schwartz and use a target Gorbatt (2017) language

Strategy

Table 1 (continued)

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Mourão (2019)

Providing time and Hirschler (1994) facilities for intergroup peer interaction and supporting peer language learning

Creating language areas

Alstad and Kulbrandstad (2017) The researchers observed that the teacher repeated the whole sequence of play several times by changing roles with the child. With the child’s progress in production of target utterances, she gradually reduced her leading role in this activity and introduced another child to replace herself. By so doing, the teacher could evaluate the child’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky 1978) and mediate this development

Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education (continued)

Mourão (2019) showed that child-initiated play in the English language area, after formal instruction through teacher-led activities in English, strengthened their ability to use the target language productively. Drawing on familiar language games such as “slot-and-frame” constructions, the children not only repeated formulas learned by playing with their English teacher but also showed moving from the formulaic stage toward productive language use In this unique ethnographic intervention study, five The researcher reported that the five target children spent native speakers of English (three boys and two girls) increasing lengths of time playing in groups that were trained individually to initiate frequent and efficient included two or more L2 learners. However, the native interactions with second-language learners in a mixed- speakers showed wide variability in the nature of their age preschool classroom in the United States. The interaction (time spent together, initiations per hour, children were taught discourse strategies such as talk responses to initiation, turns per hour and utterances per initiation, and reinitiation, slower rate of speech, better turn with L2 learners). This variability was observed pronunciation, requesting clarification, recasting, and regarding the clear gender differences, e.g., girls tended expansion to initiate interactions with L2 learners about three times as frequently as boys did. In addition, the girls produced 10 times as many turns of talk in conversations with L2s than the boys did, and “the rate of turns per minute was more than 5 times greater for girls than for boys” (p. 232). Hirschler concluded that the teacher’s task is to

The study explored language strategies applied by the teacher engaged in teaching L2 Norwegian to immigrant children in a monolingual preschool in Norway. By drawing on sociodramatic play to conduce decontextualized L2 use, the proactive teacher played the role of language model for the children learning L2. As an L2 model, the teacher applied diverse discourse strategies to improve children’s comprehensive output, e.g., recasting, expansion, asking elicitation questions Mourão (2019) analyzed how managing a language area in preschool classrooms with weekly low-exposure English teaching might promote children’s progress in the target language

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Table 1 (continued)

Alanís (2013)

Study

Annotations

promote interactions between native speakers of the target language and its learners by explicit training of native speakers to be more sensitive communication partners and to adjust their language to meet the needs of peers with less proficiency in a novel language In her papers, Alanís explored a critical question of how Alanís (2013) highlighted the teachers’ role in pairing to build optimal conditions for successful cooperation bilingual children to provide effective cooperation in between novices and experts. The research was inspired Spanish–English dual language classrooms. Teachers by the researcher’s rich personal experience as a former paired children who showed better language skills with teacher in Spanish–English dual language programs in less competent peers to improve target language the United States production skills. Pairing was found to be the ideal group size for cooperative language learning because it guarantees more opportunities for children to communicate. The researcher concluded that in building pairs, teachers need to consider whether both children will feel comfortable and willing to cooperate. In this case, a less competent language partner feels confident to make mistakes. In addition, this study underscored teachers’ need to provide explicit modelling of activities before onset of work in pairs

Context

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Encouraging parental engagement

Dubiner et al. (2018)

During this project, parental involvement was encouraged by inviting them to borrow English books as well as copies of songs and films to take home. In this way, parents can be informed of what was learned during classroom activities with the English teacher, as well as speaking English and playing in English with their children at home. Parents’ comments revealed that children produced spontaneous English words and expressions when travelling in English-speaking countries. However, the researchers did not conduct interviews with parents to examine their reflections on the project since a teacher–parent interaction was beyond the scope of this study For 5 months, this study followed the teachers’ project of The teachers reported that children whose parents took language model change aimed to enhance willingness to part in Arabic lessons in school, after the start of the use L2 Arabic among 4–6-year-old Hebrew-speaking project in February, showed greater willingness to use it children enrolled in a bilingual Hebrew–Arabicproductively. Thus, the teachers viewed parents’ active speaking preschool in Israel enthusiastic engagement in Arabic language learning as a significant factor in their children’s progress in L2. Unfortunately, most parents were rather passive in their children’s learning process and relied only on the teachers. The conclusion is that teachers need to conceptualize their vision of parental involvement explicitly and to provide structural management for parents as to how their children’s L2 learning could be supported at home

Elvin et al. (2007) As addressed above, this project focused on exposure to English as a foreign language in the Norwegian preschool. In their reports on the project, Elvin et al. (2007) referred to teachers’ reflections on parental feedback during project implementation

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Elicitation Elicitation is a language conducive strategy that encourages children’s language production and usage of its correct forms during natural conversational interaction with teachers (Lightbown and Spada 2013). The teacher uses the child’s word and then develops verbal constructions to expand and extend his or her L2 production (e.g., Fleta 2018; Tabors 2008). The teacher could also offer the beginning of an utterance and ask the child to complete it “by delaying speech, by pausing, and by giving children time to think of an answer” (Fleta 2018). An elicitation can be supplied by means of questioning and “false statements that the children took great delight in correcting” (Mhic Mhathúna 2008, p. 301). In addition, teachers often provide stimulus using visuals (e.g., pictures/photography, picture books) and technology (e.g., digital images, interactive whiteboard) to stimulate language production (e.g., Britsch 2009; Fleta 2019; Mourão 2015a, b, 2019; Whyte and Cutrim Schmid 2018). Picture books convey meaning by integrating illustrations and narrative, activating children’s understanding of a novel language. Face-to-face conversational interaction around narratives and illustrations play a role in children’s spontaneous speech production (Fleta 2019). Britsch (2009) views photography, another visual language elicitation tool, as a nonverbal tool: “. . . much more than a support to the verbal, instead it became a central means of organizing and conveying meanings” (p. 717). Furthermore, he claims that multimodality in general, and photography in particular, encourage children to express their ideas and share their life experiences in L2, thus promoting their productive language use. Therefore, a process of novel language learning “must be seen as essentially multimodal instead of essentially linguistic” (Britsch 2010, p. 174). To illustrate this, Keat et al. (2009) found that the photo-narration activity with immigrant children learning English as L2 in preschool in the United States boosted the children’s ability to convey information to the teacher about life at home. In this study, the children were asked to take pictures of what was important to them in their lives outside the classroom and to describe them to the teacher. Finally, in current preschool language learning programs in different countries, teachers show intentional use of diverse associative mediators as a strategy for introducing a novel language and its elicitation (e.g., Alstad and Tkachenko 2018; Barzsó 2008; Schwartz et al. 2020). This elicitation strategy has been defined as using “cues [that] activate overlapping representations of the sensory, or motivational, features of their common outcome” (Liljeholm and Balleine 2010, p. 165). By means of multisensory activation, these cues could promote young children’s intrinsic motivation to use a novel language (Schwartz et al. 2020). To illustrate this, Alstad and Tkachenko (2018) reported using a well-known L2-speaking teddy bear character as an associative mediator, in several monolingual preschools in Norway where English is taught as L2. The researchers reported that classroom teachers used this associated mediator to symbolize English for the children. The presence of this L2-speaking character in different areas of the classroom and during various activities provided many occasions for the children to use English productively.

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Ritual Repetition Ritual repetition is a strategy that promotes routine language use at specific times in the classroom, such as when answering the register or asking to go to the bathroom. The ritual repetition or routinized formulas (Clarke 1996) were defined as a relatively constant sequence of words, frequently built on formulaic chunks and repeatedly used by teachers and children in daily interactions in the preschool classroom (Clarke 1996; Hannan 2016; Wong Fillmore 1976). Importantly, research shows that these formulaic chunks repeated by the novice language learners is a crucial component of preschool children’s successful progress toward L2 production (e.g., Clarke 1996; Hannan 2016; Schwartz et al. 2020; Wray 2000). Teachers can use ritual repetition by storytelling and retelling (Mhic Mhathúna 2008). In an ethnographic study, Mhic Mhathúna (2008) showed how an increase in children’s use of L2 Irish was achieved through the teacher’s use of storytelling in Irish over a 6-month period. The teachers encouraged “the children’s one-word contributions in Irish by repeating them and then expanding them into whole sentences” (p. 302). Repetitive language in these storybooks, together with the children’s active engagement, promoted formulaic L2 learning and provided a basis for the children’s language practice in Irish. Recently, Schwartz and Deeb (2018) suggested differentiating between two types of ritual repetitions. One type is characterized by formulaic sequences frequently memorized from songs; rhymes that are not supported by contextual clues and, as a result, are often holistically retrievable without drawing on analytical processing, and promoting L2 production (e.g., Coyle and Gómez Gracia 2014; Prošić-Santovac and Radović 2018). The second type includes ritual repetitions that are reiterated by teachers intentionally in their conversational interactions with children as a springboard to L2 production. For example, a teacher can model the repetition of a formula in L2 to children, such as “I like eating” and adding a favorite vegetable, fruit, etc., “I like eating cucumbers/tomatoes/carrots” and expanding and modifying the formula thus: “I like eating pickled cucumbers” (Schwartz et al. 2020). In this context, in a recent comprehensive overview of language teachers’ strategies, Lo Bianco et al. (2019) highlighted the role of so-called slot-and-frame constructions such as “‘I went to the market and I bought ________’ (slot in an item such as ‘a duck’)” in drawing out L2 production (p. 82). These constructions consist “of a phrase in which the grammar and most of the content is fixed, but one item can be swapped in and out to create new grammatically and semantically functional utterances” (Lo Bianco et al. 2019, p. 81). This type of ritual repetition thereby pushes the child to create new output by slotting a range of L2 words, encouraging L2 production. Use of Body Movement and Total Physical Response Research in cognitive psychology has emphasized that enactment of new words and phrases during their learning leaves more traces in the memory system and makes them richer and more salient and, therefore, easier to retrieve (e.g., Engelkamp and Zimmer 1985). Moreover, Engelkamp and Zimmer (1985) suggested that the enactment effect on memory and retention might be attributed to a characteristic that encompasses motor modality, namely, encoding of target items involves a verbal

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modality, a visual modality, and a motor modality. This assumption seems highly plausible given the growing number of neuroscientific studies uncovering that lexical representation in our brains is experiential based, which in turn is connected to the body (Macedonia 2014). In addition, recent neuroimaging research has presented evidence that retrieval following enacted encoding is associated with motor brain regions that are more active during this type of encoding than during verbal encoding (Nyberg et al. 2002). These neurocognitive data have been recently supported by experimental research, showing that children’s activation of motor modality (gestures, body enactment, movement) together with visual and language modality not only improves understanding and memorization of novel lexical items, but also conduces their production (e.g., Tellier 2008). One of the best-known strategies that activate motor modality is Total Physical Response (TPR). Initially elaborated by Asher (1969) for improving L2 understanding and listening skills by means of listen-and-do motor acts, originally, the TPR included a sequence of simple instructions such as “stand up,” “walk,” “jump,” and ending with a more complex utterance. Later, this strategy was applied for conducing L2 production as well among young language learners (e.g., Rodas Reinbach 2011). In addition to possible neurocognitive effect of multimodality, it is plausible that body enactment and movement by means of the TPR strategy is developmentally appropriate and, as a result, influences young children’s intrinsic motivation to participate in activities conducted in L2. For example, Brumen (2011) examined the motivation of young children, who were engaged in learning foreign languages (English, German) within the Network Innovative Project implemented in several preschools in Slovenia. In this project, the teachers intentionally and deliberately implemented diverse language strategies, including TPR, to promote learning of the target foreign languages that were not supported by children’s close environments. The semi-structured interview for the 120 children showed that 92.5% responded that they enjoyed activities involving body enactment during novel language learning, namely, the TPR strategy: “‘It was fun when we moved like snails,’. . .”‘I like spinning in the circle and presenting the butterfly’” (p. 726). To watch a teacher applying this strategy in a classroom, see the following link: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼1Mk6RRf4kKs. To conclude, the use of TPR seemed to foster intrinsic motivation in a direct way. To summarize, this subsection presented three didactic LCSs that can be characterized as developmentally appropriate and multimodal because they draw on verbal and nonverbal stimulus and employ diverse technological tools to encourage production in a novel language.

Management Strategies Going back to the role of classroom ecology in learning a novel language, in this subsection, focus will be on the role of teachers’ management strategies for encouraging L2 productive use. In general, effective classroom management sets the stage for optimal learning and has a strong impact on children’s achievements. Classroom

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management is defined as teachers’ ability to establish and maintain order in a classroom, “to engage students, or elicit their cooperation” (Emmer and Stough 2001, p. 103). At early ages, children do not want to do an activity because they think of its possible future benefits, but because it is fun and they enjoy discovering things. Drawing on this theoretical claim, I assert that the LCSs related to teachers’ management play a critical role in fueling children’s willingness and positive attitudes toward the process of listening to and speaking a novel language (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). In this chapter, the following classroom-management strategies will be reviewed: explicit request to use a target language, teacher mediated sociodramatic play, creating language areas, providing time and facilities for intergroup peer interaction and supporting peer language learning, and encouraging parental engagement.

Explicit Request to Use a Target Language Insisting strategies or explicit requests to use a target language require the child to answer in that language (Döpke 1992). Focusing on promoting Swedish language production in a Swedish immersion context among young Finnish users in Finland, Södergård (2008) revealed that the teacher used indirect approaches to encourage Swedish use. Particularly, the teacher avoided explicitly requesting L2 use and instead, invented a system of “signals” in the form of questions, such as: What? What did you say? These signals were intended to provide signs to the children, reminding them that they are expected to answer in the L2 rather than the L1. The teacher did not believe it was necessary either to inform the children explicitly that Swedish was a novel language or to develop their awareness of the distinction between languages. Yet, as stated by the researcher, the monitored signals were frequently unclear to the children, and the teacher had to repeat her signifying questions several times until they understood that they were being asked to use Swedish (L2) instead of Finnish (L1). This implicit request to use the target language was critically addressed in another recent study by Dubiner, Deeb, and Schwartz (2018), which showed that teachers’ clearly formulated expectations of children speaking L1 Hebrew as a majority language to use Arabic as a minority language often achieved a positive outcome. This proactive agentic behavior by teachers is directed not only to conduce minority language production but also to empower the status of this language in the macro context of unequal sociolinguistic relations between socially dominant and nondominant languages (Palmer and Martínez 2013). Teacher-Mediated Sociodramatic Play The productive use of a novel language may be enhanced during sociodramatic play (dressing up, playing house, and playing schools including modeling and imitation of their L2 model teachers). Behavioral modeling allows teachers to extend the language patterns children learned from them by elucidating an example of their use in the language classroom. This modeling exemplifies not only patterns of L2 use but also patterns of L2 learning such as imitation, repetition, asking questions, and erroneous production (e.g., Cameron 2001). Such behavior can be defined as a form of scaffolding, conducted as another means to support learning a novel

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language (De León 2012). Vygotsky (1978, 1987) and one of his followers, Bruner (1986), viewed the concept of scaffolding as a type of mediation strategy and synonymous with the process of adult
child interaction. In the context of L2 learning, the teacher scaffolds the children’s talk to allow their participation at a level suited to their capabilities. Why is sociodramatic play, as a type of classroom activity, so favorable for language production compared with other types of free play? First, sociodramatic play may increase L2 production because of the significant potential of peer talk. As indicated by Blum-Kulka and Snow (2004), peer talk is a way to offer children “a wide range of opportunities for mutual learning of pragmatic as well as linguistic skills” (p. 294). Peer talk allows “more equal participant structure of peer groups,” which may promote peer language imitation and modeling, and therefore encourage productive L2 use (Blum-Kulka and Snow 2004, p. 298). Second, based on Vygotsky’s (1978) claim that “a child moves forward through play” (p. 103), Bodrova (2008) claimed that sociodramatic play creates an opportunity for oral language development during preschool age since this type of activity is characterized by a higher level of linguistic engagement than other activities, e.g., sports games. During this play, children create their own model of reality by imitating adult means of communication – speech, intonation, and gestures (Elkonin 1978). In addition, Elkonin (1978) identified that sociodramatic play supports the development of intentional behaviors that in turn demand that children voluntarily follow the rules of play. Through teacher-mediated sociodramatic play, the teacher may mediate target language production by applying scaffolding strategies such as modeling, corrective feedback, and elicitation (see Table 1). To recap, teachers serve as behavioral models and, by doing so, scaffold L2 production by explicitly expecting children to use a target language and by modeling L2 words and expressions through teacher-initiated sociodramatic play.

Creating a Language Area Creating a language-conducive context is one of most important tasks for teachers to conduce target language use. Language-conducive classroom contexts have been defined “as contexts rich in multisensory activities with a wide array of semiotic resources and diverse teacher–child and peer interactions, encouraging the child’s engagement in the novel language learning” (Schwartz 2018, p. 6). The aim of establishing and managing these classroom contexts is to improve comprehensibility of linguistic information and to enhance the children’s L2 production (van Lier 2004). One example of such contexts is a language area that has been defined as a “facility that is organized to stimulate children’s natural use of the target language items that are presented in the teacher-led activities” (Robinson et al. 2015, p. 12). This organization of the preschool space is intended to generate children’s subsequent autonomous and natural use of the target language by utilizing the language resources they found there. Interestingly, Waddington, Coto Bernal, and Siqués Jofré (2018) recently found that free play in the language area was a source of inspiration for children who were less active during teacher-led structured English activities in a preschool classroom in Catalunya. These children were observed “to be much more

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confident using English in the learning area and seemed to actively enjoy imitating their classmates, who helped them and showed them how to play” (p. 342). To conclude, research shows that creation of resourced language areas is a task for intentional teachers to fuel children’s motivation to play with puppets and other requisites that remind them of activities led by their L2 teacher. These classroom areas encourage children to recall words and phrases associated with a target language.

Providing Time and Facilities for Intergroup Peer Interaction and Supporting Peer Language Learning Children’s learning of a novel language can be positively stimulated and enhanced through daily interactions with native-speaking peers or with those more advanced in L2. Recent studies have shown that, from an early age, children demonstrate readiness to help other children. Focusing on classroom peer support in L2 learning, in a recent study, Erdemir and Brutt-Griffler (2020) showed that young novice L2 learners’ L2 English production was facilitated through peer-to-peer conversations during one academic year in a monolingual preschool in the United States. The most progress in L2 production was observed during interaction with peers who displayed slow-paced conversational patterns and used diverse topic-related artefacts to negotiate the meaning of words and to conduce their production. Blum-Kulka and Snow (2004) drew attention to the fact that, as language “teachers,” peers create the possibility of an equal participant structure whereas teacher-child interaction is asymmetric and provides less opportunity for reciprocal exchanges (p. 298). They asserted that interaction between L2 experts and novice L2 learners offers both groups of children “a wide range of opportunities for mutual learning of pragmatic as well as linguistic skills” (Blum-Kulka and Snow 2004, p. 294). Novice language learners are guided by experts toward requisite linguistic knowledge, and with time and progress in the target language, the novices demonstrate expert L2 skills (e.g., Angelova et al. 2006). When pairing children who are novices or less competent in the target languages with experts, it is crucial to think about the reason for pairing and the expected outcome (Kelly 2015). Kelly (2015) illustrated a case of unsuccessful pairing of Spanish-speaking children learning English as L2 with their peers who were either more advanced in L2 or native English speakers. The teacher grouped the children without explaining the aim of this cooperation. As a result, few cases of L2 scaffolding were observed and, unfortunately, little authentic language interaction was evident between the partners. “In most pairs, the English-speaking child hurried through the activity and wanted to leave the table, while the DLL (dual language learners) sat looking confused” (Kelly 2015, pp. 8–9). An empirical answer to a critical question of how to build efficient cooperation between novices and experts can be found in a study by Alanís (2013), reviewed in Table 1. Encouraging Parental Engagement Recently, Bergroth and Palviainen (2016) indicated the importance of examining the role of teacher–parent interaction and its considerable potential impact on early

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bi/multilingual development and education. Taking Epstein’s (2011) concept of educational partnership as a fruitful ground, the researchers suggested a novel concept of partnership for bilingualism, which focused on how parents and the surrounding ethnolinguistic community and teachers negotiate and work for the children and their bilingual development in education. Epstein (2011) suggested that this partnership is particularly evident during the child’s development in preschool and the early years in elementary school. Epstein (2011) called to replace the old ways of thinking about parental involvement with innovative ways of organizing effective programs incorporating school, family, and surrounding community partnerships. She claimed that children’s academic progress is a result of overlapping spheres of influence of home, school, and community, which share the responsibility for their success. Active parental engagement may include involvement such as communicating, volunteering, learning with the child at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community both at school and at home. This engagement may result in parents’ tendency to increase their own natural communication in a target language and to support teachers’ efforts to inspire productive language use among young children, as in the case of Irish as an endangered minority language in Ireland (see Hickey 1999b). Teachers could initiate a partnership with parents even in the case of no parental competence in a target language by suggesting that they listen to songs in that language with children at home or play the role of enthusiastic students who wish to learn the L2. Drawing on theoretical assumptions briefly outlined above, Table 1 presents two recent initiatives for creating teacher–parent partnerships to influence children’s progress in learning a novel language. To conclude, the aim of this subsection was to conceptualize three classroommanagement strategies to promote productive use of a novel language: creating a language area, stimulating peer language learning, and encouraging parental engagement. In classrooms with different levels of competence in a target language, teachers may mediate the learning environment by establishing a language area and by encouraging pairing between novice L2 learners with peers with higherthan-average ability in the target language. Concerning an educational partnership between teachers and parents, the teachers’ task is to construct it gradually based on mutual communication and respect and keeping in mind parents’ perspectives and cultural values of education (Hsieh 2011).

New Projects At the time of writing, information is available on the contributions of only a few new projects investigating strategies defined in this chapter as language-conducive. The first cohort of current studies focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of early foreign language education in Europe. A particular focus of these studies is the prevalent modern tendency to teach English as a foreign language in preschools due to parental pressure and the belief that it will be advantageous for the children’s economic future (Nikolov 2010). Some sought to identify teacher strategies that conduce English production “in situations in which young children encountered the

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target language mostly within the classroom context and was not supported by the children’s home and close environment” (Schwartz 2018, pp. 15–16). To illustrate this, the current research project run by Prošić-Santovac and Radović (in preparation) focuses on how teachers develop and incorporate developmentally appropriate and child-centered strategies, using authentic teaching materials, to increase children’s intrinsic motivation to use English productively. The second area of research is a less examined domain of enquiry in the context of early educational revitalization of endangered languages. A current swing in this research domain is toward investigations on micro and mezzo levels by zooming in on the family, community, and educators’ efforts to maintain endangered languages. For example, drawing on an ecological perspective to language learning and the ethnographic approach toward data collection, Smith-Christmas and Ruiséal (2019) showed how Irish Gaelic, as an endangered language, was established under interactionally authoritative conditions as a language of reciprocal interaction between family members, community, and preschool education settings, naoinra, in Gaeltacht (primarily Irish-speaking areas) in Ireland (https://folklife.si.edu/smile/ irish). This project is part of the large-scale interdisciplinary program – Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe – established by the Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage. The project seeks to examine endangered language revitalization initiatives in Europe. The naoinra adopts an immersion approach whereby the teacher engages children in inspiring, developmentally appropriate, and pleasurable activities through the medium of Irish (Hickey 1999a). One target of these settings is to strengthen the children’s positive emotional relationship with Irish, which could be achieved by engaging parents and children in drama and music in and after class activities in Irish. The teachers encourage parents to use Irish in a natural context of daily fun home activities such as arts and crafts, farming, or cooking together.

Critical Issues and Topics In this section, attention will be drawn to several problematic issues in the empirical study of LCSs. First, although the aim of the current analysis was not to address all existing research on language teaching strategies, but instead to focus on selected studies reporting strategies conducive to children’s L2 production, I found this analysis challenging since the data set is still rather limited. This is due to the complexity of organizing research on teachers’ strategies in a preschool context, the great variability of learning contexts and models, and the relative novelty of the target research domain. More specifically, few studies used valid quantitative measures to capture children’s progress in L2 production. Most of the studies analyzed above were context-embedded and therefore provide a context-dependent teaching experience that is difficult to generalize to other populations (Lo Bianco et al. 2019). The studies applied a qualitative methodology, frequently adopting longitudinal ethnographic observations. Consequently, the efficacy of the observed strategies was impossible to quantify, with no option for statistical generalization and comparison, and it was evaluated through description of children’s progress in novel

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language production. Finally, the studies referred to did not provide a report of longitudinal perspectives on learners’ trajectories over the observed classroom period. Nonetheless, the presented analysis identified several arguments supporting the choice of the ethnographic method in many studies presented above. First, the credibility of the ethnographic observations was enhanced by different types of triangulation: diversity of data collection methods, data sources, and participants. Second, these studies’ particular value is in theoretical generalization and “the opportunity to shed empirical light about some theoretical concepts or principles . . . that go beyond the setting for the specific case” (Yin 2014, p. 40), as well as in practical generalization, i.e., lessons that could be learned (Yin 2014). Finally, to gain insight into how language production can be promoted in diverse language learning contexts, researchers need to enter classrooms and study how authentic verbal and nonverbal interaction between teachers and children works. This data collection process can be achieved only by in-depth longitudinal observations of the teachers’ LCSs. Returning to a critical issue, it is important to bear in mind that one size does not fit all, and there is a substantial need to learn how teachers can adjust LCSs for children from various cultural contexts and with different learning styles. This research might shed light on what is universal and what is context specific and individually matched in terms of teachers’ didactic, and management strategies. In addition, this research may define inefficient strategies as opposed to the current overwhelming tendency to present merely the teachers’ “best experience.” Finally, although classroom teachers are viewed as the anchors of the learning process, other forces are essential for reaching the desired pedagogical goals explored in this chapter, namely, preschool managers, pedagogical instructors, and policy makers. These forces together might create a collective agency, where a “multiagent mode” is employed and people “achieve unity of effort for common cause within diverse self-interests and coordination of distributed subfunctions across a variety of individuals” (Bandura 2008, pp. 92–93). Today, however, no data exist on how this collective agency can influence the process, i.e., how teacher agency interacts with higher echelons with decision-making power, i.e., the management of a knowledge distributing institution. Therefore, it is important not only to look at what individual teachers are able or unable to do to create languageconducive contexts in their classrooms but also to look at “the cultures, structures and relationships that shape the particular ‘ecologies’ within which teachers work” (Priestly et al. 2015, p. 3).

Future Research Directions In this section, some area for future investigation will be presented by drawing on the discussion about the LCSs thus far. At the theoretical level, addressing a link between teachers’ didactic as well as behavioral patterns and young language learners’ motivation to use a novel language productively is an important and

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unexplored research agenda. Recently, Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov (2019) revealed that, similarly to what we know about school-age language learners, current scarce data on young language learners show that, among this population, motivation has a central role. For example, in a study of 6- to 14-year-old foreign language learners on causes of motivation in the classroom, it was found that they fluctuate depending on age and that for the young language learners, the following was necessary: “classes must be fun and the teacher is in focus” (Nikolov 1999, p. 53). Building on this finding, it can be assumed that teacher enthusiasm and commitment are vital for the promotion of children’s intrinsic motivation to learn a novel language (Mihaljević Djigunović and Nikolov 2019). Further research is necessary to explore how teachers, as agents, create a language-conducive context in interaction with the children’s agency to enhance their motivation to learn a novel language. At the practical level, one clear message from recent research on teachers’ LCSs is that no strategy stands alone; rather, the interplay and conjoint implementation of didactic, and management strategies has a better chance of making an impact. Further research is necessary to investigate how teachers manage the complex orchestration of diverse strategies, along with an awareness of how strategies are accepted and perceived by children. The latter issue is related to a critical question of how the presented strategies appeal to a variety of children’s learning styles in the classroom. Thus, today, understanding is lacking of how individual differences between the children and their interactional characteristics influence their mode of engagement as agents in L2 production during diverse LCSs.

Conclusions In this chapter, I aspired to ground LCSs in theoretical perspectives of two classroom phenomena – overuse of socially dominant language and fixation of the receptive bilingual skills – as well as Gass and Mackey’s (2007) input-interaction-output hypothesis, and Epstein’s (2007) concept of intentional teacher and teacher agency. The theorization of the LCSs was followed by proposing a twofold schema for their categorization: (1) didactic strategies, and (2) classroom-management strategies. At the theoretical level, the proposed schema might serve as a model for further research designs in this domain. Current research focused mainly on application of a single language-conducive strategy to analyze a context-dependent teaching experience. Drawing on the analyzed data, future research is recommended to provide a quantitative comparison between applied strategies with children’s productive language use as a dependent variable to supply statistical generalization for the observed strategies. At the practical level, the languages covered in the studies presented above ranged from languages of immigrant and ethnic minorities such as Spanish and Swedish, endangered languages such as Irish, and English as the most widespread foreign language in the world. Concerning diversity of the educational contexts, the chapter addressed a range of language programs for young learners, e.g., dual language programs where the target language is a majority and a socially dominant

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language, and a minority and socially nondominant language; EFL programs and immersion programs for heritage language enrichment. With such an array of language models and programs, the proposed classification schema may facilitate teachers’ curriculum planning and enhance efficiency of their language instruction process and classroom management. Finally, the chapter highlights that the teachers’ task is to build on parents’ and peers’ engagement by keeping parents’ and children’s agentic perspectives and needs in mind.

Cross-References ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Disorders Among Children with Developmental Disorders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No Double Deficits for Multilingual Children with Special Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Advantage of Maintaining the Heritage Language: Beyond Language Capacity . . . . . . . . . . Crosslinguistic Transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assessment of Multilingual Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intervention of Multilingual Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Effect of Therapy in the Societal Language on the Heritage Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Therapy in Both Languages Does Not Slow Progress in the Societal Language . . . . . . . . . . The Value of Treating the Heritage Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Directions for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Today, more than half of the world’s children are raised multilingual, which poses diagnostic and interventional dilemmas to providers for children with special needs. This chapter discusses issues related to multilingual language assessment and intervention in early education. According to the best practice guidelines of R. Novogrodsky (*) Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel e-mail: [email protected] N. Meir Department of English Literature and Linguistics, The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_18

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professional bodies, multilingual children with special needs should be diagnosed and receive intervention in all languages the child speaks. Importantly, empirical research consistently demonstrates that multilingualism is not a burden for children with special needs. There is no empirical evidence that children with developmental disorders cannot become multilingual. Multilingual children with developmental disorders can acquire two languages, following their own trajectory of language development. This chapter gives the reader a complete picture of potential ways to implement these approaches in early education for multilingual children with special needs. The chapter ends with suggestions for future directions for research and education, focusing on the relationship between the child’s educational needs, the family’s needs, and the languages that are part of his/her life. Keywords

Multilingualism · Special needs · Early education · Developmental language disorder (DLD) · Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) · Hearing impairment · Intellectual developmental disorder · Assessment · Intervention

Introduction Today, more than half of the world’s children are raised in communities where multilingualism is the reality, rather than a choice. These children need two or more languages in order to participate and communicate in society and with the important people in their lives (De Houwer 1999; Grosjean 2010; Marinova-Todd et al. 2016). In most cases, children who are raised in multilingual communities are exposed to their Heritage language (also termed home language, minority language, first language, or mother tongue) at home and to the Societal language, which is the majority language of the community, at the education system and in various daily interactions. Growing up in a multilingual environment may be challenging for young children with typical language development (TLD) and even more so, for young children with special needs, especially those who have language difficulties. This chapter discusses issues related to multilingual language assessment and intervention. For each study reviewed, the languages that were tested and the country (when available) are presented. It is agreed that multilingualism does not cause language disorders (Kohnert 2007). Yet, multilingual children with TLD might score lower on standardized language tests that are normed for monolingual children (Armon-Lotem and Meir 2016; Anderson 2012; Restrepo 1998). Typically, most bilingual children are unbalanced bilinguals, i.e., they have one language which is dominant (stronger, more preferred) compared to the other (for an overview, see Meir 2018). Differences between monolingual and multilingual children can be manifested in the area of lexicon, with multilinguals scoring consistently lower than their monolingual peers when vocabulary in one language is considered (for an overview, see Haman et al. 2015). This gap is also reported for morpho-syntax, especially when bilinguals are

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tested in their weaker language. Various external factors have been proposed to account for the lower performance of bilinguals as compared to their monolingual peers. These include quantity and quality of exposure, age of onset of bilingualism, socioeconomic status, the size of the bilingual community speaking the Heritage language, and the availability of schooling in the Heritage language (e.g., Chondrogianni and Marinis 2011; Armon-Lotem and Meir 2019; Paradis 2011). Furthermore, differences between monolinguals and bilinguals might be attributed to crosslinguistic influences, i.e., those from the Heritage language onto the Societal language, and vice versa (Meir et al. 2017). We will return to crosslinguistic influence in more detail in section “Crosslinguistic Transfer.” The gap in linguistic skills between monolingual and bilingual children might be more pronounced in the preschool years, and this gap might persist throughout the child’s life, depending on exposure to the languages (Armon-Lotem and Meir 2019; Kohnert 2010). Language skills of multilingual children are distributed unevenly across and within the languages spoken by the child (Kohnert 2010). These varying levels of language skills across the two languages make language assessment challenging. Thus, a multilingual child should be diagnosed and receive interventions in all the languages he/she speaks. However, the reality is far from ideal. Assessment tools are predominantly available in Societal languages and are normed for monolingual children. Furthermore, most multilingual children with special needs do not receive professional support in their Heritage language, rather solely in the Societal language (de Valenzuela et al. 2016; Jordaan 2008; Pesco et al. 2016). A review by Pesco et al. (2016) on special education and language education policies in four countries (Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) demonstrated that the Societal language is the sole or predominant language of instruction in special education settings in these countries. Even for children with TLD, limited or no support is provided for the Heritage language. In countries that provide support for Heritage languages, it is relatively small-scale and does not apply to many minority speakers. In several countries, Heritage language support is provided in the form of supplementary schools run by volunteers (ibid.). As noted above, Pesco et al. (2016) reported that multilingual children with developmental disorders receive special language services. However, their Heritage language is not supported, due to limited resources. One of the main barriers to multilingual language support among children with developmental disorders is shortage of qualified multilingual staff, such as teachers and speech and language therapists. Time and scheduling conflicts are also enumerated among the obstacles to providing services in the different languages the child speaks. Finally, in many cases, parents are advised by professionals to refrain from an additional language and to focus on a monolingual environment for children with developmental disorders, although this advice is not supported by empirical research (Bird et al. 2016; Marinova-Todd et al. 2016; Yu 2013). This chapter focuses on early language education of children with various developmental disorders, who have language and communication difficulties as part of their phenotype. The populations discussed in this chapter are children with developmental language disorder (DLD), previously referred to as specific language

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impairment (Bishop et al. 2016; Novogrodsky and Kreiser 2019), as well as those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), hearing impairment, or intellectual development disorder. Despite different etiologies and specific needs for each population, language difficulties are at core of deficits in these disorders. The term “multilingual” refers to a child who uses more than one language and is the default term in the chapter. However, when discussing studies that explored specific pairs of languages, the term “bilingual” is used. The chapter discusses available evidence regarding the benefits of supporting the Heritage language alongside the Societal language among children with special needs. It examines the benefits of maintaining the Heritage language to assist with the acquisition of the Societal language and for socio-emotional and cognitive development of multilingual children with special needs. Current literature supporting the position that multilingualism does not cause additional difficulties for children with developmental disorders is presented. In addition, methods for diagnosing language abilities of multilingual children and examples of multilingual interventions are presented. The chapter ends with discussing advantages for language outcomes of multilingual children with special needs and future directions for research and practice.

Main Theoretical Concepts Language Disorders Among Children with Developmental Disorders Children with special needs in early education are diagnosed with various developmental disorders. A short description of each clinical population discussed is provided in this section. The first population is children with DLD. This is a primary disorder in language development, in the absence of documented neurological damage, hearing deficits, severe environmental deprivation, or intellectual developmental disorder (Leonard 2014). The disorder is manifested by a gap in language scores compared to the child’s chronological age, in comprehension, production or both, and is shown in one or a combination of different language domains, e.g., lexicon, morpho-syntax, and pragmatics (Novogrodsky 2015). DLD affects 5–7% of children (DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association 2013; Leonard 2014). The second population is children with ASD. ASD is diagnosed based on two symptom clusters: (a) pervasive deficiencies in social communication and social interaction and (b) restrictive and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities (DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association 2013). It is estimated that 15–20% of children with ASD fail to learn even single words for communicative purposes, while approximately half obtain complex expressive skills and achieve fluent and functional speech (Dromi et al. 2018). Importantly, the children who acquire functional speech show language difficulties in the domain of pragmatics (e.g., Novogrodsky and Edelson 2016; Lang et al. 2011). The third population is children with congenital hearing impairment, which is diagnosed based on behavioral and objective measures of hearing loss. As a group, these children are reported to have difficulties in language abilities compared to

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children with typical hearing. This is evident in both preschool and school years and is apparent regardless of the hearing devices used by the child: hearing aids or cochlear implant (e.g., Boons et al. 2013; Friedmann et al. 2008; Novogrodsky et al. 2018). The last population is children with intellectual developmental disorder (e.g., Down syndrome, William syndrome). Down syndrome is a genetic syndrome resulting from trisomy 21, and William syndrome is a genetic syndrome, which results from deletions of certain genes). Intellectual developmental disorders affect various cognitive abilities, such as reasoning, planning, judgment, and abstract thinking (Bird et al. 2005; Perovic and Lochet 2015). Children with special needs in early education are usually diagnosed with one of the above disorders. Sometimes the child is diagnosed with more than one development disorder (e.g., hearing impairment and ASD). The populations described here present different etiologies and each child has a unique profile of strengths and weaknesses within the disorder; however, all these children demonstrate language difficulties, and for multilingual children, the domain of language is even more complex in terms of assessment and intervention.

No Double Deficits for Multilingual Children with Special Needs One important finding across studies is that multilingual children with special needs do not have double deficits. This means that the severity of their language disorder is not a sum of the limitations from the multilingual status and the disorder (e.g., ASD, DLD). Compared to monolingual children, multilinguals receive less input in each of their languages because their waking hours are divided between the two languages (for a review, see Armon-Lotem and Meir 2019). Reduced exposure to each language has been hypothesized to cause difficulties in linguistic uptake in multilingual children with developmental disorders. This gave rise to testing the cumulative effects hypothesis (Paradis 2010; Paradis et al. 2017), which suggests that multilingual children with special needs might have an additional disadvantage related to their linguistic development, as compared to their monolingual peers with developmental disorders. The hypothesis predicts that the gap in language performance between monolingual and multilingual children with developmental disorders is larger than the gap between monolingual and multilingual peers with TLD, indicating an extra burden of multilingualism among children with special needs. However, empirical research does not support the cumulative effects hypothesis (Armon-Lotem et al. 2015; Degani et al. 2019; Paradis 2010; Paradis et al. 2017). Multilingualism does not impede language and cognitive development among children with special needs. Numerous studies on bilingual children with DLD do not confirm the cumulative effects hypothesis in the domain of morpho-syntax (Blom and Boerma 2017; Gutiérrez-Clellen et al. 2008; Meir 2017; Meir et al. 2016; Paradis et al. 2003; Thordardottir et al. 1997; Tsimpli et al. 2017). Orgassa and Weerman (2008) reported that Dutch-Turkish bilinguals and Dutch monolinguals with and without DLD, ages 4–8 years, demonstrated similar accuracy on adjectival inflections in Dutch, whereas bilinguals with DLD were less accurate in

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their use of determiners, as compared to their monolingual peers. However, the important finding was that bilingual children with TLD were also less accurate than monolingual children with TLD in adjectival inflections. These findings suggest that bilingualism affects children with DLD and TLD similarly, and is not an extra burden for children with special needs in the domain of morpho-syntax. Furthermore, in a study conducted in Canada, bilingual and monolingual children with DLD (mean age 6;11 years) performed worse than their peers with TLD did on language tests that measured different language capacities. Yet, no cumulative effects of bilingualism and DLD were observed in the use of verbal inflections (Paradis et al. 2003). Similarly, in a study conducted in Israel, bilingual Russian-Hebrew children with DLD did not show a cumulative effect on a variety of morpho-syntactic structures, as compared to their monolingual Hebrew-speaking peers with DLD. The gap in performance between bilingual and monolingual children with DLD was similar to that of their monolingual and bilingual peers with TLD (Meir 2017). To summarize, studies of multilingual children with DLD show that multilingualism does not aggravate the morpho-syntax disorder caused by the DLD. This pattern of no cumulative effect is shown in other language domains, such as lexical knowledge (Degani et al. 2019). In a picture-naming task with four groups of participants, monolingual and bilingual school-age children (Hebrew-English) with TLD or with DLD, bilingual children with DLD scored lower than all the other groups did on the naming task in Hebrew. The authors suggested that the scores of bilingual children with DLD must consider the basic performance gap between monolingual and bilingual children with TLD in the language that is tested. Similar to studies on DLD, no cumulative effect was observed in developmental disorders, such as ASD. Bilingual and monolingual children with ASD showed the same patterns and impairment (Drysdale et al. 2015; Gonzalez-Barrero and Nadig 2017). For example, recent studies investigating syntactic abilities of bilingual children with ASD confirmed the lack of cumulative effects (Meir and Novogrodsky 2019a, b). These studies compared four groups of children: monolingual Hebrewspeaking children with TLD and with ASD ages 5–8 years, and bilingual RussianHebrew-speaking children with TLD and ASD, ages 4–9, residing in Israel. Children were tested in Hebrew (the Societal language) for most tasks and in Russian (the Heritage language) for vocabulary and morpho-syntax. The results showed that there was a negative effect of clinical status and a negative effect of bilingualism; however, no interaction between ASD and bilingualism was found, suggesting that bilingualism affects children with TLD and ASD similarly. A unique bilingual condition is the case of children who speak diglossic languages. In these cases, the language includes two linguistic varieties. In a study that examined narrative abilities of children with hearing impairment compared with their hearing peers in both Colloquial Arabic and Standard Arabic, children with hearing impairment scored significantly lower than children with typical hearing. However, when comparing the two linguistic varieties, no differences were found (Novogrodsky and Maalouf-Zraik accepted for publication). Palestinian-Arabicspeaking children, ages 10–15 years, were tested on two different picture-story books with similar narrative components, one in Standard Arabic and one in

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Colloquial Arabic. The children with typical hearing scored significantly higher compared to the children with hearing impairment, in measures of lexical diversity and morpho-syntax. However, comparisons between Colloquial Arabic and Standard Arabic revealed no differences in these measures for children with hearing impairment. The authors suggested that the difficulties expressed by children with Hearing Impairment are because of their hearing loss, not because of language learning deficits. They emphasized the importance of both languages in intervention for children with hearing impairment. Studies of children with intellectual developmental disorder agree with the picture presented above. Bilingual and monolingual children with Down syndrome showed similar performance (Bird et al. 2005). The authors compared language performance of 8 bilingual children and 14 monolingual children with Down syndrome ages 2;7– 10;2 years. The bilingual children spoke English and another language (French, Cree, Lebanese, Portuguese or Italian) and were either balanced bilinguals or English-dominant. Language tests in English included standardized tests and productive vocabulary using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. The results showed similar profiles of language abilities across the two groups, suggesting no negative effect of bilingualism. The studies discussed in this section showed that multilingualism does not aggravate the language disorder beyond the developmental disorder itself. This is seen across different populations of children with special needs: DLD, ASD, hearing impairment, and intellectual developmental disorder. The implications for education are the importance of keeping the languages that children with special needs use, to maximize their ability to communicate, which will result in enhancement of their language and cognitive abilities. Educators should be aware of the different languages a child with special needs speaks and should make the maximum effort to support these languages, as will be described in the next sections.

Advantage of Maintaining the Heritage Language: Beyond Language Capacity Some recent studies have suggested that multilingualism might have a facilitative effect and can serve as a protective mechanism, providing a cognitive and linguistic advantage for multilingual children with special needs (Armon-Lotem 2010; Blom and Boerma 2017; Engel de Abreu et al. (2014); Kohnert 2010; Roeper 2012). For example, Engel de Abreu et al. (2014) found that bilingual children with DLD outperformed monolingual peers with DLD on a Selective Attention task. Selective Attention represents the ability to direct our attention to relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the environment. This is an important cognitive process, as there is a limit to how much information one can process at a given time, and Selective Attention allows the child to focus on what is important in a specific situation. In the domain of cognitive flexibility (i.e., set shifting), a recent study found that bilingual children with ASD scored higher that their monolingual peers with ASD did (Gonzalez-Barrero and Nadig 2017). Another example is

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Theory of Mind, which represents social cognition, i.e., the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, knowledge) to oneself and others, and to understand that others’ perspectives can differ from that of the child (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985). Tsimpli et al. (2017) found that bilingual children with DLD showed enhanced Theory of Mind skills, as compared with monolingual children with DLD. The facilitative effect of multilingualism can be viewed from a different angle, emphasizing the effect of communication experience beyond specific linguistic input. Romeo et al. (2018) tested the effect of conversational-turns on brain activity using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. The findings suggested that communication experience (e.g., conversational turns) affects neural language processing beyond environmental factors and the quantity of words heard by the child (Romeo et al. 2018). The study showed that monolingual children who experienced more conversational-turns exhibited greater activation in left inferior frontal regions (Broca’s area) during language processing. Conversational-turns, rather than the absolute number of words heard by the child, explained nearly half the relationship between children’s language exposure and verbal abilities. In relation to the discussion on multilingual children with developmental disorders, these results suggest that the communication with caregivers matters, regardless of whether it is in the Heritage language or in the Societal language, meaning that the impact is beyond the number of specific words or utterances the child perceives. To summarize, previous research suggests that multilingualism does not have a negative effect on language outcomes, as shown in section “No Double Deficits for Multilingual Children with Special Needs,” and it might have a positive effect on various cognitive abilities of children with special needs.

Crosslinguistic Transfer One important process documented in language development and use by multilingual children is crosslinguistic transfer. The term refers to the interaction between languages (Cummins 1979; Paradis and Genesee 1996; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996). This view assumes that languages spoken by a multilingual person interact and affect one another. The effect results from “similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired” (Odlin 1989, p. 27). Similarly, the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (Cummins 1979) proposes that the bilingual child’s competences achieved in the Heritage language/first language (L1) can be transferred into the Societal language/ second language (L2). According to the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis, the child’s knowledge in L1 can be instrumental for developing corresponding abilities in L2. Crosslinguistic influence in multilingual children may be bidirectional, from the Heritage language to the Societal language and vice versa. Yet, it should be kept in mind that crosslinguistic influence is interactive in nature (see Chung et al. 2019), meaning that it is modulated by numerous language-general and language-specific factors, i.e., the linguistic proximity of the Heritage and the Societal languages,

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proficiency in the two languages and the complexity of a certain linguistic phenomena (For a review of crosslinguistic influences that are related to schooling, see Chung et al. 2019). At school age, additional aspects are added to the equation, for example, orthographic distance between languages. Moreover, crosslinguistic influence interacts with external factors such age of onset of bilingualism, immigration experience, educational settings, and extent of exposure to the languages that the child speaks. For example, in the Canadian context, Blom et al. (2012) showed that children, whose L1 encodes grammatical categories of person, number, and tense on verbal inflections carry over this knowledge from L1 to the acquisition of verbs in L2English. The authors reported that children with an L1 that marks verbs for person, number, and tense, like Arabic and Spanish, were more accurate compared to children with an L1 that does not mark these grammatical categories, like Mandarin and Cantonese. Evidence for crosslinguistic influence has also been reported for the acquisition of articles (a/an, the) in L2/English (e.g., Zdorenko and Paradis 2008). Multilingual children who speak a language with articles in L1 (e.g., Spanish, Romanian, and Arabic) outperformed children whose L1 lacked articles (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian). Similarly, there are studies demonstrating the effect of L2 on L1. For example, in the USA context, Anderson (2012) showed that the abilities of sequential SpanishEnglish bilingual children with TLD show effects on their L1/Spanish morphosyntactic abilities by their newly acquired L2/English. She reviews previous studies on Spanish-English sequential bilingual children and concludes that, in the context of L2/English, bilingual children made more morphological errors in L1/Spanish than monolingual Spanish-speaking peers. The author attributed the errors to the influence of L2/English. Importantly, these results present the effects of the L2 on the L1 among children with TLD. In the Israeli context, Meir et al. (2017) demonstrated bidirectional, crosslinguistic transfer for Russian-Hebrew-speaking children with TLD. Russian and Hebrew have rich verbal paradigms. In both Russian and Hebrew, bilinguals performed on par with monolinguals on verbal inflections, showing a facilitative effect resulting from the similarities between the two languages. Yet, when the two languages showed differences in the mapping of morpho-syntactic categories, bilingual children were less accurate. This was demonstrated for the acquisition of articles in Hebrew (Russian does not have articles) and for the acquisition of accusative marking in Russian and in Hebrew (both languages mark the accusative case; yet, differently). To summarize, the languages of a multilingual child interact. The interaction can give rise to a facilitative effect, when the grammatical categories of both languages overlap, or to a negative effect, when the grammatical categories do not overlap or overlap in part. Furthermore, as has been previously stated in the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (Cummins 1979), the child’s knowledge in the L1 can be instrumental for developing corresponding abilities in the L2. More examples on facilitative effects are given in section “New Projects,” where interventions for multilingual children with special needs are discussed. The interaction between the languages of a multilingual child with special needs affects his/her use of each of these languages, as shown in the studies presented above. Exposure to more than one

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language does not aggravate the language disorder, as has been shown for different populations with developmental disorders. Furthermore, it might show positive cognitive effects on the abilities of children with special needs. With these theoretical concepts in mind, section “Major Contributions: Assessment, Diagnosis and Intervention” highlights issues of assessment and intervention of multilingual children with special needs.

Major Contributions: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Intervention Assessment and diagnosis are the first phase of intervention. The complexity of assessment for multilingual children with special needs and the solutions suggested by different approaches is presented section “Assessment of Multilingual Children.” Current practices for assessing multilingual children are followed by an overview of intervention approaches for monolingual children with special needs and how each approach can be adopted for multilingual children with special needs.

Assessment of Multilingual Children According to the best practice guidelines recommended by professional bodies (in the USA, ASHA 2004; in Europe, IALP 2011), multilingual children should be assessed in each language they speak. However, there are two main barriers. The first is that often, diagnostic tools are only available in the Societal language. The second barrier is that most professionals are monolingual speakers of the Societal language. There have been attempts to design parallel tools for assessing the different languages multilingual children use. For example, in the USA, some assessment batteries were developed and normed to evaluate language skills of Spanish-English bilinguals in both languages (Peña et al. 2018). In Europe, members of the COST Action IS0804 (http://www.bi-sli.org/) developed parallel Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings tools in a variety of languages to evaluate language skills of multilingual children (Armon-Lotem et al. 2015). These tests, evaluating expressive and receptive vocabulary, morpho-syntax, narrative abilities, phonological processing and short-term memory, are available in several languages (e.g., Arabic, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish Turkish, etc). Yet, language assessment tools are not available in some Societal languages as well as many Heritage languages (Thordardottir 2015). For example, in Canada, there are language assessment tools for the two Societal languages: English and French, but not for many Asian Heritage languages of the local communities (Thordardottir 2015). In the USA, there are assessment tools available for Heritage Spanish, e.g., the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment, developed by Peña et al. (2018). In Israel, there are language tests in Hebrew and Arabic (e.g., Maaluf Katzenberger and Meilijson 2014; Katzenberger and Jabara 2017); yet, there is a scarcity of tools and norms for multilingual children speaking any Heritage language in tandem with these two languages. Furthermore, using

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monolingual language tests from the country of origin to test multilingual children in that language has disadvantages, because the target language in these cases is the Heritage language, which is not identical to the language in the country of origin. An example of this would be using the Clinical Evaluation Language fundamentalpreschool-2 designed in the USA for English-speaking children (Zimmerman et al. 2002) to assess the English of bilingual English-Hebrew speakers who live in Israel. The explanation is the language variations these children are exposed to. First, children with TLD who acquire English as their Heritage language in Israel show gaps in their lexicon and grammar compared with monolingual English-speaking peers in the USA. This gap is susceptible to crosslinguistic transfer (see section “Crosslinguistic Transfer”) from the dominant Hebrew on the English (ArmonLotem et al. 2020), which is not the case for monolingual English-speakers. Similarly, Meir (2018) showed that the language skills of bilingual children whose Heritage language is Russian are strongly influenced by the Societal language, Hebrew. Children showed more errors in grammatical categories of case and aspect due to the influence of Hebrew, which does not mark these categories morphologically. Finally, professionals should be aware that test norms obtained for monolinguals can lead to overidentification of language disorders in multilingual children (Armon-Lotem and Meir 2016). Furthermore, even if we continue to develop language tests for each minority language that is used by a community in any country, we will never be able to cover all of them. As a partial solution for this dilemma, parent questionnaires were developed (e.g., Abutbul-Oz et al. 2012; Gutiérrez-Clellen and Kreiter 2003; Paradis et al. 2010; Restrepo 1998; Tuller 2015). The aim of these questionnaires is to bridge the gap between best practice guidelines and the assessment tools available for diagnoses in the Societal language. With monolingual children, parental questionnaires are complementary tools in the diagnostic protocol, in addition to direct testing of the child. Among multilingual children, parental questionnaires might be the core source of information for clinical decisions. Another solution is dynamic assessment tools (Kohnert 2010). In dynamic assessment, language outcomes are not the target. The score is given to the child for the change in performance shown during the testing, which includes pretest, learning phase, and post-test. Whereas parental questionnaires target the child’s caregivers for information (with translation when needed), dynamic assessment tools measure the child’s capacity to learn the Societal language (Hasson and Joffe 2007). To conclude, multilingual children with TLD do not learn their two languages like monolingual children do, due to the effects of the other language and to the variations of the Heritage language within small communities, as compared to the origin language. This specific learning situation is reflected in the performance of multilingual children with TLD on language tests, both in the Societal language and in the Heritage language, when it is applicable (Armon-Lotem and Meir 2016). This is true also for children with special needs. Professionals should be aware that lower performance relative to monolingual norms in the languages spoken by the child should not be construed as a sign of a language disorder. Thus, all languages need to be viewed in the context of the child’s linguistic environment and they all need to be

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assessed. The Heritage language and the Societal language are both essential for functioning at home and in school settings. When language tests in the Heritage language and multilingual norms for the Societal language are not available, clinicians should seek language milestones in both languages by collecting data via parental and teacher questionnaires and by using dynamic assessment. These tools provide complementary information: parental and teachers’ questionnaires provide information about the child’s language capacity in the Heritage language and the Societal language, and dynamic assessment taps into the child’s ability to progress in the Societal language.

Intervention of Multilingual Children Integrating multilingual intervention into special education is an optimal option; yet, not the common practice for multilingual children with special needs. Interventions for preschool children with special needs (not specific to multilingual children) have three different tracks (e.g., for Israel see: Ari-Am and Gumpel 2014; Novogrodsky and Kreiser 2019; for the US, see: Kauffman and Badar 2014). These three tracks vary with respect to how the child with special needs is integrated within the mainstream educational systems. The first track is preschool special education programs for children with similar developmental diagnoses or special needs (e.g., DLD, ASD). In all programs, core goals of intervention are language and communication. However, the focus is on the Societal language. In some countries, children with different developmental diagnosis are supported within the same program, meaning, for example, that children with ASD and children with DLD participate in the same intervention program. The second track is partial inclusion. In these programs, there is inclusion within a preschool of typically developing children for part of the day/week. Most children in the kindergarten will have typical development and a small group will have special needs. Ideally, two teachers, one of them is a special education teacher, and two assistant teachers will operate the program. Many activities are shared between the two groups and specific, separate activities are planned for the children with special needs. However, multilingual interventions are not common in the first and second tracks. The third track is full inclusion. In these programs, a child with special needs attends a mainstream preschool together with typically developing children. Usually, full-inclusion programs are recommended for children with less severe diagnoses. The child with special needs receives one-on-one intervention outside the classroom during or after school hours. Variations between these three tracks: special education school or class, on the one hand, and full inclusion for children with special needs, on the other hand, are not available in all countries. Sometimes within different school districts in the same country, all three tracks are not available (Novogrodsky and Kreiser 2019). Examples of intervention programs for children with DLD are presented in Law et al. (2019). Children with special needs (e.g., DLD) are eligible for special education programs in preschool and kindergarten. Different programs are designed according to the model of special education presented above. However, in most cases, the emphasis on communication and language skills is in the Societal language (Novogrodsky and

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Kreiser 2019). Information on intervention delivery for children with DLD for specific countries is available in the following dataset: www2.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/COST_ IS1406/query.php. Although this project focused only on children with DLD, it reflects the current practice regarding multilingualism for children with special needs in general, across Europe (Law et al. 2019). The online dataset provides information about identification, assessment, diagnosis, decisions, planning, intervention delivery, funding, and education. The issue of multilingual intervention is not included in the dataset, not because professionals and researchers disagree that it is a crucial issue (Thordardottir and Topbaş 2019), but because it is not available for parents who seek early multilingual intervention for their children with DLD (Jordaan 2008). The needs for multilingual intervention are highlighted in the American Speech and Hearing Association 2011 position statement, which emphasized this topic from the speech and language therapists’ point of view. It suggested that cultural competence is part of the knowledge that speech and language therapists must acquire (ASHA, 2011, in Thordardottir and Topbaş 2019). Furthermore, in a recent study that explored multilingual interventions based on a survey of 2455 speech and language therapists from 39 European countries, only 17% of the respondents said that multilingual intervention in the languages spoken by the child is available, and 46% responded that it is available sometimes. This finding suggests a shift in the field compared to findings from 10 years earlier (Thordardottir and Topbaş 2019). Jordaan (2008) reported on findings from 99 speech and language therapists from 13 countries and showed that 87% used the Societal language only. It is important to note that these percentages of multilingual intervention mean that there is intervention in a language other than the Societal language, not necessarily that the two languages are part of the intervention. To summarize, the professional community is aware of the concept of multilingual intervention, but it is not the common practice for multilingual children with special needs. The next section describes different levels of support for the languages a child speaks. It further elaborates on how professionals working with children with special needs can modulate the intervention of the languages based on the child’s needs.

New Projects An interesting change in interventions for children with special needs in recent years has been a shift from private, individual sessions to group work. This change, focused on the Societal language, has influenced all three intervention tracks described above. These groups include children with special needs and children with typical development. This change is a result of moving from the didactic medical model of direct teaching, to a constructivist model, emphasizing an active role of the learner. According to this model, learning in general, including language learning is perceived as a social process in which the learner connects known information with new information (Vygotsky 1980). This model increases the child’s participation and allows the specialist (e.g., teacher, speech and language therapist) to provide modeling of actual communication situations, while the child actively

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participates in the activity. The group intervention models everyday situations (e.g., playing, shopping) and can be adapted to age and culture. Group work enables more children to be involved in communicative-linguistic activities. Support in the Heritage language can be added to individual and group interventions, based on the child’s needs (Barrera 1993). It can vary between a Full Bilingual approach, where both languages are used equally, to a Dominant Bilingual approach, where the Societal language is dominant. Alternatively, a Modified Single language approach can be adopted, where the non-Societal language is used only when needed for clarification. Furthermore, a Multicultural Monolingual approach can be used, with cultural scaffolding, when needed for intervention with the Societal language (Barrera 1993). Another important aspect of multilingual intervention is to ensure collaboration between clinicians and parents/caregivers and to support their role as intervention agents for their children. One route is to conduct an intervention session in which both languages alternate in the session. For example, if a parent/caregiver speaking the Heritage language is present, the clinician and parent work together, creating bilingual intervention sessions (e.g., Thordardottir et al. 2015). The second scenario is when the intervention is carried out in the Societal language within the educational setting in the absence of parents. In this scenario, the Heritage language is conducted via parent training as a home-based intervention (for an overview, see Durán et al. 2016). In the second scenario, the intervention focuses on the Societal language, while the Heritage language is enriched by the parents who receive training from the clinician to exercise a variety of language-stimulation activities in the home. Previous studies have emphasized the importance of maintaining the languages of multilingual children, as parents of multilingual children have strong positive attitudes towards maintaining the Heritage language of their children (e.g., Howard et al. 2020; Jordaan 2008). An important variable in successful involvement of parents is understanding the culturally relevant values, beliefs, and practices found in parentchild interactions with multilingual children (Jegatheesan 2011; van Kleeck 1994). We will discuss possible intervention scenarios in the next section emphasizing: the effect of intervention in the Societal language on improvement in the Heritage language, the effect of intervention in both languages on improvement in the Societal language, and finally the effect of treating the Heritage language on improvement in the Societal language. Studies that explored multilingual intervention for different populations of children with special needs are reviewed. These studies include children with DLD, ASD, hearing impairment, and intellectual developmental disorder.

Critical Issues and Topics Only a few studies have tracked multilingual interventions. They are reviewed in the following subsections, highlighting different clinical populations and the outcomes of these interventions. For each study, a description structure (individual versus group) is given emphasizing how multilingual intervention can be implemented and the language outcomes in both the Heritage and Societal languages.

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The Effect of Therapy in the Societal Language on the Heritage Language As described earlier, services provided to multilingual children with special needs are largely available only in the Societal language. One question is whether the effects generalize from the treated Societal language to the non-treated Heritage language. The answer is not simple. When not directly treated, improvement in the Heritage language is limited. Confirming the predictions of crosslinguistic transfer, improvement in the non-treated language is observed in aspects that are shared across the two languages. For example, articulation difficulties (also termed as phonological difficulties at the phoneme level) in both languages can be addressed through therapy in one language. Research showed that improvement in the production of phonemes that are shared across languages is observed when the treatment targets only the Societal language (Holm et al. 1997). Yet, some phonological rules are not shared across the two languages and should be treated separately. This was demonstrated by Holm et al. (1997) who investigated the efficacy of individual treatment provided in the Societal English to an English-Cantonese-speaking child age 5;2 years. The child was diagnosed with DLD and part of his language difficulties were in the domain of phonology. He had articulation errors characterized at the phoneme level and at the phonological-rule level (production errors in combing phonemes). In both languages at the phoneme level, some phonemes were missing, and some were produced incorrectly. At the phonological-rule level, some consonant clusters (combinations of two or more consonants) were not produced. The therapy was provided in English, the Societal language, and focused on phonological production and perception of distinct phonemes. For example, therapy targeted the production of [s] (e.g., sip) to make it distinct from the sound [ʃ] (e.g., ship), which is how the child produced it. After targeting specific phonemes in the Societal language, considerable improvement was observed in both languages, as they share these two phonemes. In contrast, treatment of consonant clusters (e.g., plane, blue) in the Societal language did not generalize to Cantonese, as the characteristics of clusters in Cantonese are different. This study has important clinical implications suggesting that shared features of languages show generalizations from the treated language to the non-treated language and certain features of linguistic knowledge are language independent. The generalization is shown for features that are similar across both languages, supporting the idea of crosslinguistic transfer (Paradis and Genesee 1996; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996). Thus, when planning an intervention for a multilingual child in the Societal language, it is suggested to begin with linguistic aspects that have shared properties in the two languages. The phenomenon of crosslinguistic transfer is also demonstrated for the domain of lexicon. In an intervention study, Kambanaros et al. (2017) found evidence of crosslinguistic transfer in this domain. They presented a case study of cognate intervention for a trilingual (English, Cypriote Greek, and Bulgarian) girl age 8;6 years, diagnosed with DLD in Cyprus. Cognates are words with similar form and meaning across languages, such as Bulgarian tigur, English tiger, and Greek

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tigris for the concept of “tiger.” Intervention was provided in English. The girl showed effects of crosslinguistic transfer from the treated language to the nontreated languages in learning cognate words. Importantly, generalization was observed for new words not included in the treatment, suggesting crosslinguistic awareness that seems to be activated during this intervention. This specific study focused on words that shared phonological forms (meaning that two cognate words have partial phonological overlap between them) across the lexicons of the three languages; thereby, supporting the bilingual approach (Barrera 1993) in individual interventions. The bilingual approach would suggest using the three languages equally. Here, the intervention focused on words that overlap across the languages spoken by the child. This method can be applied in full inclusion settings when a child receives individualized language intervention in the Societal language. It requires the speech and language therapist to know the overlaps in the lexicons of the languages the child speaks. Such information can be obtained from the parents, or by conducting a search over internet resources. Furthermore, this approach can target other language domains as well. For example, it can be extended to treatment of morphology (inflectional and derivational) and syntax, requiring knowledge about these domains in the languages the child speaks. Parents can join as facilitators, who provide information about words and structures that are similar in the languages. For multilingual children with intellectual developmental disorder and severe disabilities, it is crucially important for professionals to interact with parents. Based on observations and qualitative research interviews with multilingual parents, Pickl (2011) suggested that the quality of parent-teacher-interactions is central to effective communication interventions. Parental involvement and partnership have a broad effect on the intervention, which is beyond the scope of the current chapter (Schwartz and Yagmur 2018). Narrative interventions show similar patterns in the grammar elements of narratives across languages. Narratives might take advantage of the interrelations of the cognitive schemata, which are noted in the grammatical structures of narratives told by bilingual children. Petersen and Spencer (2016) investigated the extent of the crosslinguistic transfer of English on Spanish, regarding complex syntax and narrative schemata in Spanish-English-speaking children with DLD, ages 7–8 years. The results indicated generalization from the treated language (English) to the nontreated Heritage language (Spanish) for complex syntax and story grammar. Crosslinguistic transfer of story grammar schemata has been demonstrated in numerous studies showing that children rely on their language-independent universal knowledge of story grammar (see “Narrative abilities in bilingual children” by Gagarina et al. (2016) and the studies cited in it). These studies further demonstrate that there is a crosslinguistic transfer, which can potentially yield a positive transfer from the treated Societal language to the nontreated Heritage language for phenomena that overlap between them. Thus, when planning therapy for multilingual children in the Societal language, speech and language therapists should be aware of similarities between the languages that the child speaks. These overlaps in different linguistic domains: phonology, lexicon, morpho-syntax, and narrative story grammar might be utilized as a tool to maintain

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the Heritage language. On the other hand, the studies clearly demonstrated that if there is no overlap between the two languages, there is no transfer from the treated to the non-treated languages, suggesting that both should be treated. It is thus important that speech and language therapists and special education practitioners increase their professional knowledge about languages spoken by children with special needs from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Therapy in Both Languages Does Not Slow Progress in the Societal Language Dual language intervention is promising for promoting the Societal language while maintaining the child’s Heritage language. Ideally, the child should receive therapy in both languages, because treatment of the Societal language positively affects the Heritage language only in the domains in which the two languages overlap. Thus, dual language intervention will also target domains in which the two languages spoken by a child differ. For example, it will allow targeting lexicons in both languages beyond cognate words, and focusing on morpho-syntactic structures that differ across the languages. However, there is a potential concern that dual language intervention might slow progress in the Societal language, which is the language in which the child functions in the mainstream education setting. Although studies evaluating the efficacy of dual language interventions are scarce, their results converge: dual language intervention does not impede progress in the Societal language. Importantly, the duration of the therapy should not be doubled for multilingual children, which is important because therapy hours are limited. Children receiving bilingual intervention seem to improve in both languages within the same time span as bilingual children who receive therapy in the Societal language only do (Restrepo et al. 2013). For example, a study by Restrepo et al. (2013) compared the efficacy of SpanishEnglish and English-only vocabulary intervention for bilingual children with DLD in the USA. Preschool children ages 3;7–5;8 participated in bilingual versus English only intervention. Interventions were delivered in small groups (2–5 children), in 45-minute sessions, four times a week, for 12 weeks. The intervention targeted vocabulary through different activities: pointing to words in sets of pictures or objects, producing words, definitions through questioning in a script, and using words in sentences through scripted play with manipulative and dialogic book reading. The results indicated that the bilingual intervention was more effective, as compared to the monolingual intervention in the Societal language, English. The children in the bilingual intervention showed gains in both the Heritage Spanish and in the Societal English, while children in the monolingual intervention showed gains in the Societal language only. Importantly, children with DLD in the bilingual intervention program showed similar gains in the Societal language as compared to bilinguals with DLD who received intervention in the Societal language only. This study, exploring the bilingual approach in a group setting, highlights the idea that bilingual intervention does not impede improvement in the Societal language.

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A study on children with hearing impairment who received intervention in both the Heritage (Spanish) and the Societal (English) languages (Bunta et al. 2016) also supports the advantage of the full bilingual approach. Two groups of preschool children participated. The monolingual group (mean chronological age, 4;8) received support only in the Societal English and the bilingual group (mean chronological age, 4;7) received support in both their Heritage Spanish and the Societal English. Children in both groups used hearing aids and cochlear implants and their “hearing age” was younger than their chronological age (mean 1;6 years). The “hearing age” is calculated from age of implantation of a cochlear implant or the age of beginning using a hearing aid, aiming to represent the age of functional hearing of the child. The intervention for both groups included listening and speaking activities in English as the main language of instruction. The monolingual intervention group received small-group intervention three times a week. The bilingual intervention group also received three interventions per week, but once a week the auditory-based therapy was in Spanish, led by a native speaker. Participants in the bilingual intervention group also received professional interpreter services for all audiology-related appointments. Children who received dual language support outperformed their peers who received English-only support on expressive communication scores and language age scores. The findings support the bilingual approach in a group setting, emphasizing the importance of communication with the family in their Heritage language. The bilingual-bimodal intervention (signed and spoken language) for children with hearing impairment showed parallel outcomes. Children receiving intervention in both American Sign Language and English scored similarly to their hearing peers on language measures that matched their chronological age in the spoken language (Davidson et al. 2014). The study tested five preschool children with hearing impairment, who used a cochlear implant. They communicated in American Sign Language, their Heritage language, with their deaf signing parents at home and in English, the Societal language. Their language skills in English were compared with bilingual-bimodal hearing children who communicate in American Sign Language and English. These were hearing children of deaf signing parents. The results showed comparable English scores for both groups on a variety of standardized language measures. The authors concluded that natural sign language input (comparable to the Heritage language of bilingual children) does not harm the development of the spoken language of children with hearing impairment. An important finding in this study is that bilingual-bimodal children with hearing impairment closed the language gap compared with their bilingual hearing peers; a phenomenon not observed in other population. An explanation for this unique finding is that sign language might mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language (Henner et al. 2018). In another study, school age native signers, exposed to their Heritage American Sign Language, outperformed non-native signers in reading comprehension measures, representing the written modality of the spoken language (Novogrodsky et al. 2014). These findings support the importance of language exposure beyond modality (spoken or signed) at preschool age for this population and the advantages of multilingual intervention in general.

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The advantage of using the bilingual approach in intervention is further expanded in a study of children with DLD, who spoke several Heritage languages (Arabic, Bangla, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, Japanese, Kabyl, Punjabi/Urdu, Russian, Sinhalese, Spanish, and Tamil) in addition to the Societal Language, French (Thordardottir et al. 2015). In this study, bilingual and monolingual interventions were delivered to bilingual children with DLD in Canada, who spoke French as their Societal language and a variety of Heritage languages. The intervention in the Societal language was delivered by French-speaking speech and language therapists. The Heritage language in the bilingual intervention was supported through parental collaboration. The authors noted that parents opted for bilingual interventions, which reflected their desire to maintain the child’s Heritage language. The study did not find significant gains in the Heritage languages. However, children in both intervention programs made similar gains in the Societal language (French). Thus, this study reiterates previous research suggesting that progress in the Societal language is not endangered when the Heritage language is supported. This is particularly important because in many cases, certified multilingual clinicians are not available for a specific Heritage language. Thus, parental participation might be a solution in these situations. Involving parents in the intervention requires the clinician’s sensitivity to the characteristics of each family’s interactions. This, in effect, reinforces the family’s resources and ability to interact with their child with special needs (Kleeck 1994; Kreiser and Novogrodsky 2019). Thus, it is important for professionals to develop sensitivity to cultural differences. For example, the value of talk, which might be different across cultures, and beliefs about intentionality, e.g., who is permitted to initiate an interaction (for a detailed review of this topic, see Kleeck 1994). To conclude, the studies discussed in this subsection provide clear evidence that interventions in both languages do not impede the Societal language capacity of the child. This is supported in vocabulary measures, language scores, reading comprehension scores, and parental involvement in the intervention. Moreover, this is found among children with DLD and for those with hearing impartment and for different combinations of Societal and Heritage languages, suggesting that this idea can be adopted for various populations of children with special needs.

The Value of Treating the Heritage Language This section focuses on the Heritage language as a choice for intervention. Choosing the language of intervention seems to have important clinical implications beyond language outcomes. The case of children with ASD highlights the importance of maintaining the Heritage language from another perspective. In this population, the Heritage language might open the child to communication with his/her close environment, as shown in the following studies. Communication is one of the core impairments of children with ASD. The ability to communicate (e.g., eye contact, initiating interaction) is a prerequisite developmental stage for specific language goals in interventions (e.g., storytelling, vocabulary learning). Lang et al. (2011) showed that children with ASD performed better and participated more in

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intervention sessions that used the Heritage language, as compared with similar intervention sessions that used the Societal language. Support for this assumption comes from a study on play behavior. Bilingual children with ASD demonstrated more play behaviors when using their Heritage language, as compared to sessions in the Societal language (Lim and Charlop 2018). It is suggested that bilingual children with ASD demonstrate increased accuracy in responding to instructions and fewer challenging behaviors, when using their Heritage language. Among children with ASD, the Heritage language may represent the warmth and comfort of the home environment (Lang et al. 2011). Kremer-Sadlik (2005) suggested that intervention in the Heritage language might also be associated with the positive aspects of home, as parents use the Heritage language to communicate between themselves, with other siblings, family members, and the community (Fillmore 1991). Thordardottir and Topbaş (2019) reported that speech and language therapists recommend parents speak the Heritage language at home, based on the individual needs of the child. Implementing the Heritage language in intervention requires a partnership between professionals and parents. As shown above, the positive outcomes of the Heritage language can support the Societal language. Intervention in the Heritage language and in the Societal language can be delivered individually and/or in group settings, depending on the child’s language and communication needs. Importantly, using the Heritage language in intervention does not harm the Societal language. In two case studies of children with ASD, ages 3 and 5, both showed improvement in the monolingual (English) and bilingual interventions (English-Spanish), alternating across 14 treatment sessions (Summers et al. 2017). The children showed similar improvement in morphological abilities measured by mean length of utterance across the two intervention conditions. The authors stated that bilingual intervention did not have negative effects on children with ASD. Although no positive effect was shown in the bilingual intervention compared with the monolingual intervention, the importance of early intervention in the Heritage language for children with ASD is supported by its transmission to the Societal language (Seung et al. 2006). Seung et al. (2006) reported an intervention case study of a bilingual Korean-English child. The child’s primary language at home was Korean and he attended a private prekindergarten program where he was exposed to English. He was diagnosed with ASD at the age of 3:6 and was followed longitudinally for 24 months. The intervention was delivered in the Heritage language (Korean) for 12 months, and then English was gradually introduced. The final phase was delivered in the Societal Language (English). It seems that the child established a linguistic foundation in his Heritage language, the home language of communication, and then progressively transferred it to the Societal language with intervention support. This study presents an individual intervention that was sensitive to the child’s developmental and emotional needs. It started with the child’s Heritage language and progressively integrated the “bilingual approach” and the “Modified Single language approach” (Barrera 1993), where the Societal language is dominant. Research on multilingual intervention is a growing field. To date, many are case studies. They use precise statistical models and are crucial for exploring the efficacy

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of multilingual interventions. It is important to note that interventions for multilingual children include several variables, such as the number of languages the child with special needs is exposed to, the interaction between these languages (see section “Crosslinguistic Transfer” for crosslinguistic transfer), the cultural differences that are linked to the multilingual situation, and the effect of cultural differences on the intervention. This chapter reviewed and discussed the efficacy and variations of multilingual interventions. The outcome measures were the language, communication, and cognition capacities of the child. However, outcome measures are one of the three pillars of evidence-based practice. The second pillar is based on perspectives and expertise of speech and language therapists, which are also affected by their cultures and by their knowledge of multilingual interventions (Thordardottir and Topbaş 2019). The third is the choice of language for assessment and intervention. For example with regards to intervention, do naturalistic and drilling multilingual interventions have similarly positive effects? Does modeling multilingual intervention enough or is repetition required? If repetitions are required, how many? Finally, do the repetitions have to be equal in all languages the child speaks to show improvement? With these questions in mind, the advantages of multilingual intervention in early education, for several populations with special needs, await future clinical initiatives.

Directions for Future Research Historically, research on interventions for multilingual children with special needs was limited. This lack of knowledge created barriers for professionals encountering multilingual children with special needs (Welterlin and LaRue 2007; Yu 2013). Further studies are needed to evaluate the effect of multilingual interventions in individual and group settings. It is important to explore these effects among populations of children with various special needs (e.g., ASD compared to hearing impairment), as they might respond differently. Moreover, future studies should also address the short- and long-term benefits of multilingual interventions, and the effect of direct multilingual interventions versus indirect multilingual support given to the families. Longitudinal studies are needed to better understand the long-term effects of multilingualism on the language and cognitive skills of children with special needs. It is important to ensure that these studies follow children through their school years, exploring the effects of multilingual interventions during the preschool years of children with special needs on their academic achievement and social interaction capacities in school. In addition, studies should address the long-term emotional and psychological aspects of multilingualism for parents and for their children with special needs. Materials to support interventions in Heritage languages are lacking (Paradis et al. 2018). Thus, future studies should focus on developing and exploring clinical materials that enhance the Heritage languages and that can be used for both the Societal and the Heritage languages. In addition, it is important to develop programs that support the Heritage language and incorporate parental collaboration. It is

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suggested that parents of multilingual children with special needs, similarly to parents of multilingual children with TLD, want their child to be able to communicate in the Societal language without losing the Heritage language. Future studies should focus on developing roadmaps for parents of multilingual children with special needs, advising them how to maintain and support the Heritage language in different educational settings. These roadmaps might be specific to settings with full inclusion, partial inclusion, and special education programs.

Conclusions Linguistic skills are unevenly dispersed within and across the languages spoken by a multilingual child (Kohnert 2010). For multilingual children, the Heritage language is an important part of their family life, tradition, and culture, and the Societal language is important for integration into the broader community. Multilingualism is not a choice; it is necessary for children to communicate in different settings in everyday life. Thus, all languages spoken by a multilingual child need to be viewed in the context of the child’s linguistic environment and should be part of assessment and intervention. Multiple components of the language system should be part of intervention, based on the child’s language profile and needs. There is no empirical evidence that children with developmental disorders cannot become multilingual. Multilingual children with developmental disorders can acquire two languages, following their own trajectory of language development. As demonstrated in this chapter, multilingual children with developmental disorders do not demonstrate a double delay in language acquisition, as compared to their monolingual peers with special needs. Yet, research shows that these children are less likely to become balanced in the languages, they speak as compared to their TLD peers. They are at great risk of losing their Heritage language (Paradis et al. 2018) due to a lack of opportunities to become multilingual. Unfortunately, common practice today is to provide intervention to multilingual children in the Societal language, which contrasts sharply with the evidence-based approach. Support of both languages provides optimal language outcomes for children with developmental disorders. This chapter synthesizes research demonstrating that progress in the Societal language is not impeded during dual-language interventions among diverse, atypical populations (e.g., children with DLD, ASD, or hearing impairments). Multilingual interventions are effective for children with special needs, as both languages are maintained and developed (Kohnert et al. 2005). Moreover, support for the advantage of intervention in the Heritage language advanced the idea of implementing multilingual interventions as an umbrella for a variety of optional programs. This concept relies on evidence-based practice research covering different domains of language: phonology, lexicon, morpho-syntax, and discourse level (pragmatics). These programs focus on the specific linguistic profile of the child, while capitalizing on the multilingual intervention. It is important to adapt the program to the child’s needs, which can vary between “Full-bilingualism” to “Multicultural Monolingual” approaches (Barrera 1993). As different studies showed, the intervention can be

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delivered in various formats: full inclusion, partial inclusion, and special education settings. Whereas intervention in the Societal language supports development of the Societal language only, multilingual intervention provides a child with special needs the chance to maintain both languages and to function in various settings throughout life. Thus, educational policies should encourage the Heritage language and multilingual interventions for these children. Training specialists to provide intervention in the Heritage language should become a priority for policy makers. This will support improving the social and linguistic development of children with special needs.

Cross-References ▶ Caregivers’ Linguistic Interaction in Early Language Learning and Education ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Part IV Early Language Education in Different Countries

Early Language Education in Australia

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Australia: A Multicultural Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-mainstream Language Education in the Australian Context: A Brief Historical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Childhood Education in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts: Framing Early Language Education Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions: Formal and Non-formal Initiatives in Australia’s Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supra Macro Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Macro Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Micro Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infra Micro Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects: Treading Carefully in the Right Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues: Assimilationism and the Mainstream Society’s Monolingual Mindset . . . . . . . Future Research Directions: A Systematic Mapping of Early Language Education Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

While Australia is a highly linguistically diverse country, its educational policy is strongly dominated by a monolingual mindset, and thus languages other than S. A. Eisenchlas (*) School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia e-mail: s.eisenchlas@griffith.edu.au A. C. Schalley Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_26

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English find little institutional support. A few selected languages, considered of vital importance to the country, are taught as foreign languages, but there is little provision for home or foreign languages at the preschool level. Using Chua and Baldauf’s (Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. Routledge, New York, 2011) model of language policy and planning as the analytical framework, the chapter explores formal and non-formal activities to foster the development of languages in young children at preschool level. These initiatives range from macro-level planning, targeting mostly English-speaking children acquiring a small number of languages, to micro-level planning, aimed at supporting home language maintenance and development. Micro-level initiatives can be parent-initiated, e.g., playgroups for diverse languages, family day care in the relevant languages, or sojourning to the parents’ home countries, or include more formal programs, usually developed and run by communities, such as supplementary schooling (e.g., community language schools). The chapter shows that, despite a societal monolingual orientation, communities can be creative in developing initiatives. Not every community is active in pursuing language maintenance, however, and the overview suggests that some languages are better placed for intergenerational transmission than others. Keywords

Australia · Intergenerational transmission · Non-mainstream languages · Preschool language education · Bilingualism

Introduction It is a truism that in multilingual societies the role of language(s) is inexorably linked to the history of migration, ethnic relations, and the attitudes and beliefs that influence language policy development. This chapter thus begins by discussing crucial moments in Australian history that impacted on languages in the community. It then examines government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 35 years to address matters of language teaching and learning. In line with the handbook’s topic, this chapter’s focus is restricted to early multilingual education. Current macro-level initiatives targeting a small number of young children in Australia are described. Moreover, as home language maintenance is generally not supported in the formal Australian educational landscape, a select number of micro-level language planning initiatives to promote and support children’s home languages are discussed, illustrating how local agents, both at individual and community levels, strive to meet their language education goals.

Australia: A Multicultural Society “Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. We are as old as our First Australians, the oldest continuing human culture on earth, who have cared for this country for more than 50,000 years.

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And we are as young as the baby in the arms of her migrant mother who could have come from any nation, any faith, any race in the world. Australia is an immigration nation. Almost half of our current population was either born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas.”

We begin this chapter by quoting the words of the former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, in the foreword of the most recent Australian Government’s multicultural statement, titled “Multicultural Australia – United, Strong, Successful” (Australian Government, Department of Home Affairs 2017). This statement is relevant to our overview because it unambiguously states that “Australia is an immigration nation” and identifies two populations intent on language maintenance and intergenerational vitality (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2016), namely, migrants, as immigrants are called in Australia, and Indigenous people. In this chapter, however, we restrict discussion to nonIndigenous languages, as the challenges involved in Aboriginal education raise a number of critical issues which cannot be adequately covered here due to length considerations. Despite the government’s 2017 statement endorsing cultural diversity and inclusiveness quoted above, Australia’s multilingualism has traditionally not been seen as a national asset. It was not until 1973, following the dismantling of the “White Australia Policy,” which was established in the “Immigration Restriction Act” in 1901 and aimed to promote a homogenous population by limiting immigration to mainly northern Europeans (Clark 1987), that Al Grassby, Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam Government, delivered a reference paper entitled “A multi-cultural society for the future” (Grassby 1973). The characterization of Australia as a “multicultural nation” (ib., p. 15) received bipartisan support in 1975, i.e., support from both government and opposition parties, indicating that “multiculturalism was becoming a major political priority on both sides of politics” (Australian Government, Department of Home Affairs n.d.-a). Since then, there have been periodic challenges to this concept and occasional backlashes by those who see multiculturalism as having the potential to weaken social cohesion and erode the “Australian national identity.” Nevertheless, Australia continues to accept substantial numbers of migrants every year. The Migration Program is set annually, with the total places available for 2018–2019 capped at a ceiling of 190,000, unchanged from 2017 to 2018 (Australian Government, Department of Home Affairs n.d.-b). Since 1975, the unparalleled high migrant intake has rapidly changed the demographic composition of the country. As of June 30, 2017, 29% of the population, i.e., 7.1 million residents, had been born overseas, in nearly 200 countries (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018). While migrants from England are still the largest group of overseasborn residents (accounting for 4.1% of Australia’s total population), migration from China (2.5%) has for the first time overtaken migration from New Zealand (2.3%). These groups are followed by migrants from India (2.2%), the Philippines (1.1%), and Vietnam (1.0%), revealing a demographic shift from European to Asian migration.

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Non-mainstream Language Education in the Australian Context: A Brief Historical Overview Setting the Stage With regard to the linguistic landscape, the 2016 Census lists more than 300 distinct languages, with more than one in five Australians (21%) speaking a language besides English at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). These statistics call into question the reference to the teaching of “foreign” languages in schools and university curricula, as many of these languages are very prominent in the community and are “foreign” only from a monolingual Anglocentric perspective. Moreover, less than half the overseas-born population (42%) spoke only English at home in 2016, while 8.3% spoke Mandarin, 3.5% spoke Cantonese, and 3.1% spoke Vietnamese. For those born in Australia, only one in 12 (around 8%) spoke a language other than English at home, the most common being Greek (0.8%), Arabic (0.8%), and Italian (0.7%), which attests to high intergenerational attrition rates of home languages (Clyne 2001; Lo Bianco 2003). Given the linguistic diversity, one would expect that language policy and planning (henceforth, LPP) would have been of great concern since early days. This was not the case. Aboriginal languages were repressed, and most did not survive (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2016). Of the 250 Aboriginal languages spoken in 1788, the beginning of the British colonization of what is now Australia, few remain (Clyne 1991). The history of migrant languages, which were already spoken from the early days of European settlement, provides evidence for an existing tension between English monolingualism as a symbol of identity and the reality of great ethnolinguistic variation that characterizes modern Australia (Arvanitis et al. 2014; Martín 2005). In fact, the status of languages other than English seems to have deteriorated in the last decades. Schalley et al. (2015) point to a negative correlation – the more multilingual Australia became, the more assimilationist its education policies and the more monolingual the orientation of the society. Indeed, while the initial years following colonization were characterized by a laissez-faire policy regarding “foreign” languages in education (Clyne 1991; Ozolins 1993), the history of Australia’s LPP following Federation in 1901 can be seen as a narrowing of perspective, from accepting or tolerating linguistic diversity towards monolingualism in English, owing to a growing sentiment that linked English monolingualism with loyalty to the Crown or to Australia, and the use of other languages with anti-British Empire or anti-Australian attitudes (Clyne 1991; Martín 2005). World War I saw a broadening of exclusionist and xenophobic policies, which led to the banning of languages other than English in the education system and an active policy of assimilation for those residents who were already in the country (Arvanitis et al. 2014). By 1930, even the entry of non-British Europeans

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was banned unless they had relatives in Australia (Martín 2005), in the interest of attaining a homogenous national identity. The dismantling of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s saw a great influx of “new Australians” from a diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The ideology of assimilation was slowly replaced by the concept of integration to the new culture without necessarily abandoning the home culture. The late 1970s saw the establishment of a number of institutions (e.g., the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council, the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, Ethnic Community Councils, Community Language Schools) which were instrumental in developing policies to address the needs of migrants and refugees to help them overcome disadvantage, foster social participation, and avoid ethnic conflict. A characteristic of this period is the emphasis on “asserting rights rather than eradicating problems” (Arvanitis et al. 2014). This period also saw the introduction of bilingual teaching for Indigenous children of the Northern Territory, which eventually expanded into other states (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2016). With regard to non-Aboriginal home languages, the education system did not follow suit. Lip service was paid to the importance of languages, but no initiatives to promote maintenance and development of home languages were introduced during this period, or – except for very few exceptions – since. The limited support offered was, and still is, mostly restricted to English as a Second Language (ESL), with the unstated belief that proficiency in the English language is the one-and-only skill these children need to “do well” in their new educational context and to assimilate rapidly and effortlessly into Australian culture (Ozolins 1993). Non-mainstream languages were thus shoved into the private domains, and their teaching entrusted to the community language schools. The family or community thus became solely responsible for these languages’ maintenance and development, although, as discussed in §3.3.2, some government funding is made available to them.

National Language Policies and Initiatives Relevant to this chapter and central to the history of minority languages teaching and learning in Australia, the late 1970s were also the years in which a push for a national policy on languages began to be coordinated (Martín 2005), following years of lobbying by language teachers, linguists, Aboriginal, ethnic, and deaf groups for a coordinated national policy. This resulted in the National Policy on Languages (NPL) (Lo Bianco 1987), the first comprehensive national policy on languages in an English-speaking country, explicitly endorsing multilingualism as an asset for the wider community (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2009, p. 16). Furthermore, as Arvanitis et al. (2014, p. 16) note, the NPL “legitimised language policy as an issue in its own right, placing it outside ethnic origins.” Language could now be seen as something “for all.”

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The NPL was based on four principles: (a) English for all (stressing English as a Second Language, rights for migrants and especially migrant children) (b) Support for the maintenance and revival of Aboriginal languages (c) A language other than English for all (d) Equitable and widespread language services (through, for instance, the provision of interpreters and translators) While admirable in its goals and aspirations, the NPL’s success was limited through shortcomings in its implementation (Ozolins 1993). The onus for executing these principles fell on educators, who were responsible for fostering the maintenance of community languages. Programs in community language education at primary schools (which cater for children from 4.5 years of age onwards, i.e., within the scope of the handbook) were developed, but without additional training teachers were left to their own devices, remaining largely ignorant of the processes involved in language acquisition and maintenance (Clyne 1991). Similarly, the recommendations for early language education (see the section “Early Childhood Education in Australia”), which included the provision of appropriate training programs for preschool education personnel, the establishment of language awareness and bilingual programs, and the employment of bilingual aides, were to the best of the authors’ knowledge not implemented at a larger scale. Furthermore, support and funding commitments by both federal and state governments were insufficient, which led to the NPL’s eventual failure (Ingram 2004; Arvanitis et al. 2014). It is noteworthy that the main principle in the NPL that relates to migrant children is the provision of English as a Second Language (ESL, described as “English for all” in the NPL). While language maintenance is explicitly listed as a goal for Aboriginal and community languages, the practical challenges posed by the diversity of community languages in Australia lead the policy maker to be cautious in his proposals in regard to the maintenance of these languages. Although there is recognition that community languages’ maintenance is desirable for “important emotional, cultural, intercultural, social and educational reasons” (Lo Bianco 1987, p. 15), the recommendations seem to suggest that, except for the languages of “geopolitical significance” (ibid.) (such as a number of Asian languages), community language schools would suffice to fulfil the task of language maintenance and development (ib., p.126). Furthermore, as Nicholas (2015, p. 171) remarked, “command of English and command of another language are presented as two distinct achievements. There is no explicit reference in these pillars to a notion of bi- or multilingualism and hence to potential or real relationships between command of one language and command of other languages.” Nicholas further argued that separating the needs of different groups and addressing them differently “became a mechanism through which universal societal bilingualism was marginalised. Engagement with more than one language was promoted, but only for some” (ib., pp. 171–172) languages and

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migrant groups, a point we discuss further in the section “Critical Issues: Assimilationism and the Mainstream Society’s Monolingual Mindset.” As we will see later in the chapter, it is the third principle, “a language other than English for all,” that became prevalent in Australia’s language policy. Most programs in place still aim at developing “elite” bilingualism in English-speaking children (de Mejia 2002), and disregard language maintenance in speakers of non-mainstream languages, which, as mentioned above, is tasked to the community language schools. Only 4 years later, the NPL was, however, superseded by a new policy entitled “Australia’s Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy (ALLP)” (Department of Employment, Education and Training 1991), which completely shifted the focus to English as “Australia’s Language.” Further policy documents followed, showing a trend of progressive narrowing of areas and objectives from “languages” (i.e., all languages) to “language” (i.e., English) to “literacy” and “testing” (see Schalley et al. (2015) for a thorough discussion). The most recent development in the history of languages in Australia was the establishment of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which started operation in 2009. Its mission was to develop a national curriculum from foundation or “prep” (a compulsory preparation year before the beginning of primary schooling; see the section “Early Childhood Education in Australia”) to the end of high school in a wide range of disciplines, one of these being languages. The aim of the national curriculum for language studies is “to enable all students to engage in learning a language in addition to English” (ACARA 2017). While the scheme targets mostly students beyond the age group targeted in this chapter, it is worth mentioning it because, as we shall see in the section “Early Childhood Education in Australia,” it impacts on an important current scheme targeting young children, Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA), both in terms of the common aim of instilling an interest in language from an early age and in the selection of languages to be supported. ACARA recognizes three groups of language learners: “ab initio learners,” i.e., those with no previous knowledge of the language; “background language learners,” with varying degrees of linguistic competence in their home language; and “first language learners,” who attended primary schooling in that language before migrating to Australia. Despite the recognition that learners may have previous knowledge of a language, pathways based on all three groups of learners are provided only for Chinese and Aboriginal languages, and two for Auslan (Australian Sign Language). For the other 15 languages included in the curriculum, no provisions are made for “background” and “first language learners” to develop these languages further. To summarize the discussion so far, the brief historical overview clearly shows that the early promises held by the NPL with regard to home languages were not held, as languages other than English were relegated to the private, or ethnic community, domains. Furthermore, there are no discernible initiatives in the different language policies in relation to early language education, despite the centrality of the early years for children’s cognitive development, as well as their sense of identity and belonging. This is the focus of the next section.

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Early Childhood Education in Australia The concept of early childhood education in Australia is far from being clearly delimited. While the “Early Years Learning Framework” describes early childhood learning as applying to children “from birth to five years of age, as well as their transition to school” (Australian Government, Department of Education and Training 2017a), university courses in early childhood education often cover the ages birth to 8, thus including not only childcare settings (ages birth to 5) but also the foundation year and the first 3 years of primary schooling (ages 5–8). In line with the ages covered in this handbook (3–6 years), we understand “preschool” as an umbrella term in this chapter, covering all ages before official schooling. Early childhood education (ECE), which in Australia is not compulsory, can be formal or non-formal. Formal education is regulated and is conducted away from the child’s home. In Australia, preschool providers include long, or occasional, day care, family day care, kindergartens, and supplementary (“community language”) schools. Although the formal ECE system is far from straightforward, we try to summarize a few of its features. In general, day care centers are considered mostly child minding facilities, while kindergartens have a stronger focus on education through play. Day care centers provide longer hours of care than kindergartens and therefore are more popular with working parents. In reality however the distinctions between these two types of providers is fuzzier. Firstly, different states and territories use different terms (e.g., kindergartens in Queensland are called preschools in Victoria and early learning centers in the Australian Capital Territory). Moreover, some kindergartens operate as part of day care (preschool programs in long day care centers; some states use all these terms as equivalent). Some kindergartens are standalone or in or near schools. In terms of age, while some childcare centers can cater for children from 6 weeks onward, kindergarten programs are for children who have turned 4 the year before starting school, although some states offer kindergarten for children above 3 years of age. Non-formal care, on the other hand, is non-regulated, can be paid or unpaid, and it either occurs in the child’s home or elsewhere. Examples include care provided by grandparents and other relatives, non-related adults (e.g., friends, nannies, au pairs), or other organizations (e.g., religious institutions, playgroups). It is important to note that there is considerable variation with regard to the level of state, territory, and federal funding available for ECE, as well as in states’ guidelines and regulations regarding how it is provided (Baxter 2015). Given the great diversity of settings and contexts, the situation of languages at preschool level is even more heterogeneous than in later stages of schooling. Government documents still pay lip service to the importance of keeping the home languages, but little support has been made available to achieve that end, as compulsory language education is restricted to primary schools onwards, not to ECE. This is unfortunate, as “research has shown that the early childhood years are also an ideal time to foster bilingualism” (Benz 2015, p. 1), as well as crucial to “the development of children’s identity, values, attitudes, awareness, empathy and respect” (ib.), all of which are associated with language learning.

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Main Theoretical Concepts: Framing Early Language Education Initiatives This section provides an overview of the theoretical concepts, within which the ensuing discussion will be couched. This chapter adopts Chua and Baldauf’s (2011) analytical framework, which distinguishes between macro-level and micro-level planning activities and is thus particularly suitable to represent the multi-level, multi-actor complexities of LPP in Australia. LPP can start at different levels and thus result in top-down or bottom-up activities (Chua and Baldauf 2011) – macrolevel activities are initiated top-down and are typically implemented in the formal education system, while micro-level activities are driven bottom-up and often constitute non-formal educational activities. As Fig. 1 illustrates, Chua and Baldauf (2011) further distinguish two stages each within the macro- and the micro-levels. LPP activities are organized across the stages of Supra Macro Planning and Macro Planning (both macro-levels), as well as Micro Planning and Infra Micro Planning (both micro-levels). Each of the four stages involves different actors, who exercise their agency in developing programs and adapting them to the relevant contexts and local conditions. These actors are

Supra Macro Planning Level 1: Government (e.g. ministries) Level 2: International institutions / organisations (e.g. cultural associations) Macro Planning Level 3: States (e.g. state government departments) Level 4: Regions / councils (e.g. regional or council service providers) Micro Planning Level 5: Local institutions (e.g. preschools, schools) Level 6: Organised communities (e.g. religious or organised ethnic groups) Infra Micro Planning Level 7: Flexible communities (e.g. playgroups) Level 8: Tight-knit social units (e.g. families) Level 9: Individuals (e.g. children, educators) Fig. 1 The stages and levels of macro and micro policy planning (based on Chua and Baldauf 2011, p. 940, with levels adapted to the Australian context)

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indicated on different “levels.” Fig. 1 adapts Chua and Baldauf’s (2011) model to the Australian context, identifying key actors. While the levels are exemplary rather than exhaustive, they point to a downscaling continuum of actors from large powerful bodies (e.g., government bodies and international institutions) to families and individuals with limited influence on society. It should be borne in mind thought that, although Fig. 1 may suggest a linear model, “language planning can start at different levels and may not necessarily occur in a sequential order” (Chua and Baldauf 2011, p. 940). In fact, the chapter will provide ample evidence of the multiple entanglements between the different layers, going beyond the top-down and bottom-up dichotomy. Planning at the macro-levels “is normally thought of in terms of large-scale, usually national planning, often undertaken by governments and meant to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society” (Baldauf 2006, p. 147). The bipartite division of the macro-levels into the Supra Macro Planning and Macro Planning stages seems well fitted to the Australian context, where education is primarily the responsibility of the states and territories (Macro Planning stage) but where the national government “plays an important role in providing national leadership across important policy areas, including quality teaching, boosting literacy and numeracy outcomes, and parental engagement” (Australian Government, Department of Education and Training 2017b) (Supra Macro Planning stage). This division also allows for the accommodation of initiatives instigated by international actors, or by foreign national actors. As Baldauf (2006) notes, language policies at the macro stages can be formal and overt, expressed in policy statements and educational directives, or informal, expressed in discourse, or may be left “unstated” or covert (ib., p.149). While classical LPP focused on the macro-levels, in recent decades researchers brought the importance of the micro-levels as sites of planning to the fore. Micro-level planning “refers to cases where businesses, institutions, groups or individuals hold agency and create what can be recognised as a language policy and plan to utilise and develop their language resources” (Baldauf 2006, p. 155). Similarly, Liddicoat and Taylor-Leech (2014) define micro-level planning as the site where “local actors assume agency in language work and establish processes through which perceived local language needs can be addressed using the resources available in their contexts” (p. 237). As the discussion in the section “Infra Micro Planning” will show, the partition into Micro Planning and Infra Micro Planning is again very fitting to the Australian context, as it allows for a distinction between community LPP activities, such as community language preschools, which require a concerted effort of a community of interest (Micro Planning stage), and more individually or family-driven LPP activities such as short-term sojourning (Infra Micro Planning stage). At the same time, the model allows to illustrate interactions between different actors and stages. Importantly, the micro-levels are not just the areas of LPP where macro policies are translated into local practice and implemented. Rather, many policy and planning activities are initiated at this level and can impact on macrolevel decisions and thus influence change. As Liddicoat and Taylor Leech (2014) point out, the micro-levels are inherently diverse and characterized by a range of

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different actors seeking local responses to their needs. Baldauf (2006) even argues that the macro and the micro are often simultaneously at work. However, in Australia, actors operating at the macro- and the micro-levels often seem to find themselves at odds with one another. When this happens, tensions between macrolevel policies and attitudes and micro-level needs and realities become exacerbated. Micro-level planning thus becomes a site of resistance where macro-level policies are subverted or contested (Liddicoat and Taylor-Leech 2014). To mention just one example, despite the frequent mention of the value of home languages in ECE documents, these languages are not supported in the ECE sector (but see the section “Macro Planning” for a commendable exception). This void has mobilized parents and community activists into organizing playgroups, as discussed in the section “Playgroups.” The micro-level examples discussed in the following sections illustrate how this lack of institutional support for languages drove parents and communities committed to intergenerational transmission to develop grassroots initiatives that exist in parallel to the mainstream education system. Anticipating the discussion, it will become clear that in Australia most early language education initiatives are instigated and operate at the micro-levels in the context of indifference and neglect of languages other than English by macro policy planners.

Major Contributions: Formal and Non-formal Initiatives in Australia’s Early Language Education This section provides an overview of formal and non-formal initiatives to foster the development of non-mainstream languages at the preschool level. The initiatives discussed in the following sub-sections exemplify a variety of programs developed and implemented by actors at all levels of language planning, ranging from national and foreign governments (Supra Macro Planning) to state and territories’ programs (Macro Planning), to community strategies (Micro Planning), to parents’ and small group initiatives (Infra Micro Planning). The selection of programs and initiatives are not intended to be exhaustive but rather to give a snapshot of early childhood language education in Australia.

Supra Macro Planning At the national level, there is only one example of a recently implemented government-initiated and government-funded program for young learners: Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA). It is described in some length here, as this initiative could positively impact on the provision of language instruction in later levels of education. ELLA is a digital, play-based program developed by the Department of Education. The program includes a series of interactive applications (apps) aimed at exposing preschool children to languages other than English in an engaging way (Australian Government, Department of Education n.d.). The government’s

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objective is to increase motivation for further language learning in later years of schooling, as a reaction to the falling enrolments in languages across secondary and tertiary levels of instruction. Note that intergenerational language transmission is not mentioned as an objective and that, while incidental language acquisition may occur, language awareness and interest in languages are the main focus. ELLA has been used as a stand-alone language learning resource which young children access independently through an iPad. It became nationally available to eligible preschool services in 2017, following a successful pilot conducted in 2015 which involved 1,868 children in all states and territories, in urban and rural locations, and in a range of settings such as kindergartens and long day care services (Australian Government, Department of Education and Training 2016). Five languages were included in the trial, namely, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, French, and Arabic. According to the ELLA website (Early Learning Languages Australia 2020), approximately 2,500 preschool services decided to implement ELLA in 2018, thus allowing access to the program to over 80,000 children. The languages currently available include Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Greek, Spanish and Vietnamese, with Korean and Turkish being added in 2020. This expansion aimed at aligning this scheme to cover the languages taught in the Australian curriculum and early years of schooling. While the effectiveness of the program needs to be further investigated (for instance, whether ELLA truly motivates further language studies will only become clearer in years to come), ELLA looks like a promising initiative. It implicitly recognizes that languages are worthy of study and that early language learning can have a positive impact on later schooling. There are plans to extend ELLA into the early years of formal schooling (either as support of language learning or as a stand-alone program, as implemented in early childhood education), with first primary school trials in 300 schools from across the country taking place right now. This could indicate a shift toward a more concerted language curriculum across all levels of schooling. It has to be noted that the target audience are children acquiring a select group of “foreign” languages, specifically, the ones included in the school curriculum. There is no indication that the designers had the needs of young home language speakers (both Indigenous and migrant/refugees) in mind when designing the program, and thus the program does not support home language development, although this may still occur incidentally. Furthermore, as it stands, the apps do not seem to involve interaction between peers, which is critical to language acquisition, particularly at this young age. Nevertheless, if expanded to support home languages widely spoken in the community but not yet included in the school curriculum, ELLA could be an innovative and feasible way to address the wide linguistic diversity that is present in Australian educational institutions. ELLA could bypass the need for additional resources (both human and material) once apps for the different languages are developed. It should be stressed, however, that research demonstrating that actual language learning can occur via self-regulated processes is still scarce. This has not been conclusively demonstrated for learners at this young age, and in fact early educators argue that language acquisition crucially requires social interaction and scaffolding and thus cast doubt of the effectiveness of this project. Therefore, while

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this is a promising program in bringing to the fore the importance of exposure to additional languages, its effectiveness is yet to be evaluated.

Macro Planning It is at the Macro Planning stage that national policies are adapted according to Australian states’ and territories’ needs and capabilities. However, states and territories appear to mostly restrict themselves to providing funding and guidelines, and to regulating accreditation of activities at the Micro Planning stage, such as playgroups and community language schools (see the section “Macro Planning”). A notable exception is a recent initiative by the state of Victoria, the “Early Childhood Language Program,” that was being rolled out from term 1, 2019 (Victoria State Government, Department of Education and Training 2020). In this Department of Education and Training program, about 5,000 preschool children across the state benefit from having learning opportunities in a language other than English over a period of 4 years. There are two strands in this program: the “Learn languages at kindergarten” strand offered to 150 kindergartens, which provides learning opportunities in another language for up to 3 h per week, and the much smaller “Bilingual kindergartens” strand offered to 10 kindergartens, through which children learn in another language for up to 7.5 h per week, and hence half of their instructional program. At the moment, language instruction is delivered by a dedicated teacher, who may offer the program at several institutions. The languages of the program include Arabic, Auslan, Chin Hakha, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Karen, Mandarin Chinese, Punjabi, Spanish, and Vietnamese, and more than five Aboriginal languages (Mikakos 2018; Victoria State Government, Department of Education and Training 2020). The decision of which languages to include has been guided by communities’ needs, kindergartens’ interests, and the availability of qualified staff. Importantly, the offered languages are, for the first time, not restricted to the group of “foreign” languages included in the Australian school curriculum. Instead, they include migrant community languages such as Chin Hakha, Karen, and Punjabi, as well as several Aboriginal languages, which could be seen as a step in supporting intergenerational language transmission. The needs and aspirations of actors from the Micro Planning stage – expressed in a tender process – have thus had an impact on decisions made at the Macro Planning stage, which is a very positive development. As stated by the responsible Minister for Early Childhood Education, at the time this is an “Australian-first initiative” (Mikakos 2018), and nothing similar has ever, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, been implemented in Australia before. Unfortunately, the scope of the program is restricted to 4 years and to a small selection of languages spoken in Australia, and only a small percentage of kindergarten services in Victoria (one of eight states and territories in Australia) could be included. Whether there are any plans to roll out a comparable program across the state at a later stage is unclear but would probably depend on a future evaluation of the program.

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We recognize that, given Australia’s linguistic diversity, supporting home language maintenance in most if not all of the languages spoken in Australia poses a significant challenge to the formal education system, which, as mentioned above, depends on the states and territories’ willingness to provide funding. For practical reasons, doubts have been cast on the ability of schools to cope with the complex Australian linguistic situation. Moreover, Fishman (1991) recognized that schools alone cannot reverse language shift and suggested steps for communities to create an environment in which home languages can thrive beyond the classroom. This is where activities at the micro-level have an important role to play, and examples at both the Micro Planning and the Infra Micro Planning stages are discussed in the following.

Micro Planning As Fig. 1 indicates, the Micro Planning stage includes a diverse range of activities, initiated by a variety of actors. Some of these initiatives clearly started as bottom-up responses to local conditions but took on a life of their own by expanding into the wider migrant communities, eventually receiving government support in terms of accreditation and funding. Examples are non-formal language classes organized by small groups of parents, which were later formalized in community language schools. Some other programs at this level were initiated at the Supra Macro Planning stage of foreign governments and funded foreign agencies as a sort of cultural diplomacy and soft-power building, aiming at international language and culture promotion (Zhao 2011). These can be seen then as top-down initiatives that are implemented at the local level. Examples include organizations such as the Alliance Franc¸aise, the Japan Foundation, and others. While these institutions provide paid language tuition open to all consumers, some implement programs that aim at home language maintenance and development. Also included are foreign government-funded programs that contribute financially toward language programs, through partnerships with local education authorities and individual private and state schools (e.g., The Italian Study Centre in Australia), or to students learning the language of origin. All of these initiatives, while implemented at and depending on actors from the Micro Planning stage, such as teachers and community leaders, show that there are interactions and interdependencies between the Micro Planning stage and the macro-level stages. Importantly, both interactional directions – bottom-up and top-down – do occur. This is in particular the case for initiatives aiming for more long-term sustainability. In what follows, two activities that operate at the Micro Planning stage are described in detail: playgroups and community language schools and preschools.

Playgroups Playgroups have been defined as “community-based, localised groups that bring together preschool-aged children, their parents and carers for the purpose of play and social activities” (Dadich and Spooner 2008, p. 95). They have been an integral part

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of the landscape of early childhood programs for more than 40 years and are the second largest civil society movement in Australia (Playgroup Australia Website 2016). Playgroup Australia, a non-profit organization, is the national peak body that coordinates state and territory organizations. Collectively, they represent playgroups across 80% of postcodes in Australia, with thousands of families attending every week. Note, however, that not all playgroups are members of the association, and therefore these figures do not provide the whole picture. The Australian Government supports one model of self-managed and two models of facilitated playgroups (Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs 2006a, b). The self-managed playgroups (also known as “community” or “mainstream”) are initiated and self-run by groups of parents or caregivers, who meet with the aim of offering recreation and social activities to their children. They are hence Micro Planning stage initiatives that receive support from actors from both the Supra Macro Planning stage (financial government support) and the Infra Micro Planning stage (volunteer work from parents and caregivers), demonstrating yet again how the different stages interlock. Facilitated playgroups, on the other hand, are implemented by local organizations but are government-funded and run by paid facilitators with expertise in early childhood education. The two facilitated playgroup models have different aims. Supported Playgroups aim to connect members of particular populations with one another. Intensive Support Playgroups, on the other hand, aim at addressing the needs of populations perceived as vulnerable, such as migrant and refugee families, Indigenous families, single or young parents, or families living with disabilities. Despite migrant and refugee families being identified as participants in Intensive Supported Playgroups, many playgroups targeting specific community languages have been initiated by groups of migrant parents as self-managed programs. What distinguishes these from other self-managed playgroups is the aim of providing children with opportunities to develop social and affective connections with peers of similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as home language development through structured activities and unstructured play. Unless these groups opt to become members of the association for the practical benefits that membership confers (such as insurance, or information sharing), neither the association nor the public may be aware of their operation. These clear cases of Micro Planning have therefore not been researched to date.

Community Language (Pre)Schools Community language schools (also called “heritage,” “ethnic,” or “Saturday/Sunday” schools, in operation since 1857) are a community response to the challenge of providing children with opportunities to develop their home language against the backdrop of monolingual educational agendas and wide linguistic diversity. Each State and Territory Department of Education regulates registration and accreditation. Schools receive macro-level support through state funding supplemented by federal “per capita” funding. The initial steps in establishing such schools, however, usually rest on micro-level actors, groups of community activists willing to offer voluntary work. The Ethnic Schools Association’s website describes them as “after hours

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language schools that provide mother tongue language teaching and cultural maintenance programs” (Australian Federation of Ethnic Schools Associations 2012). Australia now has about 1000 community language schools, attended by more than 100,000 school-aged children. These schools provide lessons in 72 languages (Lo Bianco 2009), just over one-third of the languages spoken in Australia. Some of these schools also add religion and history to instill in-group loyalty. While we could not find any published information about the preschool years, we are aware from personal knowledge and encounters with community members that many of these schools organize preschool classes. These preschools provide instruction to younger children, through fun activities such as dance, martial arts, music, or games. Their aim is to develop a positive attitude toward the language and language learning that will sustain motivation for language learning from a young age.

Infra Micro Planning The last decades have seen growing recognition of the crucial role of the family as “the critical endpoint in many language management activities” (Spolsky 2009, p. 22), particularly in contexts where there is little institutional support for languages other than the mainstream. Families thus become the principal language managers, responsible for the linguistic trajectories of their children. Activities at this stage can thus be seen as sites of contestation of macro-level education policies, which in Australia ignore local agents’ needs and aspirations. Through the use of technology and other means, local communities increasingly bypass the national macro-levels, connecting instead transnationally and translocally in their efforts to maintain the home language (Hatoss 2020). The literature on family language planning provides ample examples of parentinitiated activities, which extend along a continuum of locations and spaces, from the home to the local target diaspora community, and beyond. Reported in the literature have been the control of the home language environment (Spolsky 2009) through steering language use in the home; the provision of resources such as written paperbased and online materials and games in the home language (Eisenchlas et al. 2016; Little 2018); the use of new media to communicate with community members (Hatoss 2013); or living in neighborhoods with a high demographic concentration of home language speakers (Fishman 1991). In the following, two initiatives that parents have implemented in Australia are presented: recruiting target language speakers to extend linguistic input in the target language and sojourning to the parents’ country of origin for educational purposes.

Recruiting Target Language Speakers One of the most frequent parent-initiated language management activities in the Australian context is the recruitment of target language speakers into the country, as the presence of target language speakers in the family is conducive to home language

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use and maintenance (see also Pauwels 2005). These target language speakers are mostly family members, au pairs or nannies, or family day care providers. Family members may take on carer roles (in particular grandparents and other older relatives such as aunts and uncles) or enter the family as overseas visitors. They often have limited English proficiency, thus providing an important source and reinforcement of target language use (Pauwels 2005). Anecdotal evidence suggests that target language-speaking au pairs or nannies play an important role in some minority language communities in Australia (e.g., the German-speaking community). Au pairs and nannies as target language speakers entering the family domain have been discussed in the literature from very early on (Ronjat 1913; Hoffmann 1985). In Australia, however, au pairs “are covered by no government regulatory scheme: there is no dedicated visa, no official guidelines governing the terms of placements, nor any official definition of au pairs” (Berg 2015, p. 187). This makes them invisible to macro-level institutions. Partially due to this invisibility, their contribution to language acquisition and maintenance in Australia has not been researched systematically to date. Family Day Care (FDC) is an approved childcare service, regulated by the National Quality Standard and other state and territories frameworks, that operates from private homes, catering for up to four children under school age. Family day care educators have to be accredited and fulfil a number of requirements, including holding an appropriate qualification (or be actively working towards it), clearance for working with children, and are required to maintain and develop skills and knowledge to deliver quality education and care through attendance at meetings and workshops. FCD has been in existence for more than 40 years. As of June 2018, FDC services more than 125,000 children around the country, i.e., 12% of Australia’s entire early childhood education and care sector (Care for Kids 2018). Some parents select carers based on their language background, but to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is little, if any, research on this decision and how it impacts on children’s language development. As a significant number of migrant women become FDC educators, there is anecdotal evidence of English-speaking children acquiring basic command of the carer’s language during these formative years. To the best of our knowledge, though, there is no research on these language interactions and their impact on the English-speaking children’s language awareness and development.

Educational Sojourning Sojourning during the Australian school holidays to the parents’ homeland to further kindergarten/school-aged children’s education is a frequent activity that has hitherto received little attention. Initiated at the family level, this strategy directly engages the target community overseas to offset, at least temporarily, local environmental impediments to promoting home language maintenance and development and cultural understanding. A study of this phenomenon was recently conducted by Eisenchlas et al. (online first, 2019). Interview data was collected from Taiwanesebackground mothers who regularly engage in this practice.

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Although the parents’ stated aim was to facilitate the development of children’s linguistic skills, in particular, literacy, the interview data showed that attending (pre) school in Taiwan was considered by parents as an opportunity to further develop basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) through authentic interactions with native-speaking peers, rather than cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) (see Cummins (1979) for a discussion of these concepts). While the stated focus on literacy suggests that this language management activity is particularly suitable for primary school-aged children, the interviewed mothers recommended piloting it in kindergarten to see how the children adapt to a different environment, before enrolling children in primary school. Another frequently mentioned reason for the sojourn activity was to develop closer bonds with the extended family in Taiwan, which again points to the importance of the family, both nuclear and extended, in enhancing children’s language skills, thus improving children’s self-confidence and motivation to continue learning and using the language upon returning to Australia. Both self-confidence and motivation are affective factors considered conducive for intergenerational transmission (Kopeliovich 2013). While this activity is clearly family-initiated and managed, interview data discussed in Eisenchlas et al. (online first, 2019) indicate that rather than being an individual management activity, the success of sojourning rests on participants’ abilities to establish partnerships with spouses, schools, preschools, and teachers at both ends of the sojourning, and the extended family and community abroad, without whose collaboration this experience could not be attained. There is thus a considerable planning and investment of time, cost, and effort involved in managing this activity, and other micro-level actors from both the Micro Planning and Infra Micro Planning stages need to be involved in order for these activities to be successful.

Summary This section has provided an overview of formal (e.g., Early Childhood Language Program) and non-formal (e.g., au pairs as target language speakers) initiatives toward early language education in Australia. Initiatives from all four stages of policy planning as suggested by Chua and Baldauf (2011) were discussed (see Fig. 1). Interestingly, both macro-level initiatives presented herein are very recent developments and not rolled out across the country, so only a limited number of children have so far had access to them. The noted lack of institutional support for early language education has instead generated a number of micro-level grassroots initiatives, the effectiveness of which has, however, not been evaluated to date. Moreover, no systematic mapping or overview of which initiatives are driven by the different actors from the different stages is available to date, leaving us with many open questions about the actual state of early language education in Australia. What can be said, however, is that the different stages appear rather interlocked, and actors from the different stages interact flexibly to support early language education.

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New Projects: Treading Carefully in the Right Direction As just mentioned, both the national program ELLA (Supra Macro Planning) and the Victorian Early Childhood Language Program (Macro Planning) are very recent early language education projects that can be considered as tentative steps “in the right direction,” although they are as yet merely reaching a limited number of potential beneficiaries. They are, however, the only two Australian macro-level initiatives targeting early language education, indicating a clear need for more initiatives, at both macro-level planning stages (SupraMacro and Macro). Given that these initiatives are so recent, they are yet to be evaluated. Their evaluation will pose significant logistical challenges. On the one hand, a longitudinal approach would be required, which would involve tracking participants for a considerable period of time. On the other hand, many confounding factors would need to be disentangled, as language acquisition and development is a multidimensional process involving a wide range of social, affective, and cognitive factors. It remains to be seen which stance political actors and education policy planners might take in the coming years after these initiatives have concluded. At the micro-levels, it is difficult to identify sustainable initiatives that do not benefit from macro-level support. However, what can be expected is that actors at the two micro-level planning stages (Micro and Infra Micro) will extend current initiatives, using, e.g., technology to connect with one another beyond existing geographical limitations. For instance, recruiting target language speakers into the families is increasingly facilitated by recent technological developments. Hatoss (2013) has coined the blend “cyberspora” to refer to communities of practice that extend beyond existing geographical limitations by entering and making use of virtual spaces.

Critical Issues: Assimilationism and the Mainstream Society’s Monolingual Mindset As the discussion in the sections “Major Contributions: Formal and Non-Formal Initiatives in Australia’s Early Language Education” and “New Projects: Treading Carefully in the Right Direction” has shown, languages and their acquisition have to date not received much macro-level support in Australia. This became evident even in the newest initiative, the Victorian Early Childhood Language Program, when the Minister for Early Childhood Education, Jenny Mikakos (2018), explicitly justifies the program by stating that “learning another language has great rewards – it’s fun, it improves brain function and actually helps kids learn English better.” Neither the mastery of a language per se nor, for background speakers, questions of identity and belonging appeared to play a role in the minister’s view. The two reasons shining through in the quote are cognitive benefits (“improves brain function”) and enhancing the acquisition of the mainstream language English (“helps kids learn English better”). This stress on cognitive benefits is extremely narrow and shows a clear discrepancy between Australia’s official approach to

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languages and the one displayed by, e.g., the European Commission, which claims that early language learning has enormous potential for the development of children’s identity, values, empathy, and respect, all in addition to learning a second language: Opening children’s minds to multilingualism and different cultures is a valuable exercise in itself that enhances individual and social development and increases their capacity to empathize with others. [. . .] As young children also become aware of their own identity and cultural values, ELL [Early Language Learning] can shape the way they develop their attitudes towards other languages and cultures by raising awareness of diversity and of cultural variety, hence fostering understanding and respect. (European Commission 2011, p. 7)

This significant difference raises the question why languages are so underrated in Australia, where 21% of the population speak a language other than English at home. Despite lip service being paid to cultural and linguistic diversity, a monolingual mindset (Clyne 2005) still operates in mainstream society, stemming from a persistent Anglocentrism and an assimilationist rather than integrationist perspective on migration (Martín 2005). English is the de facto official language and is seen as a marker of Australian identity and as fostering social cohesion. Thus, the majority of Anglo-Australians are staunchly monolingual and see little value in adding languages to the curriculum (Bense 2014), as attested by frequent letters to newspaper editors bemoaning the time “wasted” in learning foreign languages, and the persistently low enrolments in languages courses at all levels of instruction, characterized by Clyne et al. (2007) as a “national tragedy and an international embarrassment.” Indeed, according to Tim Mansfield, the Executive Director of the Asia Education Foundation, in the 1960s, roughly 40 percent of high school students graduated with a second language. This figure is currently down to 10 percent (Theodosiou 2017), which places Australia almost at the bottom of the OECD rankings (Clyne et al. 2007). Ruiz’ (1984) three language policy perspectives of “language as a right,” “language as a problem,” and “language as a resource” are relevant to the Australian context, where only a few prestigious languages are seen as resources on the basis of economic (e.g., Chinese, Japanese), geopolitical (e.g., Indonesian), or cultural rationales (e.g., French, German) and thus find a place in the curriculum. These “priority” languages are distinguished from Indigenous, migrant, and community languages that are seen as problems (Lo Bianco 2003; Schalley et al. 2015). The “problem languages” are thus neglected and relegated to the private sphere or shoved into an alternative, supplementary educational setting. It is only the languages seen as resources that are considered worthy of study. A welcome exception to this observation is the new Victorian Early Childhood Language Program; this initiative, however, is nonetheless justified in line with the mainstream society’s monolingual mindset and a resulting focus on the children’s English and general cognitive benefits. Overall, no attempts are made to invest in meaningful bilingual education that would enable bilingual children to achieve high levels of proficiency in their home language(s) (Piller 2013). A clear distinction is thus made between being bilingual in community languages and becoming bilingual in priority languages.

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Only the latter is considered an achievement, while the former is “judged as a social remediation or disadvantage” (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2016, p. 11). The critical issues in relation to language education in the Australian context (early and otherwise) thus appear to be the mainstream society’s monolingual mindset as well as the assimilationist orientation of language-related policies. Both affect language education adversely. As Clyne (2005) argued, it is imperative that Australia overcomes the monolingual mindset. This would allow Australians “to develop our language potential to the fullest, giving monolinguals a measure of plurilingualism and developing all the languages of plurilinguals to the highest possible level and providing the opportunity to build competence in further languages” (p. 64). This change of perspective would require educating mainstream Australians on the importance of languages for the well-being of all families and communities, and increase awareness about the benefits of bilingualism, which extend well beyond their economic applications. Ethnic organizations and researchers have a role to play in this process, by increasing advocacy efforts as a way to combat the worrying trend against languages in the education system and wider community.

Future Research Directions: A Systematic Mapping of Early Language Education Initiatives The discussion in this chapter has highlighted a number of early language education initiatives that have not been investigated at all or have been underresearched to date, and hence more systematic research is needed. In addition to evaluations of macro-level initiatives (see the section “New Projects: Treading Carefully in the Right Direction”), these include, among others, investigating the long-term benefits of micro-level initiatives such as bringing target language-speaking au pairs or nannies into the family, children’s short-term educational sojourning to the parents’ homeland, and the provision of family day care in languages other than English. Generally speaking, a systematic mapping and description of early language education in Australia and the effectiveness of its initiatives would be a highly desirable addition to the body of research on language maintenance and development. A mapping like this could be based on Chua and Baldauf’s (2011) model (see the section “Main Theoretical Concepts: Framing Early Language Education Initiatives”) and ask (i) which actors within which stages of the model instigate or implement initiatives; (ii) which actors at different levels (and stages) in the model interact to achieve joint outcomes, and how they do this; (iii) which aims, methods, activities, and outcomes guide these initiatives; and (iv) which potential initiatives are not being implemented, and why not (i.e., what are the roadblocks?). Furthermore, the discussion has shown that, at least at the macro-level and hence in formal education, no serious distinction is made between background speakers and second language learners. In the current programs, these different groups are conflated (although they are nominally recognized by ACARA in the national

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curriculum). What are the effects of this conflation on (i) language learning outcomes, (ii) students’ motivation, and (iii) teachers’ approaches to and perspectives on teaching? In relation to micro-level/non-formal education, questions that have been raised include what affordances technology might have on offer for language learning and whether actual language learning can occur via self-regulated processes. In particular long-term effects appear to be of special interest, and hence there is a need for longitudinal studies. While these questions are raised with regard to the Australian educational context, the issues are pertinent to other educational environments, in particular where a diversity of actors operate at different levels to address communities’ language needs. Thus, the framework adopted in this chapter can provide the basis for a taxonomy of initiatives and allow for the systematic comparison across and within countries.

Conclusions The chapter has shown that, despite societal monolingual orientation, communities can be creative in implementing initiatives. Not every community is active in pursuing linguistic development, however, and the overview suggests that some languages are better placed for intergenerational transmission than others. The chapter ends with a call to start shifting the paradigm from thinking about home language activities as complementary to educational practices to advocating for a concerted approach to language education (Lo Bianco 2018). This would apply at all levels, but crucially start in early childhood, given the centrality of the formative years to the intellectual, emotional, and social development of the individual.

Cross-References ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

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Perspectives on Heritage Language Programs in Early Childhood Education in Canada

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Themistoklis Aravossitas, Spyros Volonakis, and Momoye Sugiman

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clarifying Terms and Theories in the Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Support for Promoting HL Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Frameworks for Early Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canadian Paediatric Society’s Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Learning in Ontario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quebec: A Unique Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HLE in Other Provinces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linguistically Appropriate Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maintaining the Commitment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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T. Aravossitas (*) CERES-Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] S. Volonakis Network Child Care Services, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Sugiman Toronto District School Board, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_36

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Abstract

In Canada, over 20% of the population report a mother tongue other than English or French. In a country that formally embraces the concept of multiculturalism, communities that are interested in the protection and promotion of their respective linguistic and cultural heritages may do so through a variety of heritage language (HL) or international language (IL) programs that are supported by the provincial governments. Multiple generations of Canadian children – including children of interethnic marriages and those with no background in an international language – can be found in these programs that teach non-official languages/immigrant languages, i.e., languages other than English, French, or Indigenous languages. Also found in HL programs are immigrant and refugee children who have arrived in Canada as a result of the recent surge in global migration. Strategic efforts are undertaken by many local school boards, communities, and HL educators to identify meaningful ways of promoting HL teaching and learning. In this chapter, we present an overview of such efforts in HL programs, particularly within the preschool context in Canada. We outline some of the major theoretical concepts, policies, and frameworks that guide HL programs for the early years in selected regions of Canada. Ontario receives a heightened focus because of its status as Canada’s most populous and multilingual province. Keywords

Bilingual education · Early years language development · Heritage language · Linguistically appropriate practice · Multilingualism · Mother tongue retention

Introduction Having become a self-governing nation in 1867, Canada is characterized as a relatively young country even though its Indigenous populations had established thriving and complex societies in Canada many thousands of years before they were displaced by British and French colonists. In fact, archaeologists believe that “human beings had been living in what is now Canada for at least 12,000 years and probably much longer” (Government of Canada 2018a, para. 1). Nonetheless, the conventional historical narrative depicts the country as a vast wilderness, a blank canvas available to European immigrants for settlement and development. Whether Canadians find their cultural origins in the seventeenth century settlers from France, in the twentieth century migration waves, or in the flow of immigrants and refugees over the past two decades, everyone – with the exception of the First Nations, Metis and Inuit – claims roots from somewhere else. The Official Languages Act (1969) and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) recognize the equal status of English and French “in all federal institutions” (including the parliament, courts, and all federal government services and publications), thus rendering them “official languages” (Hudon 2011, p. 1).

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Despite Canada’s official bilingualism, it is the English language that dominates over French in all regions except Quebec. At the same time, in the 2016 Canadian Census, 19.4% reported speaking more than one language at home, and 22.3% noted an immigrant language as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada 2017a). It should be noted here that the term “immigrant language” is defined as a language that is neither English, French nor Indigenous and “whose existence in Canada is originally attributable to immigration after English and French colonization” (Statistics Canada 2017a). Furthermore, the term “mother tongue” is used in the Canadian Census to denote “the first language learned in childhood and still understood,” and it is distinguished from “languages spoken most often at home” (Statistics Canada 2017a). While Mandarin, Cantonese and Punjabi remain in first, second and third place respectively as the most common immigrant mother tongues, other languages have shown remarkable growth since 2011, most notably Tagalog, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu (Statistics Canada 2017a). In terms of ethnolinguistic diversity, the demographic composition varies from region to region, yet the overriding fact is that the nation’s linguistic landscape is constantly evolving and highly textured. It is richly multilingual and multicultural, particularly in the large urban centers of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. In fact, more than 200 languages are spoken in Canada, including approximately 70 Indigenous ones (Statistics Canada 2017a). Until fairly recently, the linguistic heterogeneity of languages diminished noticeably as one moved towards the rural and remote regions, but with the increasing number of new immigrants and refugees settling in more sparsely populated areas over the past few decades (Yoshida and Ramos 2012; Wiginton 2014), it is no longer accurate to describe the rural linguistic landscape as almost entirely English or French. Also, since several less populated provinces, such as Manitoba and Nova Scotia, have been intensifying efforts to attract foreign-trained professionals through their Provincial Nominee Programs, it has been predicted that the flow of new immigrants to these regions will continue to grow (Wiginton 2014). Between 2011 and 2036, as a consequence of “international immigration,” Canada’s ten provinces and three territories “are expected to see a rise in the demographic weight” of people whose mother tongue is a language other than English or French (Houle and Corbeil 2017, p. 113). Against this backdrop is a growing awareness that diversity and inclusivity – at all levels of one’s education – enrich and promote the well-being of individual Canadians, and by extension, the nation’s well-being. This recognition has been the result of deliberate efforts that continue to evolve and require persistent vigilance. As Cummins (1981) states, in the past, one of the major purposes of education was the “Canadianizing” of all children to obliterate any “foreign values,” and because of “the strong emphasis on Anglo-conformity in the schools, it is not surprising that bilingualism came to be regarded as a negative force in children’s development. . .almost as a disease” (p. 6). Before the multiculturalism rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, English was the lingua franca of Canadian pre-schools and elementary schools outside Quebec – except, of course, for French Immersion programs which were established in the early 1970s to promote nationwide bilingualism. When it came to the non-official languages, though, teachers either ignored their students’ heritage languages (HLs) or advised

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immigrant parents to use only English at home (Cummins 1981). The faulty reasoning was that being exposed to more than one language in the early childhood years would lead to first language interference, hinder English language development and result in further ghettoization of ‘ethnic’ communities rather than the favored road of assimilation (Cummins 1981; Cummins and Danesi 1990). Two decades ago, most young minority-language children in Canada had limited to no exposure outside the home environment to caregivers or teachers with whom they could communicate regularly in their mother tongues. A 1998 study on the language socialization of minority-language children, conducted in childcare centers in three Canadian cities, revealed that more than three quarters of children in a particular language group attended ECE centers where not even one child or educator shared their first language (Bernhard et al. 1998). With regard to multilingual education policies, prior to the enactment of the federal policy of multiculturalism in 1988, in many regions of Canada, there was overt suppression of languages other than English and French (Cummins and Danesi 1990). Assimilationist policies, which tended to promote Anglocentric and Francocentric values in the school and the society, were the accepted norm until the later decades of the twentieth century when they were supplanted by more integrative, inclusive policies (Cummins and Danesi 1990). Spearheaded by Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, these new policies acknowledged Canada’s flourishing immigrant population and promoted the concept of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework” (Jedwab 2020). As Pierre Trudeau stated when introducing this concept in the Parliament of Canada on October 8, 1971, There cannot be one cultural policy for Canadians of British and French origin, another for the original peoples and yet a third for all others. For although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly. . ..(Library and Archives Canada 1971)

Eventually, this official policy evolved into the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (Canadian Multiculturalism Act, R. S. C. (1985). c. 24 (4th Supp.)) which acknowledges “the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society” and “the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage” (p. 1). As for language, the Act stipulates that it is Canada’s policy to “preserve and enhance the use of languages other than English and French, while strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada” (p. 1). By the mid-2000s, guided by this Act, some mainstream educators were making serious efforts to encourage young children to not only appreciate but also preserve their cultural and linguistic heritage, as demonstrated mainly through school projects carried out in both HL and English, and the writing and publishing of bilingual books, and similar initiatives (Stille and Cummins 2013). While indirect forms of language suppression have not vanished, the situation has gradually improved – at least in the major urban centers. Although minority language rights are protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), the exercising of those

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rights has varied from province to province according to the size of the immigrant population and the given political climate. The next section begins with an overview of relevant theoretical concepts and some critical studies that explore the significance of HLs and the relationship between HLs and Canada’s official bilingualism. This discussion is followed by an outline of some significant initiatives and contributions to the field of Heritage Language Education (HLE) for young children. It concludes with thoughts about future challenges and research directions. We focus on learners, parents, schools, and communities as well as programs and policies, both federal and provincial, that value bilingualism and multilingualism in the early years. Several dimensions are explored, including parental involvement, pedagogical principles, and innovative practices. Due to space limitations, we have highlighted only some salient programs and documents instead of trying to list all of them from coast to coast. The bulk of our discussion features Ontario, essentially because it is the most densely populated and multicultural province. Ontario is home to approximately half of the Canadians who reported an immigrant mother tongue in the 2016 Census (Statistics Canada 2017a). Additionally, from a historical perspective, this province was selected because it was a pioneer, along with Alberta and Manitoba, in establishing publicly funded HL programs in the 1970s particularly within the Toronto District School Board (Cummins 1981; Cummins and Danesi 1990). We also review some relevant HL documents and programs pertaining to young children in other provinces of Canada. This analysis does not explore the revival, promotion, or teaching of Indigenous languages for a variety of reasons. First, we are not qualified to speak about this specific subject. It is both historically and politically complex and requires the input of Indigenous scholars, elders, and specific “First Voices” who are qualified and authorized to present the subject in a respectful manner, having heightened sensitivity to its complexities. Second, it is essential to understand that when we speak of Indigenous languages, we are referring to over 70 distinct languages and not some monolithic tongue. Those differences carry with them unique histories and cultures, and thus unique requirements and demands for their promotion. Third and most significantly, the imperatives related to Indigenous languages are different. Indigenous languages are not immigrant languages that were spoken after colonization; rather, they are mother tongues that were lost as a result of colonization and the deliberate efforts of the colonizers to eliminate those languages and, more broadly, to erase the Indigenous identity (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015). Whereas immigrant groups seek to preserve their respective heritages, the Indigenous communities seek to revive and resurrect what was lost as a consequence of colonization. Their imperatives, therefore, are profoundly different and require a different understanding as to the efforts that are required to accomplish the desired revival. This linguistic revitalization has been evolving by leaps and bounds over the past decade and is beyond our area of expertise. Also outside the scope of our current discussion are the sign language rights of young deaf children and the Afrocentric schools in Canada.

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Main Theoretical Concepts Before reviewing some of the key HL initiatives across Canada, we explain central terms used in the study of HL learning in the early years. Our chief focus is on HLE’s role in preventing the loss of immigrant mother tongues, that is, the languages first learned at home which are not Canada’s official or dominant languages. After outlining some relevant theoretical concepts, we discuss the rationale for promoting HLE in the early years.

Clarifying Terms and Theories in the Literature Coined in Canada in reference to HL programs that were established in the 1970s to support the teaching and learning of the nation’s immigrant community languages, HLE is a field that emerged in bilingual education in the early twenty-first century (Brinton et al. 2017). In recent years, the term heritage languages has been used interchangeably with the terms community languages and international languages. To avoid confusion, we shall adhere to the original term in this chapter for the most part. In Canada, HL generally signifies any language other than the two official languages or Canada’s Indigenous languages (Cummins 1992). Similarly, from an educational perspective, Bilash (2009) refers to HL as languages spoken in the home that are different from the main language spoken in the society. Polinsky and Kagan (2007) define HL as the incompletely learned home language that could be either maintained or shifted, depending on certain factors. Baker (2011) views language maintenance as a language’s relative stability vis-à-vis its use in specific spaces (e.g., home, school, community events), its practical use by both children and adults, and the number and distribution of speakers of that language. According to Weinrich (1966), language shift is the gradual transition from one language to another as the norm. Fishman (1991) explains that this term denotes the behavior of a whole community, a subgroup of the community or an individual. On the other hand, for De Vries (1987), language shift is an individual’s transition from one linguistic community to another one. Essentially, both language maintenance and language shift refer to the degree to which a minority community supplants its native language with the dominant society’s language. Joshua Fishman (1991) studied language shift in relation to immigrant communities in the United States and their efforts to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage. He describes the immigrants’ shift from their home language to the dominant language (i.e., English) as a process spanning generational stages. Firstgeneration immigrants are proficient in their native language, and they usually use it in the home while attempting to develop the highest possible level of competence in the dominant language for work and integration purposes. For the second-generation speakers, acquiring proficiency in the dominant language is the norm, yet this acquisition often happens at the expense of the HL which is used in limited circumstances and gradually declines (Fishman 1991). By the third generation, the dominant language takes over in all social realms. Incomplete acquisition and loss of

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linguistic structures are evident for most individuals who are not expected to retain functional command in the HL beyond the third generation (Fishman 1991, 2001, 2006; Alba et al. 2002). Fishman’s work on the Revising Language Shift model (Fishman 1991) is based chiefly on the experiences of European immigrants in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. His work is supported by the studies of Veltman (1983, 1988, 1990), Valdes (2001), and Alba et al. (2002), who, among others, discuss the linguistic assimilation (i.e., Anglicization) of immigrants within three generations. These studies confirm that Anglicization has no racial boundaries, as it has also affected Asian communities. The phenomenon of language shift at the expense of the HL tends to occur wherever immigrant minority language speakers interact with the dominant language groups (Hornberger 1998; Walker 1993). The shift is evident at the community and individual levels (Fishman 1991; Wong Fillmore 1991) and has been documented by researchers in several countries as a cross-generational pattern (Veltman 1988; Wake 1990; Hakuta and D’Andrea 1992; Aunger 1993; Finocchiaro 1995; Dave 1996; Xiao 1998; Harrison 2000; Kouritzin 2000). Moving along the generational continuum (from first generation to second, third, and fourth), HL speakers are unlikely to maintain competence in their HL for a variety of reasons: personal, cultural, professional, and so on, but mainly as a result of the societal push toward the dominant language (Fishman 1991; Veltman 1988). The degree of HL maintenance or a shift to the dominant language(s) is largely contingent on language policies and practices at both the societal and family levels. The notion of family language policy, as defined by Spolsky (2004), involves three key parameters: language practices, language beliefs, and language planning. Language practices are substantially influenced by the social context. Values and beliefs also play a pivotal role as they modify such practices through language planning and language management (Nekvapil 2006). Connections among state policy, community language policy, and family language policy, practice and management are demonstrated in the work of Schwartz and Verschik (2013). Based on wide-ranging ethnolinguistic data (from immigrant families, inter-marriage families, and minority families in conflict zones), the authors highlight several effective family language practices, including enrollment in bilingual kindergarten, negotiation of language use and roles in the home, collaboration among parents, children and teachers on language teaching and learning, as well as faith-related literacy activities and home language learning (Schwartz and Verschik 2013). One of the most important foundations for successful bilingual or multilingual development in young learners is early language awareness. This term in language pedagogy refers to a child’s ability to understand what language is and what it does. A key concept in language awareness (LA) promotion is the appreciation of and sensitivity to diversity among languages. De Houwer (2015) examined cases of children with well-developed multilingual proficiency and metacognitive skills that allow them to reflect on language use. Some of the observed behaviors that demonstrate effective language awareness include children’s translating practices, their ability to detect and correct their own errors or those of their peers, and their realization that some individuals may use more than one language (De Houwer 2015).

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Theoretical Support for Promoting HL Maintenance In Canada, individuals with a mother tongue and home language other than English and French tend to retain a strong connection to their HL upon entering the school system. Given the high percentage of immigrants or direct descendants of immigrants in the Canadian population and the co-existence of more than 200 languages, Canada enjoys a wealth of cultural and linguistic resources. A survey for the Association for Canadian Studies reveals that 91% of Allophones in Canada reported an attachment to their HL (Jedwab 2014). Even so, most immigrant groups, chiefly those of European origin, have experienced some difficulties in maintaining their HL into adolescence. This retention issue can be attributed to several factors in the intergenerational transmission process, including (a) time spent in Canada, (b) migratory flow into Canada from the country of origin, (c) concentration of the language groups, (d) the extent to which children are exposed to those languages within the family, (e) the degree of exposure to English or French, (f) opportunities to study the HL in a school, and (g) interethnic marriages (Harrison 1997; Turcotte 2006; Houle 2011). In addition to family cohesion and profound cultural reasons, the successful transmission of any HL can lead to significant educational and psychological benefits. It has been well documented that the development of communication and literacy skills in more than one language in early childhood can have a positive impact on certain cognitive functions (Bialystok and Majumder 1998; Bialystok 2005; Nicoladis et al. 2006; Barac and Bialystok 2011). Also, numerous studies have reaffirmed that healthy self-esteem in children is crucial (Cvencek et al. 2016; Dapp and Roebers 2018), and ethnicity is an integral element of a child’s sense of self (Cummins 1981; Berryman 1983; Lee 2008; Adair 2015). As Houle (2011) puts it, “Immigrant children’s academic success is associated with maintaining one’s language of origin and ethnic loyalties” (p. 3). Fifty years ago, speaking one’s nonofficial home language in a Canadian school could result in punishment and shaming with obvious psychological scars: When the message, implicit or explicit, communicated to children in the school is ‘Leave your language and culture at the schoolhouse door’, children also leave a central part of who they are – their identities – at the school-house door. When they feel this rejection, they are much less likely to participate actively and confidently in classroom instruction. (Cummins 2001, p. 19)

Cummins (1981) contends that there are four basic patterns of adjustment that minority-language children could adopt once they enter the mainstream education system. The first one is a rejection of the home language and culture, an approach that means rejecting an essential aspect of one’s identity. English (or French) is acquired at the expense of Cantonese, Farsi, Hindi – or whatever the first language happens to be. Children who fall into the second adjustment pattern (rejection of the dominant Canadian culture and language) and the third adjustment pattern (lack of identification with either) tend to be less successful because of their feelings of

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ambivalence. Cummins (1981) rightly concludes that the ideal pattern is the fourth one – that is, harmony between home and the larger Canadian context. Abundant research corroborates the immense value of early exposure to the HL, which is best facilitated when both parents use the language regularly in the home, or when grandparent-speakers of the HL spend quality time, usually as caregivers, with their grandchildren (Harrison 2000; Houle 2011). In Canada’s multicultural environment, interethnic marriages are on the rise, a situation which might limit the chances for a HL to be used regularly in the home – that is, assuming that one of Canada’s two official languages dominates as the common language at home. It is also possible that young children can be exposed to two non-official/immigrant mother tongues simultaneously. Hence, to preserve and develop HL among young children, it is essential to have informed ECE practices and family policies in conjunction with specific federal and provincial policies. As Cummins and Danesi (1990) assert, HL programs at the preschool level “offer considerable potential for consolidating children’s conceptual foundation,” and without them, “daycare/preschool programs will accelerate the already rapid demise of children’s mother tongues” (p. 65). Some of the most relevant contributions to early HL education are presented in the following section. Also included are snapshots of particular early years immersion/bilingual programs in languages other than English or French.

Major Contributions At this point, it is important to emphasize that Canada is a vast country comprised of ten provinces and three territories, and education and early childhood programs fall under provincial and territorial jurisdiction. Although the federal government can offer some broad guidelines, the provincial and territorial governments, along with the local school boards, have enormous latitude. Thus, the early promotion of HLs varies from province to province – and from election to election, as political parties diverge in their attitudes towards HLE. Despite this inconsistency, numerous initiatives can be seen throughout the country to maintain, celebrate and, in some cases, revive the multiplicity of Canadian identities. Overall, it is evident that respectful acknowledgement of a child’s identity, which includes his or her ancestral heritage, is deemed a core Canadian value (Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada 1990). As Cummins (1981, 2001, 2014b) has convincingly argued, HL programs – with supportive and persistent input from parents – contribute to the development of a healthy attitude towards one’s ancestral culture and thus a healthy self-concept. Nevertheless, despite Canada’s cultural pluralism, studies indicate that as children begin to attend preschool programs and then elementary school, their HLs gradually give way to the official/dominant languages (Alba et al. 2002). The explanation for this pattern lies in socioeconomic values, attitudes related to the maintenance of HLs, the constant exposure to either English or French, and linguistic parameters. These are challenges that learners, parents, educators, school boards, communities, and policy makers confront as they navigate that complicated, ambiguous space between HLs and Canada’s official/dominant languages.

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Provincial governments and practitioners are increasingly recognizing that children whose cultural backgrounds are valorized are more likely to grow up to be confident and successful citizens. Moreover, such respect must be extended to young children in the early childcare setting (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014b). These fundamental principles are reflected in the following programs addressing the needs of minority language children and affecting the teaching of HLs in Canada. We begin with some national frameworks and then highlight provincial documents and initiatives.

National Frameworks for Early Learning Starting with a framework that encompasses Canada as a nation, the Early Learning and Development Framework was created in 2014 by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC). Taking a pan-Canadian approach to early learning and development, this document outlines basic policy and curriculum principles and identifies various ideas aimed at responding to the needs of children aged 0–8. According to this framework, it is critical to develop “an awareness of one’s positive personal, cultural and linguistic identities” (CMEC Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group 2014, p. 7). The framework also underlines the importance of educators working together with parents, families, and caregivers “to gain a deeper understanding of each child and ways to promote his/her learning and development” (CMEC Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group 2014, p. 9). Specifically, the authors observe that “[l]anguage and culture are important elements of children’s unique identity and programs should promote a sense of pride in their linguistic and cultural heritage” (CMEC Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group 2014, p. 10). The overarching message of inclusivity is echoed in a more recent federal document titled Multilateral Early Learning and Child Care Framework (Government of Canada 2018b). This document also stresses the importance of setting standards for the qualifications of ECE staff and providing equal accessibility to vulnerable children, such as those from low-income families and with varying degrees of ability (Government of Canada 2018b). In general, both of the aforementioned documents reinforce a recurring principle found in other important documents in this section – that is, the enormous value of nurturing every child’s sense of self-worth.

Canadian Paediatric Society’s Perspective The importance of linguistic identity as integral to a young child’s identity has been recognized by the Canadian Paediatric Society. In view of the recent waves of refugees and immigrants to Canada, the Society published a paper on language acquisition for children from these two groups. Titled Language Acquisition in Immigrant and Refugee Children: First language use and bilingualism (Canadian Paediatric Society 2018), this publication stresses that parents need to speak to their

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children in their home language. Corroborating the work of Cummins and Danesi (1990), this document concludes that children with a solid foundation in their mother tongue/first language learned at home (i.e., the one learned from birth until at least the age of three) acquire proficiency in a second language (i.e., one learned after three) more easily (Canadian Paediatric Society 2018). Moreover, when parents communicate in their home language, it is important that they model robust language practices, as it is presupposed that the children will learn their first or home language from individuals who are quite proficient. With regard to the learning of multiple languages, children are capable of learning two languages from birth. This phenomenon is defined as “simultaneous bilingualism” (Canadian Paediatric Society 2018). It is also possible for children to learn multiple languages sequentially in four steps. This process begins with children using their first language in the environment with their second language. Although children then stop using the first language outside the home, they continue speaking the first language at home before the second language is used in a “telegraphic way” through phrases, imitation, and so on. Finally, these steps conclude with a “productive use” of the second language (Canadian Paediatric Society 2018). The Canadian Paediatric Society (2018) also found that in a bilingual setting, one of the two languages tends to emerge as the “dominant” language, that is, children are more proficient in one language over the other because they use it more often. In addition, children may mix the two languages and make grammatical errors as they are learning and may even lose their first language; consequently, for children to become proficient in two languages, they need to be surrounded by individuals who speak each language proficiently (Canadian Paediatric Society 2018). Also underscored is the critical role that language plays in a child’s formation of a strong cultural identity and an attachment to his or her family members. It is significant that the Pediatric Society’s report underscores the foundation of the home language as a vital cornerstone in a child’s cognitive development and connection to a second language. This emphasis solidifies the notions found in the CMEC document, scholarly research, and the documents outlined in the following sections focusing on individual provinces.

Early Learning in Ontario Ontario is the most populous province in Canada. It is also the most ethnolinguistically diverse province. In the 2016 Census, while 68.2% of Ontarians stated English as their mother tongue, only 4% reported French and the remainder noted a non-official mother tongue (Ontario Ministry of Finance 2017). Although Chinese languages (mainly Cantonese and Mandarin) still ranked first in non-official mother tongues in Ontario, other ethnolinguistic communities have been growing rapidly since the 2011 Census; they include Arabic, Hindi, Farsi (Persian), Bengali, Urdu, and Tagalog (Ontario Ministry of Finance 2017). In the streets of Toronto alone, one can hear a rich myriad of languages. In the 1970s, the majority of new immigrants to Ontario came from European countries, but by the twenty-first century, Asia was the primary source (Arora 2019). In 2016, immigrants comprised approximately 29% of

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Ontario’s population, residing primarily in and around Toronto (46.1%), and almost half the residents communicated at home in a language other than English or French (Arora 2019). In view of this growing diversity, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has been offering a vast array of HL programs for K8 children. In the 2019–2020 school year, the languages offered included Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijan, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Creole, Dari, Dutch, Edo, Farsi/Persian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Macedonian, Mandarin Simplified, Mandarin Traditional, Mongolian, Marathi, Nepalese, Pashtu, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sinhalese, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Turkish, Twi, Urdu, and Vietnamese (TDSB n.d.). Although the list above may seem impressive, the survival of any class is contingent on consistent enrollment and attendance, as a minimum number of 23 learners is required to keep a class open (TDSB n.d.). Adding to the fragility of the TDSB’s HL program is the fact that it is not integrated into the regular school day but scheduled after school or on Saturday mornings when most young children would rather be attending recreational activities or playing freely. It is ironic that Canada’s most multicultural province does not offer robust duallanguage programs in non-official immigrant languages. In fact, back in the early 1970s, the notion of bilingual kindergartens was a divisive political issue. Cummins and Danesi (1990) cite the case of a public school teacher in Toronto who put forward a proposal to establish an Italian-English bilingual program in 1972. Only after “considerable negotiation” did the Ontario Ministry of Education finally agree to a transitional Italian-English kindergarten, along with “‘bicultural/bilingual immersion’ programs for Chinese and Greek students,” but since these programs were only 30 separate minutes per day, the “immersion” label was “clearly a misnomer” (Cummins and Danesi 1990, p. 34). Despite Toronto’s burgeoning population of immigrant children at the time, such programs were short-lived. Even 30 years later, with 58% of Toronto’s kindergarten children coming “from homes where standard English is not the usual language of communication” (Cummins 2001, p. 16), the Ontario Ministry of Education resisted further attempts to establish permanent bilingual or multilingual kindergartens. Today, although the city has an integrated dual-language school for Indigenous children, when it comes to similar programs involving non-official immigrant languages, Toronto lags behind cities in the Western provinces. Given the lack of commitment to a comprehensive policy of plurilingualism, Toronto’s motto of “Diversity Our Strength” rings hollow. According to Cummins (2001), this ethnocentric attitude towards multilingual education in some countries can be attributed to an underlying racist sentiment towards ‘the other’, i.e., a fear that “linguistic, cultural, ‘racial’ and religious diversity” poses a threat to “the identity of the host society” (p. l6). In any case, since Ontario accounts for almost half of the individuals reporting an immigrant language as their mother tongue or language spoken most often at home (Statistics Canada 2017a), this province constitutes fertile ground for the study of language development in early childhood education (ECE). Currently, early learning is guided in Ontario by three major documents: (1) The Early Learning for Every

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Child Today framework, (2) the How Does Learning Happen: Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years, and (3) the Child Care and Early Years Act. These documents highlight the importance of valuing diversity in the early years sector. Integral to this principle of diversity is the significance of all mother tongues.

The ELECT Framework Within Ontario, a fundamental framework for early years learning is outlined in Early Learning for Every Child Today (ELECT). The Ontario government struck the Best Start Expert Panel to author and develop an inclusive education framework (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007). In view of Canada’s multicultural make-up and the number of home languages spoken by Canadians, ELECT underscores the value of respecting children’s home languages. In the Statement of Principles, under “Respect for Diversity,” equity and inclusion are prerequisites for “honouring children’s rights, optimal development and learning”; it explicitly states that it is important for educators to support a child’s “home language” as well as English or French (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007, p. 12). In an effort to assist educators in the realization of its principles, ELECT shares different resources for language learning, each corresponding to particular stages of early childhood development. For instance, a whole section is devoted to the importance of “communication, language and literacy” (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007, p. 26). For preschoolers, the framework encourages children to use their home language in addition to English or French within the early learning setting (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007, p. 48). The document offers parents and educators a variety of illustrations of how to promote the learning of the home language parallel to the learning of one of the official languages. Underpinning this guidance is the view that parents must be actively involved in their children’s education and work collaboratively with educators so that the home language and English or French are promoted successfully. In one example, the educator encourages a parent whose child speaks Portuguese at home to discuss certain textless picture books in Portuguese with the child – the same books that will be discussed in English at the child’s daycare center. This educator also asks the parent to come into the center to teach all the children a few Portuguese words and phrases (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007, p. 71). The objective is to validate the child’s home language while also helping the child learn English. Grounded in the imperative of parent-teacher collaboration in the development of a child’s linguistic skills and knowledge, ELECT places significant emphasis on cultivating healthy connections between a child’s family and his or her cultural community (Best Start Expert Panel on Early Learning 2007, p. 75). The document concludes that the family is a critical actor in early years learning. When parents and grandparents speak their first languages and demonstrate a positive attitude towards their cultural backgrounds, their communities also gain validation. This attitude, in turn, strengthens children’s overall sense of identity, self-confidence, and well-being. The rationale is that such children will develop a healthy ethnic self-image and be positioned to contribute one day to the general socioeconomic well-being of the community, the province, and the country.

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Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years Building on the ELECT framework, the Ontario government went on to publish another framework document titled How Does Learning Happen? Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years. It further underscores the need to connect with a child’s family and community by presenting four pillars of learning (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014a, p. 18). One of those pillars is a child’s sense of belonging not just within the environment, but specifically, within the early years setting where the family’s cultural traditions and home languages are valued (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014a, pp. 24–25). When children realize that their home language is genuinely respected, they experience a sense of belonging within their own family and community, and within themselves. This sense of belonging will enhance their self-esteem and facilitate acquisition of the second language, whether English or French. As stated in the document, “Programs where children’s home language and culture are valued and supported through various means (e.g., books, signs, inviting family or community members to share their language and cultural traditions) can strengthen children’s overall language skills and build a sense of self” (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014a, p. 42). This effect is important for all ethnic and racial minorities, including Indigenous communities and Franco-Ontarians (whose home language, French, is a minority language in Ontario). The Child Care and Early Years Act (CCEYA) The operation of childcare in Ontario is governed by the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, S.O. 2014, c. 11 Sched. I, (CCEYA), which came into force on August 31, 2015 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014b). While the CCEYA does not expressly address the imperatives of learning multiple languages or the relationships between respect for mother languages and the learning of English and/or French, it incorporates the anchoring values reflected in the aforementioned government documents. Those values are reflected at the outset with the purpose of the CCEYA being described as the need “to foster the learning, development, health and well-being of children and to enhance their safety” (Section 1(1), S.O. 2014, c. 11). In Section 49 (1)(f), the CCEYA requires that a childcare program “respect equity, inclusiveness and diversity in communities.” Section 49(1)(i) requires that a program or service be “flexible and able to adapt to local circumstances” These requirements create the necessary space for the implementation of practices and approaches that are connected to the support and promotion of the home language of a child (Section 49(1)). The common thread in these documents is the paramount importance of family connections, community, belonging, and diversity. These values constitute the legal and pedagogical framework for childcare within Ontario. In both the ELECT and How Does Learning Happen documents, the significance of home languages is underlined, thereby reinforcing that language diversity is valued within ECE in Ontario. Public HL/IL Programs in Ontario The Government of Ontario introduced the Heritage Languages Program in 1977, almost a decade after the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Laing and Cooper 2019) released its report. In 1971, the federal government set out

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its policy of multiculturalism and formed the Non-Official Languages Study Commission (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014c). Legislation to govern non-official language programs in primary schools was passed in 1989; a year later the Ontario Ministry of Education issued the Policy/Program Memorandum, Heritage Languages Program, followed by the Heritage Languages, Kindergarten to Grade 8 resource guide in 1991. Finally, in 1994, the Government of Ontario had an opportunity to amend the Education Act, permitting the operation of enrichment bilingual programs in a HL and English (or French). However, the Royal Commission on Learning rejected the idea. As Cummins (2014a) points out, implicit in the commissioners’ report is the notion that students in a HL bilingual program will suffer by not becoming “truly literate” in either English or French. Such reasoning is flawed, since “there is not a shred of evidence from the Alberta programs or any other bilingual program for minority group students to support this assumption” (Cummins 2014b, p. 6). Since the 1990s, the Government of Ontario has gradually shifted from the terminology of “Heritage Languages” to “International Languages” in order to diminish “connotations of learning about past traditions” and to consider globalization, thus embracing those children who do not necessarily have a family connection to the particular language being studied (Cummins 2014b, p. 5). In 2012, the Ontario Ministry of Education released the International Languages Program (Elementary) Resource Guide (ILPRG). Outlining policies and recommendations for public school boards, school administrators, instructors, and volunteers involved in the planning and operation of HL programs, the ILPRG resource guide clearly defines the roles of HL/IL participants and stakeholders from the Ministry of Education to the onsite instructors. For example, in addition to providing an “optimal” program for the children, instructors are expected to encourage parental involvement at home and school, while the parents are expected to promote the International Language Education (ILE) program “within the community at large” and “culturally enrich the program by being active partners with the ILE instructors”; students in the program also play a valuable role by taking responsibility for their own learning and being respectful of others (Ontario Ministry of Education 2014c, pp. 7–9). In ECE settings, children are engaged in language acquisition through play-based activities such as singing, storytelling, dramatic expression, and handson artistic projects. When discussing Ontario’s ILPs, it is important to mention the International Languages Educators’ Association of Ontario (ILEA). Representing and supporting teachers of over 100 different languages, ILEA is an umbrella organization for institutions and individuals interested in advocating for multilingualism and IL programs across Ontario.

HL Programs in the Private Sector In addition to publicly funded HL/IL programs for young children, some private early learning centers in larger cities offer full-day instruction in non-official minority languages. In Toronto, Canada’s most populous and multilingual city, parents who can afford the fees have the option of enrolling their children in an independent, government-licenced nursery school or daycare center offering immersion in specific languages, including Arabic, Cantonese, German, Mandarin, Punjabi, Greek, and

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Ukrainian. A case in point is the Ikebata Nursery School, a full-day, commercial nursery school open to all children from 18 months to 6 years old (Ikebata Nursery School n.d.). Established in 1993 and housed in Toronto’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, it provides an intensive bicultural experience in the Japanese language. The school offers young children ample opportunities to develop not only their Japanese literacy and cultural knowledge, but also their fine and gross motor skills and hand-eye coordination through a wide spectrum of structured and unstructured activities, including free play, outdoor sports activities, stories, music, drama, arts and crafts activities, as well as an introduction to Japanese reading and writing (Ikebata Nursery School n.d.). All the staff have native fluency in Japanese and hold either the Ontario Ministry of Education’s ECE licence or the Japanese daycare/ kindergarten teaching licence (Ikebata Nursery School n.d.). Ikebata Nursery School is just one example of several private nursery schools/daycare centers in Ontario that receive no government funding but offer an effective alternative for parents who want an enriched language experience for their preschool children. This extent of immersion in non-official languages at the preschool level is currently unavailable in the public school system in Ontario.

Quebec: A Unique Situation The province of Quebec presents a unique situation when it comes to the issue of HLs, for it is French – not English – that dominates there. Among the ten provinces and three territories, Quebec is the only province where Francophones comprise the majority (Busque 2020). Census data from both 2011 and 2016 reveal that roughly 80% of the population consider French as their mother tongue, whereas the Anglophone population is only about 8%, and the remainder is comprised of Allophones and speakers of Indigenous languages; most of the Allophone speakers can be found in and around Montreal, the most populous city in Quebec (Statistics Canada 2017b). For centuries, language and identity have been extremely political and contentious issues in Quebec. With the passing of Bill 101, or Charte de la langue française (1977), French became the official language of Quebec, the sole language used in the provincial government and courts and “the normal and habitual language of the workplace, of instruction, of communications, of commerce and of business,” and “[e]ducation in French became compulsory for immigrants” (Behiels and Hudon 2015, para. 11). Although Canada is officially bilingual, English has a secondary status in Quebec.

Meeting Early Childhood Needs in Quebec In Quebec, the government’s policies on early learning and childcare are outlined in Accueillir la petite enfance: programme éducatif pour les services de garde du Québec [Meeting Early Childhood Needs: Quebec’s Educational Program for Child Care Services Update] (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007). The document presents the program in two parts, the first focusing on theoretical frameworks of childcare, and the second looking at practical implementations of education in the

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early learning environment (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007). It includes a discussion on the “Objectives of Educational Child Care Services,” such as the importance of ensuring health and safety, and the objectives for superior services that create an environment conducive to child development (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007, pp. 8–9). Quebec’s early learning program is guided by the overarching notions that every child is “unique,” develops differently and learns through play; the program recognizes the agency of children, the multifaceted and interrelated nature of child development, and the fundamental importance of a connection between the parents and the childcare provider or educator (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007, pp. 17–21). Furthermore, in the section on language development, the document states that vocabulary development in young children may be an indicator of their success later in their educational journey. For instance, through the acquisition of vocabulary, children also learn to use words that are “appropriate to the situation” and gain skills beyond merely the retention of a lexicon (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007, p. 29). Like Ontario’s documents on ECE, Quebec’s Meeting Early Childhood Needs stresses the value of cooperation between parents and their children’s educators and the acquisition of language through art and cultural activities (Quebec Ministry of Families 2007). As for the status of the home language, however, the Quebec and Ontario documents diverge somewhat. It appears that within Meeting Early Childhood Needs, there is no focus on the imparting and sharing of immigrant mother tongues in the childcare environment or in its perspectives on early learning. In fact, the document promotes imperatives in Quebec related to the preservation of the French language as the official language of the province. Hence, it reinforces such language protection laws as Bill 22 (Official Language Act, 1974) and Bill 101 (Charter of the French Language, 1977). Similar principles are reiterated in another document: Une École d’Avenir - Politique d’Integration Scolaire et d’Éducation Interculturelle [A School for the Future Policy Statement on Educational Integration and Intercultural Education] (2013). Again, while the official statement advocates an “openness towards diversity” (p. 31) and the hiring of staff to reflect that diversity, the use of the immigrant child’s HL is ultimately seen as another tool to help them learn the province’s official language and thus facilitate their integration (Government of Quebec 2013). Interestingly, with regard to HL programs, the government recommends Spanish or Portuguese as a third language, but the rationale is primarily career advancement, noting Quebec’s “cultural and economic ties to Latin America” (Government of Quebec 2013, p. 25). Another pertinent piece of legislation is the contentious Bill 115 that amended the Charte de La Langue Française. It caused alarm because it was regarded by many Québécois as an erosion of French language sovereignty. Passed into law in 2010, this amendment permitted some children to receive their education in English schools under special circumstances, but for a child to be declared “eligible,” parents are required to make an application to the government and meet certain specific criteria (Quebec Ministry of Education n.d.). In addition, the Québécois government tolerates some private “ethnic” schools that offer partial instruction in the immigrant mother tongue, but the primary reason is the government’s recognition of the general

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cognitive benefits of mother tongue development that will facilitate the learning of French (Cummins 2014b). Since the ultimate goal is French fluency, the French Immersion programs in Quebec make little effort to “teach for transfer across languages” (Cummins 2014b, p. 3).

Allophones and Multilingual Education in Quebec While the overriding objective has been to make French a priority for children from Allophone backgrounds, successive post-1977 governments have accepted the view that such children would feel more secure and confident in the learning of French if they did so in an environment that allowed them to learn simultaneously the customs, traditions, and language of their ancestral roots. This attitude is evidenced in one specific ‘ethnic’ school in Quebec: École Socrates-Démosthène. Offering classes from kindergarten to grade 12, the school values the importance of studies in English and Greek. Nonetheless, French is clearly the priority. Its mission is “to provide children with quality education in French, with advanced learning in Greek and English – in a family environment where children can explore their cultural heritage while emerging their sense of belonging to the Québec society” (École SocratesDémosthène n.d.). Children at the school are allowed to connect with their Hellenic heritage while also learning French and finding their own connections to Quebec. While these schools promote the importance of one’s own HL, the framework for childcare does not focus on home languages. Instead, attaining a high level of French proficiency remains the priority (Cummins 2014b). Quebec governments have supported HLE through funding for the Program d’enseignement des langues d’origine (PELO), which was launched in 1977. Like HL programs in Ontario and other Canadian provinces, PELO provides up to two and a half hours of instruction per week for mostly primary schools in non-official languages (Government of Quebec 2013). Quebec partially subsidizes communitybased and community-operated schools where a HL is used as the language of instruction for a specified percentage of the school time. Diverging from Western Canada, Quebec’s policies over the last decade have shifted toward less funding for “ethnocultural community schools,” while many school boards have prohibited the use of any language other than French on the school premises (Cummins 2014a). At the same time, school boards promote PELO “as a stimulus to enable students to transfer knowledge and skills from one language to the other and from one culture to the other, thereby supporting students in learning French and succeeding academically” (Cummins 2014b, p. 5). The pedagogy discussed in this sub-section emphasizes the agency of each child, and the priority of language development in Quebec, yet there is clearly no direct focus on the significance of HLs within Quebec’s Early Learning Framework that guides Quebec’s programs for nursery schools and kindergartens.

HLE in Other Provinces The previous two sections explored various provincial policies regarding HLE and IL in Ontario and Quebec. We now turn our attention to Western Canada (i.e., Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia) where – in contrast to Ontario and

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Quebec – there has been “[c]onsiderably more openness to the use of heritage/ international languages as mediums of instruction,” as evidenced by the existence of dual-language programs in an array of immigrant languages (Cummins 2014b, p. 5). It should be noted that the need for HL instruction is acknowledged in the Western and Northern Canadian Protocol (WNCP 2015), an inter-provincial initiative for collaboration in education that began in 1993. Since then, several cooperative projects have been co-developed by the ministers responsible for education in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon Territory. (British Columbia withdrew from the WNCP in 2011 for financial reasons.) Recognizing their common HLE needs – and the value of learning languages other than the two official ones for their young learners’ personal and professional development – the three prairie provinces have developed common curriculum frameworks for their HL programs. These frameworks include specific learning outcomes for students who begin a HL program as early as kindergarten (WNCP 2015). In the next few sections, we focus on specific Western provinces, beginning with Manitoba.

Manitoba Although Manitoba is primarily an Anglophone province, French and seven officially recognized Indigenous languages are also spoken in different regions (Continuing Consolidation of Statutes of Manitoba c. A1.5). It is also noteworthy that Manitoba welcomed a record number of newcomers in 2019. Of the 18,905 immigrant landings, the top source country was the Philippines, followed by India, Eritrea, Syria, and China (Manitoba Education n.d.). In terms of HLE, the province has a relatively long history of acknowledging the value of mother tongue maintenance, as indicated by its acceptance of dual-track language programs for young children (Cummins and Danesi 1990). In Manitoba, there is no provincial organization to oversee the teaching and learning of non-official languages at the community level. Nevertheless, HLE has been part of Manitoba’s educational system since the 1870s, mainly in community settings before or after regular school hours (Manitoba Education n.d.). Prior to 1950, foreign language studies were not permitted in the Anglocentric day school in junior and senior high schools, and not until 1970 did French become a permanently eligible language of instruction in the province. Following the Royal Commission report on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1969, which laid the foundation for official multiculturalism in Canada (Laing and Cooper 2019), interest in HLE was revived with the establishment of several HL programs in Manitoba schools. This policy shift is reflected in the following statement from the province: Cultural pluralism is a positive force in society. Education must assist students from different cultural backgrounds to develop self-esteem and a strong sense of personal identity as Canadians and as members of their ethnocultural group through awareness of their own cultural, linguistic, and historical heritage. (Manitoba Education n.d.)

Since 1979, the Manitoba Public Schools Act has allowed part of the curriculum to be delivered in a non-official language during the regular school day (Manitoba Education n.d.) There are three types of programs: (i) as a regular subject (basic HL

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course), (ii) as a language of instruction (bilingual HL program), and (iii) as a language of instruction in an enhanced HL bilingual program. In Grades K-6, a HL may be used in the teaching of Language Arts, Social Studies, Art, and Physical Education for as much as 50% of the school day (Manitoba Education n.d.). Over the years, the languages in this “Bilingual Heritage” program have included Ukrainian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hebrew (Manitoba Education n.d.). The Ukrainian-English program has been particularly successful. Children in this program have become proficient not only in Ukrainian and English, but also in other academic areas (Cummins and Danesi 1990). Manitoba’s respect for cultural diversity in education can also be found in a report by Flanagan and Beach (2016) for the Early Learning and Child Care Commission, which was established in 2015. The report presents a major plan for childcare infrastructure and includes data gathered from various individuals and organizations in Manitoba, some of whom have worked in the early learning and childcare sector. The Commission identified the need to develop a culturally based framework that recognizes the integral role of culture and language. In addition to “inclusiveness,” the study highlights the importance of “responsive” to individual needs, especially those of marginalized, “vulnerable populations” who may have varying levels of accessibility (Flanagan and Beach 2016, p. 4). Like the policy documents produced by the Ontario and Quebec governments, the Manitoba framework points to the importance of parental involvement in ECE with the introduction of “Children’s Councils” across the province that include broad-ranging representation, involving parents and settlement organizations (Flanagan and Beach 2016, pp. 10, 15). Designed to assist with the expansion of childcare spaces and the collection of data across the province, these councils offer support to licenced programs with strong connections to “Parent Child Coalitions” (Flanagan and Beach 2016, p. 15). While the report by Flanagan and Beach (2016) does not provide the detailed analysis contained in ELECT, How Does Learning Happen, or the work of ChumakHorbatsch (2012) which will be discussed later in this chapter, the recommendations that it offers do rest on a perspective that seeks to be culturally sensitive to the needs of individuals from diverse backgrounds. This is evident in the discussion of pedagogy, as it outlines some policies currently used in Manitoba to promote cultural sensitivity, noting that this principle creates the space for early learning programs that incorporate practices to uphold the dignity and cultural capital of each child (Flanagan and Beach 2016).

Saskatchewan Saskatchewan has had a proud history of supporting multilingualism, largely due to the efforts of the Saskatchewan Organization for Heritage Languages (SOHL), an umbrella organization supporting HLE in the province since 1985. SOHL works with communities, teachers, and volunteers across Saskatchewan to facilitate the preservation and advancement of all HLs. As noted on its official website, “SOHL’s membership consists of over 70 heritage language schools and multilingual organizations. Regular membership is open to any community-based non-profit organization in Saskatchewan involved in developing, teaching, and promoting the learning of heritage languages” (SOHL n.d.). The schools under SOHL’s umbrella are

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dedicated not only to teaching HLs and cultural knowledge to immigrant and refugee children, but also to improving access to Indigenous languages. Over the years, SOHL has provided instruction in 30 different languages (including Vietnamese, Arabic, Tigrinya, Ukrainian, Korean, Serbian, Bangla, Spanish, and Mandarin) in various locations. It also organizes periodic professional development workshops for all HL teachers, most of whom are volunteers (SOHL n.d.). In Saskatchewan, all ethnocultural, non-profit organizations offering HL classes in a school operated by a school board or a community group used to be entitled to receive funding from the Ministry of Education. For more than 25 years, this funding was provided through the Heritage Language Grant for students 3–18 years old to receive a minimum of 70 hours of instruction per school year (SOHL n.d.). However, financial support from the Ministry of Education has never been guaranteed. Despite the growing influx of newcomers over the past 5 years, particularly Syrian refugees, Don Morgan, Saskatchewan’s Minister of Education in 2016, announced that the Ministry’s funding of HL programs would be withdrawn because of economic constraints (Fraser 2016). Although the grant amounted to only $225,000, Morgan deemed it excessive, arguing that the government’s priority should be to teach English; accordingly, he stated that the onus for HL instruction should be on the parents (Fraser 2016). Gord Zakreski, the executive director of SOHL, reports that the organization is now dependent primarily on SOHL membership fees, provincial government lotteries, and donations from various community sponsors, yet it continues to explore alternative government funding opportunities on an ongoing basis (G. Zakreski, 5 January 2021, personal communication).

Alberta and British Columbia This section explores different HLE initiatives in the Western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. It also looks at some of the core groups and organizations that facilitate these projects. These two provinces share common values and practices when it comes to HLE. In this region of Canada, the terms International Languages (IL) and Heritage Languages (HLs) are frequently used to describe two separate types of programs that operate differently from one another. Whereas IL programs are generally those within the public school system, HL programs are commonly community-based. As will be specified below, HL learners have the option of enrolling in intensive bilingual programs for the most commonly used HLs in primary and secondary education. Thus, HL learning is integrated into the school curriculum and learners have lessons in their HL as part of their weekly schedule. The students whose HL is not taught in their day school may study it in either afterschool or weekend programs offered by community groups under provincial support and supervision (Duff 2008). In these community initiatives there is a small number of preschool programs that function as drop-ins for younger children and their families. The children have the opportunity to engage with their HL through singing, storytelling and other language and culture-based activities. The Society for the Advancement of International Languages In British Columbia, the Society for the Advancement of International Languages (SAIL BC) is a non-profit organization that actively promotes HLE. It advocates

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national action in support of diversity, the development and perpetuation of IL/HL programs, and the strengthening of “cooperation among providers and supporters of IL/HL organizations across Canada and internationally” (SAIL BC n.d.). One of the organization’s central arguments is that our economic success as a nation “relies on diversity in our trading partnerships and a development of the necessary skills, such as language, to equip people in our workplaces with the tools for success needed in today’s global marketplace” (SAIL BC n.d.). The organization also stresses that “intercultural understanding, which is enhanced by language learning, not only contributes to our economic advantage but also assists Canada’s efforts towards enhanced social cohesion as a multicultural country” (SAIL BC n.d.). In British Columbia, HLs offered within the primary and secondary public school system include Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese), German, Italian, Japanese, Punjabi, Russian, and Spanish. Even though the provincial government encourages HL programs according to community demand, SAIL BC feels that “there has not been a substantive commitment to a comprehensive languages education policy, leaving the many benefits of language learning untapped and unexamined” (SAIL BC n.d.). Early Mandarin Bilingual Program Recognizing the growth of its population of Mandarin speakers and the welldocumented psychological benefits of multilingualism, British Columbia supports innovative dual-track programs. Of particular interest is the Early Mandarin Bilingual (EMB) program that is currently operated by the Vancouver School Board. For instance, the EMB program located at Norquay Public School offers children (K to 7) the opportunity to receive their education in both Mandarin and English, but not in a supplementary way; “the program is fluid where teachers interchange Mandarin and English throughout the day,” and it is “structured to allow 50% of [the] time to be in Mandarin and 50% in English” (Vancouver School Board n.d.). Historically speaking, to have such a bilingual program in British Columbia is remarkable considering the many decades of that province’s overt institutionalized racism against Chinese Canadians, as evidenced by its support of racist federal laws such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (or the Chinese Exclusion Act) that prohibited the entry of new immigrants from China, including the wives and children of men who had already settled in the province decades earlier; the Act was not repealed until 1947 (Chan 1983). Southern Alberta Heritage Language Association Alberta has had the longest and strongest tradition of supporting HLE in Canada, since it was the first province to allow instruction in non-official languages in the public-school system (Cummins 2014a). Along with the Alberta Ministry of Education, two organizations have been working steadily with many volunteers to promote the teaching and learning of HLs. The International and Heritage Languages Association (IHLA) in Edmonton serves the communities of Northern Alberta, while the Calgary-based Southern Alberta Heritage Language Association (SAHLA) represents more than 30 community-based HL schools where at least 40 languages are taught each year by more than 500 teachers to 7500 learners of all

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ages. Both organizations assist community groups and HL preschool, primary and secondary schools in (a) the development of HL curriculum, (b) the provision of teaching resources and materials, and (c) professional development opportunities and in-service support to HL teachers (SALHA, n.d.). In its support of HL learning, SAHLA adopted the Alberta Ministry of Education statement that knowledge of languages beyond the official language(s) enhances intercultural communication skills, cognitive and home language development, and even one’s health. As the Alberta government’s statement notes, “recent studies have shown that learning additional languages protects the brain from memory loss and dementia” (SAHLA n.d.). In addition, IHLA agrees that “international language education increases the level of respect and appreciation for multiculturalism and the diversity of Canada’s peoples” (IHLA n.d.). To illustrate, in Alberta, each primary and secondary school has the option to decide if it will offer instruction in a HL. This option became possible through an amendment to the Education Act, declaring that a school board may authorize the use of any language of instruction, in addition to English and French, in its schools (Aunger 1993, 2004). To date, there are many bilingual programs operated by the school boards in Calgary, Edmonton, and across the province of Alberta where one of the two languages of instruction is either Spanish, Mandarin, German, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Polish, or Arabic. In a HL bilingual program, the HL and English are the languages of instruction in a 50% split, beginning in kindergarten or Grade 1 and continuing to Grade 9. The goal of such a program is to develop fluency in both languages (Calgary Board of Education n.d.). Also offered by public or private schools are provincially developed HL programs in Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Punjabi, Spanish, and Ukrainian. HL schools that offer community programs for students from Early Childhood Services to Grade 9 also receive funding from the Ministry of Education through the Credit Enrollment Unit (CEU) funding system (Alberta Education n.d.).

The Atlantic Provinces Whereas one might hear immigrant languages (e.g., Ukrainian, Arabic, Punjabi, Mandarin) used as the medium of instruction in kindergarten classes in specific early years programs in Western Canada and Ontario, these non-official languages are less likely to be heard as a language of instruction in any government-funded programs for young children in Canada’s Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador; at the ECE level, these provinces have had a history of prohibiting daily instruction in any languages other than English, French, Indigenous languages or the language of the deaf community (Canadian Education Association 1991; Department of Education Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.). However, over the past few decades, the status of HLs in the Atlantic provinces has evolved considerably, largely due to the growing flow of immigrants and refugees to these provinces and the concerted efforts of specific ethnocultural communities that are increasing in numbers and political clout. For instance, the Canadian Lebanon Society of Halifax has been instrumental in preserving Lebanese culture and the Arabic language in Nova Scotia. For more than

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four decades, it has been operating a bilingual HL community school for children with a “renewed focus on conversation, writing, reading and fun activities” in Arabic (Canadian Lebanon Society of Halifax n.d.). Furthermore, the government of Nova Scotia proclaimed the month of November as Lebanese Heritage Month 2 years ago (Government of Nova Scotia 2018). Similarly, in October 2019, the province announced that September would be Polish Heritage Month (Montgomery 2020). Additional evidence of this shift in attitude towards cultural diversity can be found in a document titled Capable, Confident and Curious: Nova Scotia’s Early Learning Curriculum Network (Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Education 2018). Of particular relevance in this document is its recognition of the concept of Culturally Responsive Practice which includes the following tenets: “being aware of one’s own world view; gaining knowledge of different cultural practices, historical perspectives, and world views; developing positive attitudes toward and appreciation of cultural differences, and developing skills for communication and interaction across cultures and languages” (Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Education 2018). Albeit not explicitly stated, we can infer that the assimilative education policies of the past are gradually giving way to more inclusive policies that recognize the enormous value of mother tongue development. Finally, it is worth noting that the governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick recently added Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) and Assistants to their priority list of in-demand occupations. As a result, through their respective Provincial Nominee Programs, which are a pathway to permanent residency, these provinces have invited applications from an unprecedented number of experienced, internationally trained ECEs. Presumably, children in ECE settings will eventually be exposed to a greater degree of ethnocultural diversity among their educators. This development holds promise that there will be appropriate support for children who do not speak either English or French. As long as newcomers from various corners of the world continue to choose the Atlantic provinces as their destination, there will be a need for robust early years programs in which children can continue to communicate in their mother tongues as they acquire skills in one of Canada’s official languages.

Linguistically Appropriate Practice Supporting the guidance offered in the policy frameworks and directives of the provinces discussed in the previous sections, an exceptionally useful study and methodology on the promotion of home languages in the stages of early learning is offered by Chumak-Horbatsch (2012). In Linguistically Appropriate Practice (2012), the author examines effective teaching practices and frameworks that may be used to support immigrant children and their connection to their home language (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, p. 2). Linguistically Appropriate Practice (LAP) is a framework for early years learning settings that is “inclusive, research-based and practitioner friendly” (2012, p. 4). Particularly significant is the author’s observation that immigrant children are not necessarily those who have moved to Canada, but also children born in Canada to parents who have recently immigrated, i.e., second

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generation (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, p. 8). The researcher also distinguishes between Canada’s two official languages, English and French, and other languages spoken at home, which she refers to as the home languages. She cautions that children should not be defined by the strength or weakness of their English or French skills, but in relation to the level of their language skills – whatever that language may be. Putting this distinction into perspective, Chumak-Horbatsch explains that immigrant children enter the childcare setting as “emergent bilinguals whose two languages are evolving. . .” (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, p. 23). Another key concept that she stresses is that of “dynamic bilingualism” (García 2014), which focuses on “language practice or actual language use and not on learning specific language skills”: that is, not the adding of a language to one’s repertoire but the actual practice of engaging with language (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, pp. 53–55). Rather than requiring educators to speak all the languages spoken by children in a classroom or childcare setting, LAP helps educators create inclusive and multilingual environments through the strategies outlined throughout the book (ChumakHorbatsch 2012, pp. 55, 70). These strategies aid educators in establishing a LAPbased classroom and include ideas such as the development of a language policy for children and the creation of a survey to discover what languages are spoken by the children at home (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, pp. 64–65). Additionally, practical suggestions and activities are offered on how to make children feel welcome in the childcare or classroom environment, such as having home language displays and encouraging the children to use their home language in the learning setting (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, pp. 77–78). The principles outlined by Chumak-Horbatsch echo many of the foundational principles in ELECT and How Does Learning Happen? Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years. As in the two Ontario government frameworks, the author, in her discussion of practical suggestions, proposes several theme-categorized LAP activities that educators can use in a childcare or classroom setting to nurture a sense of belonging. For instance, under the theme “Using Home Languages in the Classroom” is the creation of a “Hello-Goodbye Chart” which has greeting phrases in the different languages spoken in the center or classroom (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012, p. 118). Throughout her book, Chumak-Horbatsch shares a rich variety of classroom anecdotes that help ground the theoretical framework and activities in an authentic context. This section has explored a variety of frameworks, studies, and documents that have influenced Early Years Learning sectors in selected regions of Canada and affected HLE. While each document differs slightly in its approach or focus, it is clear that respect for cultural differences is becoming increasingly important throughout Canada.

Critical Issues and Topics There are a number of interwoven factors that influence HLE in the Canadian context and the future of HL learning at all levels of education, but especially within the preschool context. This section examines the role that professional development

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plays within the HLE context. It also discusses some of the challenges that confront educators, parents, and young children in HL acquisition in the current era.

Professional Development Professional development is vital for the continuation and enhancement of HLE in Canada. It not only provides valuable supports and practical resources for language instructors, but also offers innovative pedagogical practices and insights into teaching languages within the Canadian context. Professional development is crucial in community-based programs that run on a shoestring budget and depend on dedicated volunteer teachers with little or no formal training. Also, while some boards of education offer continuing education workshops specifically addressing HL language development and maintenance in young children, such opportunities are inconsistent and sporadic. Ultimately, when it comes to professional development for HL educators, it is a matter of funding priorities and the unwavering determination of parents and other stakeholders. One example of grassroots commitment to HL teaching can be found in Saskatchewan where SOHL has been instrumental in promoting HL in the province (see section “Saskatchewan”) and helping Saskatchewan’s HL teachers upgrade their skills and knowledge. As an illustration, recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an abrupt shift from in-person classes to virtual ones, and some teachers face a steep learning curve when it comes to the new digital teaching technologies. Consequently, SOHL has been offering workshops to help HL teachers navigate the virtual classroom (SOHL n.d.). Also, for many years, the organization subsidized the tuition for individuals who wished to pursue the University of Calgary Teaching International and Heritage Languages Certificate in neighboring Alberta; however, due to recent provincial funding cuts, SOHL is no longer able to offer this subsidy (G. Zareski, personal communication, January 5, 2021). It should be mentioned that the University of Calgary is one of the few institutions in Canada offering a certificate specifically in HL teaching. Consisting of eight classes (250 hours of instruction in two levels), this part-time online program provides instruction in language theory and practical classroom skills. Since most of the HL programs in Saskatchewan are taught by volunteer teachers, such training is extremely valuable. Another comprehensive resource for HL educators, parents, and service providers is the website mylanguage.ca. Created by Schumak-Horbatsch (see section “Linguistically Appropriate Practice”) and operated under Ryerson University’s School of Early Childhood Education, this website provides HL educators and parents up-to-date research on the “importance of maintaining and protecting the many minority languages spoken in homes across Canada” (mylanguage.ca n.d.). In addition, the website contains links to an extensive variety of practical resources (books, videos, games, songs, and toys) in several specific immigrant languages to encourage bilingualism, cognitive development, and creativity. In terms of professional development, another organization worth mentioning is CMAS (known by its acronym rather than the full name: Childminding Monitoring,

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Advisory and Support) (CMAS n.d.). Funded by the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), CMAS was established in 2000 to monitor the childminding arm of LINC (Language Integration for Newcomers to Canada), a federal language program for newcomer adults (CMAS n.d.). Eventually, CMAS developed a model of care known as Care for Newcomer Children (CNC). In addition to “creating an inclusive environment,” its mandate includes “managing the effects of culture shock” (CMAS n.d.). This mandate suggests that CMAS upholds the fundamental value of respect for the languages and cultural traditions that immigrant children bring to the ECE setting. To assist ECE teachers, caregivers and administrators in carrying out this mission, the website provides links to a vast selection of professional development webinars, videos, articles, and books. It also offers regular workshops to help educators maintain a stimulating learning environment and sensitize them to the significance of validating the child’s mother tongue. While the Ontario Ministry of Education states openly what is expected of every participant in HL/IL programs, one might still wonder whether all educators in such programs receive adequate training and ongoing professional development, or whether formal evaluation has been carried out for these programs since their establishment 40 years ago (Cummins 2014a). As educational technology and media continue to advance, it is vital that HL instructors maintain pace with new developments and issues to keep the young children in their classes motivated. However, educators should not be expected to conduct professional development individually on their own time simply by visiting recommended websites. The state has a responsibility to provide ongoing guidance and the necessary funding to ensure that young learners can continue to enjoy robust HL/IL programs.

Maintaining the Commitment When it comes to HLE in the twenty-first century, a plethora of challenges could impede and complicate the implementation and accessibility of multilingual education. For example, COVID-19 has suddenly and dramatically altered the way we learn and teach. Although developing digital literacy is a necessity that we cannot escape, the negative impacts of online schooling are particularly problematic when we consider the education of children in the early years. The value of learning naturally through play and face-to-face interaction in small groups can never be replaced by the artificiality of online learning. Young children need the tactile experience and interaction with peers. Therefore, teaching HL/IL in the age of social media, computer technology and artificial intelligence presents numerous issues that have not been fully explored yet. Another immediate challenge in HLE is securing ongoing support from the provincial governments. Although most of Canada’s provincial Ministries of Education acknowledge their responsibility towards HLE, they fall short in delivering an official curriculum for each language taught in an HL/ IL program. Without specific learning goals and assessment policies, HLE is not among any provincial government’s priorities. Funding for it is not only unreliable, but there is no overseeing government body for HLE, and many programs must rely

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on community support and volunteer teachers. As a result, the message is that since it is non-mainstream, it can be deemed less significant. In Canada, the promotion of bilingualism and multilingualism is an essential component of children’s early development and preparation for their academic life. Early childhood education, in general, is the vital bridge between the home and school. As Aravossitas and Oikonomakou (2020) elaborate with the example of Greek HL learners, although the process of acquiring Greek can begin quite successfully within the insular confines of the home, a number of factors can lead to varying levels of HL loss as a child progresses through the school system: The process usually begins at an early stage under the influence of family members, usually Greek-speaking grandparents serving as caregivers. When the children enter mainstream schools, the learning process of the HL is gradually disconnected as a result of various factors: inclinations, interests, peer pressure or simply daily workload in the dominant language. As the family focus shifts toward success in the day school, young learners do not have the opportunity to form a clear picture of their expectations and motivation regarding the HL. Attending after school HL programs challenges many learners. Extra schooling can be particularly stressful when it conflicts with other extracurricular activities (e.g., sports, music, and dance). (p. 242)

Even though countless studies have proven the affective and cognitive benefits of early bilingualism/multilingualism in terms of a child’s development, HL learning must appeal to the children. It needs to be woven into the regular curriculum, not just tagged on. The efficacy of any HL program is deeply affected by the motivation level of the children. The programs, studies and educational frameworks discussed in this paper support the notion that parents and educators alike play instrumental roles in perpetuating HLE. Working collaboratively and systematically, they can blur the boundaries between home and school and learn from each other. The reality is that the quality of any language program is contingent on complex intertwining factors. For children to succeed, parents, educators and governments must be willing to invest not only in the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development of young children, but also in each child’s bilingual and/or multilingual potential. As Cummins (2001) points out, unless the HL is reinforced inside and outside the home, it can be lost within 2 or 3 years of starting school, and “when we destroy children’s language and rupture their relationship with parents and grandparents, we are contradicting the very essence of education” (p. 16). With today’s unprecedented human migration flows and the growing reliance on computer technology in education even at the preschool level, attention to planning language education for young children becomes increasingly relevant. The future of bilingualism and multilingualism for the new generation depends largely on family decisions and attitudes toward education and language learning (Guardado 2018). Also, in view of the climbing rate of interethnic marriages and the ubiquity of English on the Internet, it is reasonable to assume that the consistent use of any HL in the home environment will dissipate unless it is kept valued and nurtured. Therefore, informed ECE practices and unwavering commitment are essential in order to promote HL retention.

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As noted in the section “Linguistically Appropriate Practice,” Chumak-Horbatsch (2012) suggests that ECE educators and caregivers familiarize themselves with Linguistically Appropriate Practice. This approach entails (a) the collection of pertinent background information about immigrant children; (b) the preparation of the classroom/child care facility environment to transition these children from home to classroom through collaboration with their parents, including the meaningful use of home languages in class, literacy materials, the recording of the language, and (c) specific techniques to be used by the early childhood practitioner to develop proficiency in the classroom language and to connect the classroom curriculum to the developmental level of each child (Chumak-Horbatsch 2012). Furthermore, educators should follow culturally responsive pedagogy practices. According to Arvanitis (2018), such an approach is characterized by a deep understanding, respect and encouragement of each child’s distinctive cultural capital by integrating into the classroom the learners’ diverse cultural and linguistic experiences. The inclusion of home languages – along with the family’s traditions in relation to religion, food, health, hygiene, interpersonal relationships, and cultural holidays – offer unique and imperceptible learning opportunities. Although some provinces have promoted HL in the early childhood stages of education since the 1970s, there is still room for a deeper integration of HL learning in the school system. As Cummins (2014b) remarks, while commendable efforts have been made in some provinces, “a policy vacuum” exists in terms of “imaginative educational responses to Canada’s multilingual resources” and we have generally “been content to stand on the sidelines as observers while children’s home language slips away from them in the early years of schooling” (p. 9). The dismissive attitude of Saskatchewan’s Don Morgan (see section “Saskatchewan”) towards the funding of HL programs is not an isolated or surprising case. The white settler mentality is deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche. We cannot assume that successive provincial or federal governments will prioritize minority language rights or open, unbiased, and humanitarian immigration policies. Despite Canada’s official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism, it can be argued that the linguistic rights of ethnic minorities are vulnerable to erosion. With the growing global dominance of English and the rise of anti-immigration sentiments around the world, the lofty principles inherent in Canada’s multiculturalism policies may not be upheld forever by local governments, school boards or individual educators. Twenty year ago, Phillipson (1998) cautioned that the increasing use of English can have both “benign or pernicious purposes. . .” and since language and culture are inextricably linked, the “linguistic imperialism” of English can be seen as “a sub-type of cultural imperialism. . .involving the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (Phillipson, p. 104). Further arguments for the promotion of mother tongue maintenance and a multiliteracies ideology are offered by Skutnabb-Kangas (1998) who claims that the linguistic imperialism of English, which she terms “linguicism,” is threatening to send many unique languages and dialects on the path to extinction. In this context, she advocates that language rights be included under human rights with the aim of preserving cultural diversity and democracy. To this end, Skutnabb-Kangas (1998) urges state funding of mother tongue instruction

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throughout a child’s education, from preschool through adolescence, with the goal of genuine bilingualism or multilingualism.

Future Research Directions Inspired by the work of Phillipson (1998), Skutnabb-Kangas (1994, 1998), ChumakHorbatsch 2012), and Cummins (Cummins 1981, Cummins 2001, Cummins 2014a, b), we see various future research directions. The most pressing one is further exploration of the multiliteracies ideology in the Canadian context (Schecter and Cummin 2003). As Cummins (2001) underscores, this ideology should be woven deeply into the core curriculum (including math and science) in practical, imaginative ways that will not only stimulate creativity, but also help children navigate the formation of their identities. To help foster positive self-images in young children in multilingual settings, individual teachers and schools in various countries have observed successful results through the use of identity texts, i.e., incorporating into the curriculum the children’s home language and culture (Cummins and Early 2011; Cummins et al. 2015; Streelasky 2020). Through a variety of creative projects that they can work on collaboratively and share with their peers (e.g., personal stories, performances, drawing, and paintings), the children are encouraged to express themselves freely by using whichever languages they feel comfortable using. In doing so, they develop pride in their own linguistic and cultural capital as they acquire skills in the mainstream language. As Cummins et al. (2015) argue, “In schools that engage in identity text work, a radically different image of the student is at play in comparison to more typical schools that adopt a remedial orientation” to those children it deems as “disadvantaged” because of their lack of proficiency in the mainstream language (p. 577). Instead of being defined by what they do not know, children “who engage in identity text work” begin to perceive themselves as “capable of becoming bilingual and biliterate” and “intellectually and academically competent” (p. 577). In view of the seismic political and technological changes that have occurred over the past two decades, identity texts projects – from ECE centers to secondary schools – merit further investigation across the disciplines of child psychology, pedagogy, sociology, and ECE. Another aspect that was touched on in this chapter is the role played by small, community-based organizations in launching and maintaining HL programs for their children. Most of the HL programs we have examined are in large, multicultural urban centers such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. However, we did not find much literature on HLE in smaller, more remote municipalities where the various ethnolinguistic minority communities are significantly smaller. However, these communities are expanding rapidly. According to the 2016 Census, Tagalog is the most rapidly growing immigrant mother tongue Canada’s three territories (Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories) (Statistics Canada 2017b). In addition to investigating grassroots efforts to establish HL programs in these northern regions, researchers might find it interesting to study HLE in New Brunswick and Nova

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Scotia. As mentioned in the section “The Atlantic Provinces,” these Atlantic provinces recently issued a call for internationally trained ECE professionals to fill a labor shortage. Future research could involve following up on these newcomers to study their impact on the self-esteem of the immigrant children under their tutelage and care.

Conclusion This chapter has presented a review of various documents, pedagogies, and practices surrounding HLE in the Canadian context with a focus on ECE. We found that engagement with HLE at the policy level varies among the provinces highlighted in this study. Also, it can change drastically with a change in government. Finally, while there is a general recognition of the importance of cultural identity, selfesteem, language, and social development in the early years, HLE is not always a specific focus. Nevertheless, pieces of a foundation exist that can be built upon to enrich HLE across the country. It should be acknowledged that the principles put forward in the documents cited in this chapter would be easier to implement in large urban centers than in smaller municipalities. Cultural attitudes and attained levels of proficiency in HLs vary throughout the country. In large metropolitan areas, we can find a heightened interest in multilingual education (e.g., increased demand for language programs in schools and for online language resources) for both cultural and future career/business purposes. Even so, the fact remains that in many regions of Canada, spending time during the school day on languages other than English and French is perceived by some politicians, educators, and parents as unnecessary. Albeit enriching, HL/IL programs are still considered largely irrelevant to children’s schooling when compared to math, science, digital literacy, and English/French development. When some individual Anglocentric educators attempt to inject a multicultural element in their programs, it is often in a superficial way (e.g., multicultural festivals or displays for Asian Heritage Month). Thus, it is incumbent on advocates of multilingual education to persevere in their efforts to disseminate their message. We have just begun to understand the vitalizing and revitalizing impact of linguistic diversity. Even at the preschool level, newcomers to Canada have precious linguistic and cultural knowledge to share with their monolingual peers. Educators and parents should be encouraged to develop an appreciation for the cultural capital and home language proficiency that young children can contribute. Otherwise, government declarations of “inclusivity” in education seem like empty rhetoric. Even if they are not receiving support from their superiors, individual schools and teachers can take the risk of taking the initiative. They can exercise their human agency by weaving in a multiliteracies ideology in their daily curriculum in a meaningful way. In the age of globalization, a policy of genuine linguistic plurality and equity could be empowering and transformative, but it requires the cooperation of parents, teachers, and communities. Promoting HL retention in our young children through

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dynamic and engaging projects, such as identity texts, is a start. It could result in the “collaborative creation of power” (Cummins and Early 2011, p. 163). Indeed, the daycare or kindergarten classroom would be the ideal place to begin to test the government’s multiculturalism policy, contest hidden agendas, and build bonds of solidarity among children of all ethnocultural communities. Nurturing children’s multilingual potential should become a priority across Canada. In the face of mounting challenges to HLE in Canada, this priority becomes more arduous to attain and more urgent to prioritize.

Cross-References ▶ Early Immersion in Minority Language Contexts: Canada and Finland ▶ Early Language Education in Australia ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education ▶ The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research into the History of Jewish Kindergartens in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingual Preschools in Modern Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent Leading Research Projects in the Field of Language Impairments in Bilingual Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Sociolinguistic Research and Actual Educational Practices: Research Desiderata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family, Community, and Parents’ Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

The present chapter discusses the significant contributions of Israeli scholars and educators in the field of early bilingual education. It starts with a brief summary of the history of the first Israeli kindergartens, as well as insights into the vitally important lessons that can help modern educators build a healthy pedagogical approach to early bilingual education. Next, an analysis of current practices in Israeli bilingual preschools reveals that these institutions answer the educational needs of diverse bilingual environments that stem from different sociolinguistic situations: (a) Hebrew-Arabic preschools that educate children from two ethnic groups; (b) preschools for fostering balanced bilingualism in Hebrew and the heritage language of an immigrant group; and (c) preschools promoting early S. Kopeliovich (*) Herzog College, Alon Shvut, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_34

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Hebrew-English bilingualism for social and academic success in the global world. Each setting has its own unique challenges related to the status of each language involved in these bilingual patterns. In addition to preschools, this chapter describes extracurricular summer and after-school activities sustaining early bilingualism in Israel. Thirdly, the significant contribution of Israeli research into the field of language impairments and bilingualism is discussed. Finally, the chapter presents the rapidly developing field of Family Language Policy (hereafter FLP) and discusses communities of families that create a supportive network for early bilingual education. The chapter identifies further research desiderata and calls for bridging the gap between sociolinguistic research and actual pedagogical practices in early bilingual education in Israel. Keywords

Early bilingual education · Language management · Language ideology · Twoway language programs · Language separation models · Heritage language · Family language policy · Bilingual children with SLI

Introduction The diversity of languages in polyphonic Israel provides fertile ground for research into early bilingual education. According to the basic law passed in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) on the 19th of July, 2018, modern Hebrew has the status of the State’s official language, and Arabic is defined as a language with a special status in the State. English is widely used as the language for international communication, technology, academy, scientific progress, and as the main language of a large group of immigrants from English-speaking countries. Among the languages of immigrant groups, Russian occupies a significant place, as it is spoken by the large group of immigrants from the former Soviet Union; its ethno-linguistic vitality comes from the density of Russian-speaking populations in urban areas, their long literary traditions, and their deep connection to the international Russian-speaking diaspora. Other immigrant languages spoken in Israel include French, Amharic, Spanish, German, Romanian, and many other languages. Yiddish has a special and complex status: it is an immigrant language of Eastern-European Jews, a language with a long historical and cultural heritage, and it is actively used in certain Ultra-Orthodox circles as a marker of a distinct social and religious identity. In addition, the Israeli linguistic mosaic includes heritage languages of Jewish communities, such as Ladino, Bukharic, Juhuri/Judeo-Tat, Dzidi/Judeo-Persian, and many other languages. Ethiopian Jewish immigrants speak mainly Amharic (as well as Tigrinya and Tigre). There are also Asian languages spoken by foreign workers from different countries and African languages spoken by refugees. Before the age of three, toddlers attend mostly private day care centers. Israeli state preschool education starts at the age of three, although compulsory preschool education starts only at the age of five. Mainstream state preschools offer basically

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monolingual educational programs with Hebrew as the language of instruction in the Jewish sector and Arabic in the Arab sector of the population. Current state preschool education emphasizes the appreciation and awareness of other languages and cultures in Israel. The present chapter deals with the mainstream Jewish state education and does not investigate the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox preschool education, which is independent from Israeli State Education. Early bilingualism in these settings is extremely interesting to study, but it is beyond the scope of the present research. Indeed, only Arab-Hebrew bilingual preschools are in the focus of the present research, while mainstream Arab preschools await further research. The article does not deal with preschools in Christian, Armenian, Bedouin, and other ethnic groups in Israel.

Main Theoretical Concepts Spolsky (2009) builds a theoretical framework of language policy at different levels of society, ranging from the family to large ethnic groups to the independent state. This model consists of three key components: ideology-management-practice. Ideology, or people’s beliefs about languages and their use, is the first vitally important component of the model. It has a significant influence on language policy at the state and family levels since the status and value assigned to languages and language varieties are based on ideologies. From an educational perspective, this component is related to people’s motivation to transmit languages to the next generation. The second element of the model, language management, focuses on the explicit efforts of policy makers to modify or control the language practices and beliefs of others. Finally, language practices are observable behaviors and choices that people make concerning the use of the languages in their lives, work, communication, etc. In a certain sense, language practices constitute the reality of language use. Thus, societal language practices provide the linguistic context for children’s language acquisition. This triple system enables researchers to investigate discrepancies between policy makers’ intentions and actual actions, between the educational ideals and the controversial reality of a multilingual society (for a more detailed discussion of this theoretical framework, see ▶ Chap. 20, “The Interaction Between Family Language Policy and Educators in Early Language Education,” by BezcioğluGöktolga in this volume). The present chapter uses this framework in order to analyze the complex relations between different aspects of multilingual language policy and practices in Israeli society in the field of early language education. The variety of approaches and language models practiced in Israeli early bilingual education includes: – Two-way language programs (Hickey and de Mejia 2014; Baker 2011), where two languages are used for daily communication and literacy instruction of all the students. – Language separation models (García 2009, p. 310), where two languages are strictly compartmentalized in the process of education.

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– First-Language-First approach (Schwartz 2017), where the home language instruction precedes the gradual introduction of the dominant societal language. This gives an opportunity to fully develop one language and, then, to build the successful acquisition of the second language on this basis. The chapter will refer to each of these approaches within the educational context of bilingual preschools and other forms of early bilingual education in Israel. Family Language Policy (FLP) is another important concept relevant to the present overview of current research in the field of early language education in Israel. Spolsky (2009) defines it as one of the levels where his tripartite model of language policy is applicable; it implies that policy makers at the family level (usually parents or other caretakers) claim to have the authority to modify the existing language practices of family members and make important decisions about language acquisition and use in the family. During the last two decades, FLP has rapidly developed as a field of research (King and Fogle 2006; Schwartz 2010; Schwartz and Verchik 2013; Fogle 2013). Finally, the concept of translanguaging is another key notion vital to the study of early language development. Translanguaging is using all the languages in the repertoire of multilingual speakers as an integrated communication system (García and Wei 2014; Wei 2018) rather than perceiving them to be two or more compartmentalized language systems. Through the lens of this theoretical perspective, multilinguals are viewed as speakers who select and employ appropriate features from their linguistic repertoire in order to negotiate and make meaning in different communicative contexts. Translanguaging practices exist in bilingual educational settings and are manifested in frequent codeswitching and flexible use of all the languages available to the speakers according to their communicative needs. To sum up, the theoretical framework of the present chapter integrates several key concepts briefly described in section “Main Theoretical Concepts.” They are used in the further analysis of preschool language education in multilingual Israeli society.

Major Contributions The contribution of Israeli research in the field of early bilingual education involves many different aspects discussed in the following sections. First, research into the history of the first Israeli kindergartens is valuable and instructive for understanding the present development of early bilingual education in Israel (“Research into the History of Jewish Kindergartens in Israel”). Second, an overview of current forms of early language education in Israeli bilingual preschools contributes to the development of modern bilingual pedagogies (“Bilingual Preschools in Modern Israel”). Third, Israeli pioneering projects in the field of bilingualism and language impairments in preschool children constitute a major contribution to current international research in the field (“Recent Leading Research Projects in the Field of Language Impairments in Bilingual Children”). Fourth, theoretical studies of the linguistic aspects of early bilingual acquisition establish a solid groundwork for the

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development of successful pedagogy for early bilingual education (“Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Sociolinguistic Research and Actual Educational Practices: Research Desiderata”). Finally, research focusing on Family Language Policy and on informal communities of bilingual families is of primary importance for practitioners and researchers worldwide (“Family, Community, and Parents’ Education”).

Research into the History of Jewish Kindergartens in Israel A discussion of modern bilingual preschool education in Israel requires a glimpse into the historically unique role played by kindergartens in the extremely complicated sociolinguistic tapestry of Israel. In this section about the historical research into preschool language education in Israel, the term “kindergarten” is used to denote educational settings for children who have not yet entered elementary school, since this word preserves the original term for this model of educational institution, as explained in this section. Recent encompassing research (Walden and ShehoryRubin 2018) sheds light on intriguing cases of language management in preschool educational settings that greatly influenced Israeli society. Thus, research into the language education policies of the past yields findings relevant to current multilingual pedagogy. The fascinating history of the first Hebrew kindergartens goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, when the first Jewish kindergartens were founded in Palestine, on the territory that later became the modern State of Israel. The language of education in these settings depended on the specific sources of financial support for each institution. Thus, the kindergarten in Zichron Ya’akov (founded in 1892) under the auspices of Rothschild family operated in French. In 1893, when the AngloJewish Association took control of the girls’ French-speaking school “Evelina de Rothschild” (founded in 1854), the language of the school shifted from French to English; the kindergarten founded in its basement in 1896 also operated in English. The whole concept of kindergarten as a preschool educational institution was new in Palestine and was developed by kindergarten teachers educated in European pedagogical colleges influenced by Froebel’s theory of early education. The first four Hebrew kindergarten teachers were professionally trained in this English-speaking kindergarten in Jerusalem (Walden and Shehory-Rubin 2018). The first Hebrew-speaking kindergarten was founded in 1898 in Rishon leZion by Esther Shapira, the first Hebrew-speaking kindergarten teacher; another three Hebrew kindergartens were founded between 1901 and 1903. All four teachers, who were born in Russia, were not native Hebrew speakers. The same pattern was true for all the Hebrew kindergarten teachers belonging to the first (1882–1903) and second (1904–1914) waves of Jewish immigration to Israel. They were born in families with a particularly strong Zionist ideology advocating the right of Jews to live in the Land of Israel; they received traditional Jewish education; and they did not speak Hebrew from birth. Some teachers started their work first in Hebrew kindergartens in Western Europe and brought their experience to the first Hebrew

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kindergartens in Palestine. Some teachers received their professional training in European educational institutions; others did not hold any teaching certificates at all. These teachers were young women who learned Hebrew from Zionist activists who had themselves been educated in traditional Jewish religious settings. They created their own teaching materials and developed educational programs that had never existed in Hebrew prior to their work; they also translated songs and games from other languages to Hebrew. They had to make methodological decisions in pedagogically challenging multilingual settings: the children who came to their kindergartens did not know Hebrew and often did not have a common language for peer communication. Furthermore, all kindergartens functioned in extremely difficult economic conditions. Despite all the difficulties they encountered, these kindergartens raised a whole generation of Hebrew-speaking children, whereas their parents often learned vernacular Hebrew from their children (Walden and ShehoryRubin 2018). This historical account challenges some myths concerning the revival of the Hebrew language. After many centuries of being used for religious purposes (such as praying and learning sacred texts), Hebrew underwent a process of revitalization at the beginning of the twentieth century and grew into a language of daily life, technology, science, and secular literature; moreover, the normal intergenerational transmission of Hebrew was re-established (Spolsky 2001). The pioneering linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) was the most prominent activist of the Hebrew language revival; he developed the enormous corpus of modern Hebrew vocabulary from the ancient literary sources (Fellman 1973). According to a popular belief, the turning point in the revival of Hebrew was the birth of the first monolingual Hebrewspeaking child, Itamar Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer’s son. Itamar was purposefully raised in isolation from any language other than Hebrew (including the native languages of his mother and peers). Based on his father’s ideological perspective, this sacrifice was presented as the essential bold step towards creating Israeli generation of Israeli children-speaking Hebrew as their mother tongue. The implied message of this narrative is that “pure Hebrew speakers” are needed in order to secure the position of Hebrew in society, while all other languages potentially threaten the existence and stable status of Hebrew. However, the abovementioned research into the history of the first Hebrew kindergartens gives ample evidence of the deep dedication displayed by many devoted enthusiastic educators, public leaders, and simple citizens committed to teaching Hebrew and using it in their everyday life (see also Spolsky and Shohamy 1999, 2001). Understanding the popular Israeli myth of the first Hebrew-speaking child raised in an artificial monolingual isolation gives insights into a powerful set of beliefs about Hebrew dominance as a supreme national value and highlights the potential dangers of multilingualism; this had a strong impact on Israeli society and the Israeli education system in the past. Bringing forward the historical truth about raising the first generation of children who spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue shifts the emphasis from the idea of limiting contacts with other languages as the basic condition for the successful transmission of a specific language; it highlights the quality of early language education and the role of educational practitioners and parents as being the most influential language policy makers.

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Research into later stages of the development of Israeli kindergartens opens a new perspective on early language education. After the establishment of the independent State of Israel in 1948, Hebrew kindergartens with their ideological commitment to fostering Hebrew as an inseparable part of the Zionist ideology faced a new challenge in the wake of a massive immigration wave from the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s. Oriental Jewish families settled in crowded “maabarot” (temporary residential areas stricken by poverty, poor sanitary conditions, and low social status). Shehory-Rubin (2008) describes the commitment of young women sent as teachers to kindergartens in “maabarot” after short accelerated pedagogical courses or without any professional training due to a severe lack of preschool teachers. They had to teach the children Hebrew and help them integrate into the developing Hebrew-based Zionist culture. However, these teachers had no common language to communicate with the pupils’ families-speaking Arabic, Ladino, or other languages of Sephardic Jewish communities. Young inexperienced teachers often found themselves in the roles of social workers, psychologists, or health professionals trying to help disadvantaged families. On the one hand, the Hebrew kindergartens were a source of warmth, help, and vitally important proficiency in Hebrew for these new immigrants. On the other hand, the kindergartens became one of the links in the chain of educational settings promoting the “melting pot” ideology of the young Zionist state. The home languages and the family heritage were viewed as inferior to the superior Hebrew-based culture; the generation raised in this system was compelled to become alienated from its multilingual roots. With the decline of the Zionist ideology at the end of the twentieth century, many now grown-up children of Oriental Sephardic Jews have publicly acknowledged their remorse for their early contemptuous attitudes towards their parents’ culture as a result of the negative views instilled in them by the dominant society. The children of this wave of immigration expressed deep regret for the loss of their ethnic-community languages under the harmful pressure of the education system geared towards raising a “new Israeli” with a strong monolingual identity. In fact, these brief insights into the history of Israeli kindergartens reflect a more general sociolinguistic picture resulting from the dramatic changes in the status of Hebrew, namely, from a language used in a limited scholarly domain to a secure and dynamically developing language used daily for multiple purposes both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora worldwide. Spolsky and Shohamy (2001) emphasize that the most important component of the revitalization of Hebrew was restoring the vitality of the language through its natural intergenerational transmission as a mother tongue. In this critically important aspect, the role of Hebrew-speaking kindergartens was essential (Walden and Shehory-Rubin 2018). However, the kindergartens later played one of the key roles in the suppression of minority languages under the impact of the strong Hebrew-focused ideology. These findings from historical research are important for two reasons. First, they clarify that early language education occupies an especially sensitive position in society, in terms of influencing the sociolinguistic situation and being influenced by it. Second, historical research sheds light on the era preceding the current rapid development of multilingual approaches to early language education.

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Towards the end of the twentieth century, many factors conditioned a major shift from a monolingual ideology towards accepting and fostering societal multilingualism in Israel: globalization processes in the world, the decline of Zionist ideology in Israel, multiple waves of immigration to Israel, etc. The present system of educational goals in Israel explicitly declares the high value of family and community heritage embedded in the unique language and culture of each community. Spolsky (2014) describes the current delicate sociolinguistic ecology of Israel as “the complex network of communication that Hebrew dominates while sharing it in part with many other language varieties” (p. 2). The following section will survey modern Israeli preschool bilingual education in the light of this shift from monolingual ideation to the emphasis on the value of all the languages used in a multilingual society. The term “preschool” used in the following sections refers to modern Israeli educational institutions for children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years (before they start elementary school at the age of six).

Bilingual Preschools in Modern Israel This section presents an overview of current practices in different branches of bilingual preschools that function in bilingual settings resulting from different socio-cultural processes. Thus, bilingual Arabic-Hebrew preschools foster the goal of intercultural interaction between two peoples living in one state. Bilingual Russian-Hebrew preschools make an effort to find the right balance between preserving the family heritage language of this large immigrant group and integrating into the dominant Hebrew-speaking environment. Bilingual English-Hebrew preschools cater to the desire of parents to foster English as the means of upward social mobility in Israel and in the global world.

Hebrew-Arabic Bilingual Preschools: Two Ethnic Groups Learning Together and from Each Other At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium, several bilingual preschool educational institutions were established to promote the goals of mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence between Arabs and Jews in Israel. The YMCA’s bilingual and multicultural preschool in Jerusalem has been open since 1982. The “Hand-in-Hand” Center for Jewish-Arab education in Israel has established schools and communities in different areas of Israel where Jewish and Arab populations live very close to each other. In different branches of this center, preschools function next to elementary schools: in Jerusalem (from 1998), in Wadi Ara (from 2004), in Jaffa (from 2013), in Haifa (from 2012), and in the Tira-Kfar Saba School located at the campus of the Beit-Berl College of Education (from 2015). The Hagar community in the Negev with its own school and preschool was established in 2006 by a group of Jewish and Arab parents. Some new projects are also developing, and existing institutions are expanding. All these institutions are supported by different organizations and by private donations.

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The pedagogical rationale of all the abovementioned preschool educational institutions is based on similar principles. First, there are two teachers in the classroom – an Arab and a Jewish teacher; the co-teachers do not translate each other’s words but rather elaborate on each other’s utterances in their respective languages (see Schwartz and Asli 2014). Second, there is a special emphasis on natural acquisition of both languages, through meaningful communication with peers rather than through formal teacher-centered methods of language teaching. Third, school activities involve various creative practices: games, crafts, themebased learning, storytelling, team projects, etc. Finally, the most crucial aspect of these two-way bilingual programs is promoting peer interaction as a powerful tool of language acquisition. Schwartz and Gorbatt (2018) emphasize the exclusive role of peer experts (competent speakers) as mediators for novice learners in the bilingual classroom. The analysis of successful peer mediation brings forward the conception of bilingualism as social power. It is worthwhile mentioning that there is a community of parents around each school, and the educational process is thereby not limited to formal lessons within the school walls. The schools foster multiple community activities to strengthen social ties between the families. Schwartz and Gorbatt (2016, 2017) address one of the major problems emerging in these bilingual educational settings, namely, the relatively low motivation of Hebrew-speaking children to use Arabic (their second language) in comparison to the significant success of Arabic speakers in the acquisition and use of Hebrew. In fact, the two-way language program offers an equal distribution of time and efforts between Arabic and Hebrew, since the balance between these languages is viewed as a key component of successful bilingual education. However, the power relations between these languages have an implicit influence: Arabic speakers actively learn the language of the dominant society (Hebrew), while Hebrew native speakers mostly show receptive rather than productive bilingual skills in Arabic, the minority language. Recent qualitative research projects conducted in Hebrew-Arabic preschools yield further important findings in the field of early bilingual education. According to Schwartz and Gorbatt (2018), peers can serve as mediators of language socialization and acquisition in early bilingual/multilingual educational settings. In addition, in their carefully documented qualitative study, Schwartz and Gorbatt (2017) explore diverse mediation strategies practiced by teachers (scaffolding, modeling, and providing skillful help within the child’s zone of proximal development) that boost the learners’ motivation to use Arabic in their daily conversations with peers and during different learning events. Thus, potential ways of addressing the problem of motivation are found in practical hands-on teaching strategies, rather than in ideological debates about the status or usefulness of the minority language. This valuable educational experience can be adapted to other bilingual preschool educational settings characterized by a power imbalance in the status of the two involved languages (such as Spanish-English-speaking preschools in the USA).

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Russian-Hebrew Preschools: Commitment to Family Heritage and Integration into the Dominant Society The huge wave of immigration of Russian speakers from the FSU after 1989 made Russian one of the strongest immigrant languages in Israel; however, it is worthwhile to note that the dominant Hebrew culture had been significantly influenced by Russian even prior to this massive arrival of Russian speakers. Yet, the intergenerational transmission of Russian in immigrant families is not to be viewed as a simple straightforward outcome stemming from the high density of this ethnic group in the large enclaves of Russian speakers in many Israeli urban areas. Rather, sustaining Russian as a heritage language requires special systematic efforts by Family Language Policy makers (Kopeliovich 2011). “Russian” preschools rapidly developed as soon as the immigrant group started to regain its social status, to develop some autonomy in business, and to take an active position in pursuing its educational goals. By the end of the twentieth century, “Russian” private preschools firmly established themselves in all the main urban centers in Israel. The attractiveness of the private Russian preschools not only is based on the emotional trigger of preserving a beloved family language but is also based on a number of advantages over municipal preschools (as perceived by the parents): longer hours of instruction, shorter vacations, provision of hot meals, smaller groups, advanced educational activities, etc. At present, most of the parents who send their children to Russian-mediated preschools belong to the so-called 1.5 generation of Russian-speaking immigrants, that is, those who were brought to Israel as teenagers and schoolchildren. During the conference “1.5 Generation of Russian Immigrants to Israel” (9.12.2018, Tel-Aviv University), Dr. Victoria Shteinman, the head of the large nonprofit organization “Horim leTzabarim” (“Parents to children born in Israel”) reported the existence of a large group of elementary school children from Russian-speaking families whose low level of Hebrew and unfamiliarity with mainstream Israeli culture impede their successful integration into the Israeli school system. This phenomenon frequently frustrates and alienates school teachers and administrators: unlike “olim hadashim” (new immigrants), these children are not entitled to additional hours of Hebrew instruction sponsored by the Ministry of Education. According to Shteinman, the families of these children often encounter a negative attitude as they are perceived as not having used the resources of the mainstream Hebrew-mediated preschools and thus of having created a serious problem for the educational system. This report highlights some serious challenges that educators need to address. In contrast to Russian-mediated preschools, bilingual Russian-Hebrew preschools explicitly and systematically address the issue of the pupils’ balanced development in both Russian and Hebrew. The widely spread network of bilingual preschools under the auspices of IGUM (“Association of Immigrant Educators in Israel”) presents a detailed statement of their pedagogical rationale deeply rooted in Vygotsky’s theory of early multilingual development. This system advocates a strict division between the two languages (“One Person-One Language”) as a key to the successful balanced acquisition of both languages. Initially, the language of the

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children’s development used to be only Russian until the age of three. Recently the model has been modified to facilitate an earlier onset of Hebrew: starting from the age of two, children participate in daily brief sessions in Hebrew. The intensive early education in Russian enables the creation of a robust homogeneous linguistic system in one language (“First-Language-First” model). According to this pedagogical rationale, success in the acquisition of one language has a positive influence on the acquisition of the second language. Yet, at the same time, these Russian-speaking children get acquainted with some important Hebrew concepts relevant to their Israeli peers’ cultural environment, such as traditional Jewish holidays and Israeli memorial days. After the age of three, the proportion of Hebrew increases, and it gradually becomes the main language of formal instruction, while Russian acquires its secured position as a heritage language cultivated through special lessons and afternoon creative activities. The aspiration is to combine instruction in Hebrew and in Russian in a balanced way and to maintain Russian as the language of informal daily communication between teachers and children. According to Vygotsky’s pedagogical rationale, the adult is viewed as the source of the language; by sticking to one language, the educator promotes its successful acquisition and prevents language mixing (IGUM official site 2019). Schwartz et al. (2016) report that the teachers’ perspective on this language separation model in IGUM kindergartens is more complex than what is stated in the declared principles: language mixing, cross-linguistic transfer, and concurrent use of both languages constantly take place in the bilingual classroom. The teachers actively use strategies of scaffolding the acquisition of the weaker language with the stronger one. Furthermore, preschool teachers and policy makers are concerned about the lack of daily interaction between their pupils and native Hebrew-speaking children and feel that carefully designed communication with Hebrew teachers does not prepare them for peer interaction in a real Israeli playground or school. One of the parents’ major concerns about the bilingual preschool is whether the children’s development in Hebrew will lag behind as a result of the relatively late exposure to this language. However, children from bilingual Russian-Hebrew kindergartens do not show any disadvantage or delay in the acquisition of narrative skills (Schwartz and Shaul 2013) or in vocabulary development (Schwartz 2013) when compared to Hebrew monolingual children and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals attending monolingual Hebrew kindergartens. Yet, questions related to the social integration of bilingual-kindergarten alumni in the dominant society are open to further systematic research. Indeed, in order to study real peer interaction and teachers’ strategies in these bilingual kindergartens, detailed qualitative research based on observations and videotaping is necessary. Apart from IGUM preschools, there are many other private preschools promoting bilingual Hebrew-Russian educational programs. It is not always clear what this term implies in each specific case. Some preschools structure their early language education process in a way similar to the IGUM model, described above, and based on Vygotsky’s views. These preschools have separate hours and separate teachers for each language. In other preschools, some Hebrew lessons are given in an otherwise

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Russian-mediated environment without any serious educational rationale regulating the ratio between Russian and Hebrew in the children’s development. Thus, despite the popular attractive title “Bilingual program,” it is not clear what level of bilingualism is maintained and developed in practice.

English-Hebrew Bilingual Preschools In contrast to Russian-Hebrew preschools catering to the educational needs of a large immigrant group, English-Hebrew preschools are not limited to immigrant families from English-speaking countries. The high status of English as the language of global communication and academic success attracts Israeli parents from different backgrounds. Carmel (2014) investigates the parents’ motivation to promote early exposure to English and concludes that investment in English is viewed as a sign of “good parenting” that facilitates the children’s future success. These findings go hand in hand with the idea of bilingual parenting as good parenting presented by King and Fogle (2006). Some of the English-Hebrew bilingual preschools have explicit educational rationales and detailed language-oriented methodologies available on their sites. For example, “Wonder school” in Tel-Aviv offers 50/50 immersion programs with 2–3 co-teachers present in the classroom without any special slots dedicated to Hebrew or English. Each teacher speaks only one language without translating, while the children are allowed to use their native language and get help from their peers and teachers, native speakers of Hebrew or English (Wonder School 2019). In addition, Hebrew-English programs with two co-teachers present in the classroom are offered by “Osher” Early-Learning Center (affiliated with the Chabad religious movement), Bilingual Nursery (Tel-Aviv), Kid’s Gan (Raanana), Love English (Tel-Aviv), and many other preschools. The mixture of Hebrew and English words in the names of many preschools highlights bilingualism as the leading attractive feature of their programs, for example, “‫ גן‬Homely” (“Kindergarten Homely”) or “‫לשוני בריא‬-‫– גן דו‬ The ABC Academy” (The ABC Academy – Healthy Bilingual Preschool). These titles preserve the Hebrew and English scripts, despite the technical difficulty of writing Hebrew and English words in the opposite directions! It is noteworthy that some bilingual Hebrew-English preschools incorporate famous methodologies of early education like the Montessori system and the Reggio Emilia approach (similar to Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschools based on Vygotsky’s pedagogical heritage). In addition to preschools, many private nurseries (for the age of 3 months to 3 years) advertise their programs as being bilingual in English and Hebrew without any clear explanations concerning the language model and language ratio, without defining the roles of the caretakers in language education, and without any clear methodological rationale underlying the toddlers’ exposure to both languages. As in the case of multiple private “Russian” nurseries, parents need to check what lies behind the commercially attractive tag of bilingualism and make their own informed decision. At the moment, Hebrew-English bilingualism is a particularly attractive feature for preschool educational settings. Carmel (2014) describes how parents’ demands meet potential providers of the English-education services. This survey of current published research has not yet revealed any systematic academic studies focusing on the pedagogical aspects of English-Hebrew bilingual

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preschools (despite the vast variety of studies on preschool bilingual children). Systematic research of these programs may offer unique insights into the practices and methods of bilingual preschool education for children from heterogeneous family backgrounds combining English and Hebrew in different ways. In these preschools, there are children from English-Hebrew bilingual families preserving English as the heritage language as well as native speakers of Hebrew and other languages attracted to the English component of the educational program. This complex sociolinguistic setting calls for further systematic research.

Extracurricular Activities Sustaining Early Bilingual Education Previous sections on bilingual preschools dealt with programs that were initiated as substitutes for municipal preschools (starting from the age of three). These alternative programs are often much more expensive than municipal preschools and require a special commitment from parents, such as financial investment and transportation. Therefore, the existence of bilingual preschools depends on high tuition fees (like in the case of some Hebrew-English kindergartens) or on the donations of ideologically committed supporters (like in the case of Arabic-Hebrew bilingual preschools sponsored by peace-making organizations and individuals). Many initiatives of bilingual preschools do not survive for long or just never come into existence. On the other hand, sustaining extracurricular language education activities for children attending the mainstream municipal preschools is less demanding. Thus, education for early bilingualism in Israel may take different forms: after-school educational centers, extracurricular activities, enrichment programs during school hours, summer camps, and private lessons. These activities flourish in the same bilingual settings as the kindergartens discussed above, namely: – A heritage language + Hebrew – Arabic + Hebrew as two languages of two co-existing ethnic groups – Hebrew + English for global communication and academic success This distinction is not always so sharp: a large number of immigrants from English-speaking countries view English not only as the global language but also as their heritage language ensuring intergenerational communication in their families. The idea of regaining family cultural roots may boost the motivation for learning Arabic in Jewish families whose grandparents immigrated to Israel from Arab-speaking countries. Unlike the bilingual preschools described in 4.1.1–4.1.3, these extracurricular activities predominantly focus on one language in the bilingual pair rather than on dual language development. Language-education activities can focus either on English as a global language, or on a heritage language, such as Russian or French, while Hebrew is sustained by participation in the mainstream early education system. Alternatively, the goal may be strengthening Hebrew to enable minority speakers to succeed in the mainstream educational system. After-school activities and private lessons for children attending municipal preschools are vehicles for maintaining the heritage languages of immigrant groups, and

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they are the initiative and the responsibility of the immigrant group itself. Thus, educational facilities for maintaining Russian as a heritage language are relatively better developed than those for other immigrant languages (like French or Spanish). The recent wave of French-speaking immigrants has boosted the use of French as a heritage language. The development of educational structures sustaining early French-Hebrew bilingualism is open to further research. The number of heritage language speakers is an important factor, but it is not enough to ensure successful intergenerational transmission of the language. The ability of the minority group to create and sustain its language education structures (even small ones) is vitally important. For example, Amharic-Hebrew bilingualism is naturally sustained in the Ethiopian background families, yet there are no significant attempts to teach Amharic from inside the group. According to Stavans (2015), Ethiopian parents are involved in their children’s education in the heritage language until the children start school; after that they relinquish heritage language maintenance in favor of Hebrew. Although the Israeli Ministry of Education offers a program for matriculation exams in Amharic in high schools, educational facilities for preschool children to learn Amharic systematically have not yet been developed. It is worthwhile to mention that the educational goals of extracurricular activities initiated by immigrant groups are not necessarily limited to heritage language education. At present, some “Russian” after-school centers (such as “Mofet,” “Kidma,” and others) offer not only preschool lessons in Russian but also classes in English, arts, mathematics, chess, and other subjects. This range of subjects attracts not only speakers of Russian but also native speakers of Hebrew and other languages. This tendency naturally increases the economic stability of the immigrant educational centers, yet it also increases the proportion of Hebrew used there. On the one hand, focusing on a large range of diverse subjects emphasizes that the immigrant group’s desire to transmit not only its heritage language but also an entire cultural and educational tradition. On the other hand, a potential hazard of this tendency is a gradual decrease in the use of the heritage language. Apart from the educational initiatives of immigrant groups, the field of extracurricular activities focusing on English as a global language is flourishing in modern Israel due to the particularly high motivation of parents to facilitate their children’s future success in international society, business, and academic studies. For example, Helen Doron’s School of English is a widespread international network of learning centers with courses of English as a second language tailored for babies, children, and teens (including multiple courses for preschoolers). The lessons are based on songs, games, and carefully planned activities; the officially stated goal of this methodology is to help children learn English as easily and naturally as they learn their mother tongue (Doron 2019). Helen Doron’s network has expanded through international franchises, and it certifies its own teachers in special teacher-training courses. In addition, many large international English-teaching companies develop programs for preschoolers in their Israeli branches (such as “Wall-Street” or “Berlitz”). In addition, many local Israeli small businesses and private teachers compete for customers in the profitable market of teaching English to young learners.

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However, not only business interests may gear the educational projects in the field of teaching English. For example, the after-school center “A.H.A.V.A” (“love” in Hebrew) is a special nonprofit organization founded in 2000 by Gaila CohenMorrison which promotes English literacy among Israeli children (starting from the age of three). This organization has special discounts for children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, especially for those who live in peripheral areas of the country. It has two different programs that reflect the heterogeneous nature of Hebrew-English bilingualism in Israel: one program is specifically designed for children from English-speaking families, while the other is for native speakers of Hebrew. The organization also provides teacher training courses (A.H.A.V.A. 2019). In the profitable business field of teaching English to young learners, these educators choose to focus on human values. In fact, A.H.A.V.A. integrates teaching English with the traditional Jewish value of helping people in need: the highest form of charity is to facilitate a person’s successful integration into the job market. This approach promotes the ideals of social equality and empowers those young learners who otherwise could not afford private English classes. To summarize, this section reviews the diversity of bilingual preschool educational settings in Israel where particularly rich practical and pedagogical insights have accumulated. Educators from diverse cultural backgrounds have brought different educational traditions to Israel and put them into practice, creating a rich tapestry of valuable pedagogical experience. Bilingualism as an educational goal is highly valued in Israeli society that used to be dominated by an extreme monolingual ideology (see section “Research into the History of Jewish Kindergartens in Israel”). The attractiveness of early bilingualism creates a tight, competitive commercial market, but it may also promote human values, charity, and a generous commitment to children’s well-being and progress.

Recent Leading Research Projects in the Field of Language Impairments in Bilingual Children Israel, with its diverse contexts of early bilingualism, has shown itself to be fertile ground for research in the field of language impairments in bilingual populations (Armon-Lotem 2018; see also ▶ Chap. 25, “Multilingual Children with Special Needs in Early Education”). The contribution of Israeli scholars is especially prominent in regard to the burning question of distinguishing between language disorders, on the one hand, and issues resulting from bilingual development in preschool children on the other hand. The lack of clarity in this crucial area often causes very serious mistakes: bilingual children may be diagnosed as linguistically impaired, or language disorders may pass unnoticed in bilingual children who don’t receive appropriate treatment in the crucial early years. Research done by Israeli scholars from Bar-Ilan University and Hadassah College has resulted in a systematic theoretical and empirical basis for disentangling bilingualism from Specific Language Disorders (Armon-Lotem et al. 2015). This has had a major impact on the early diagnostics and treatment of language disorders, as well as on training speech

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therapists and educational counselors (Armon-Lotem 2017; Armon-Lotem and Meir 2016; Meir et al. 2016; and other studies). Insights into the development of bilingual children with SLI (Specific Language Impairment) shed light on bilingual acquisition in children without SLI, when the two groups are compared (Altman et al. 2016, 2018; Armon-Lotem and Meir 2019). This research also addresses the needs of parents raising bilingual children and helps to build effective and clear communication between parents and therapists. For example, Abutbul-Oz et al. (2012) devised a special questionnaire for the parents of bilingual children with SLI. Assessment of these children for diagnostic and clinical purposes presents many significant challenges: diagnostic tools in the home language of bilingual children are rarely available, and signs of bilingualism can be confused with signs of SLI. The questionnaire based on recent research of the abovementioned Israeli scholars helps to assess the child’s performance in both the home language and the societal language. The analysis of the clinical use of this questionnaire reveals that carefully designed tasks enable disentangling bilingualism from language impairments and identifying the error patterns characteristic of bilingual typical development, as opposed to bilingual children with SLI. To sum up, recent achievements in the field of bilingualism and SLI have had a major impact on theoretical research and clinical practices; this advancement in the therapeutic field apparently resulted in major changes in Israeli special education for bilingual children. A systematic account of this influence deserves further investigation.

Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Sociolinguistic Research and Actual Educational Practices: Research Desiderata Comprehensive research corpus of sociolinguistic studies on bilingual preschoolers conducted in Israel (Armon-Lotem et al. 2013) covers a wide range of topics related to early bilingualism, such as language production, memory, vocabulary, phonology, morpho-syntactic transfer between the languages, etc. Studies have been conducted within different ethnic groups of bilingual children: Hebrew-Russian and GermanRussian (Walters et al. 2014; Gagarina et al. 2014), Amharic-Hebrew (Ben Oved and Armon-Lotem 2016), English-Hebrew, and Russian-Hebrew (Armon-Lotem et al. 2014). The connections between this sociolinguistic research and pedagogical practices in preschools need further development: the results of these studies may potentially enrich the practical educational methods in bilingual preschools. In this regard, inservice and pre-service teacher training may become the main field where research and teaching practices meet. An example of an academic project bridging the gap between theoretical studies and education in the field is a special MA program in Multilingual Education conducted at Tel-Aviv University. This program attracts Israeli teachers and educators and provides them with the educational philosophy and practical tools based on leading research in the field of bilingualism. However, further encompassing studies are necessary in order to understand how the results of

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theoretical sociolinguistic studies conducted among bilingual preschoolers in Israel can improve actual educational practices.

Family, Community, and Parents’ Education Spolsky (2012) identifies the Family Language Policy (FLP) domain as crucial. Research in the field of Family Language Policy in Israel highlights it as a crucial area for sustaining bilingual development, in accordance with research in many other contexts of societal bilingualism worldwide (Schwartz and Verchik 2013). Thus, current research reveals multiple connections between FLP and language proficiency in Hebrew-Russian bilinguals (Altman et al. 2013; Schwartz 2008). Schwartz and Moin (2011) concentrate on the perception of parents regarding their children’s proficiency in the heritage language. Their study emphasizes that the parents’ assessment of their children’s proficiency is one of the key components in childparent communication. However, a comparison between the parents’ reports and test-based assessment of the children’s proficiency reveals that parents tend to overestimate the children’s language competence in Hebrew as the second language and Russian as the home language. Furthermore, Minkov (in progress) studies the acquisition of early literacy in the bilingual Russian-Hebrew context in relation to the Family Language Policy using a combination of scrupulous quantitative research on emergent literacy in two languages and data obtained from the parents’ questionnaires on language ideology, management, and practice. The innovation of this research includes emphasizing the role of parents as mediators and providers of literacy activities for their preschool children. In addition, qualitative research into the pedagogical aspects of family language management brings vivid insights into the parents’ actual ideologies, practical strategies, decisions, and negotiation of priorities (Kopeliovich 2010). Israeli immigrant parents struggling for the maintenance of their heritage language may sometimes start their FLP project with an ideology ultimately focused on the maintenance of their native language, Russian. Consequently, their language management aims at fostering the home language by all means, even at the expense of limiting the use of Hebrew in the family domain. However, this ideology inevitably clashes with the real language practices in the immigrant home: the children are attracted to the dominant language and inevitably bring it to the household. This stimulates the parents to look for more sophisticated and flexible language management strategies attuned to the peer-group culture and multilingual society of their children (Kopeliovich 2009). In the course of negotiating linguistic, social, and cultural values, a creative Happylingual pedagogical approach to family language management was developed. It includes skillful use of peer-group influence and value-based creative teaching methods involving translation workshops, crafts, drama, and puppet shows (Kopeliovich 2014). In addition to the family, it is important to study communities of families united by their goals of sustaining bilingual practices at home. For instance, the informal

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educational organization “Horim le-Tzabarim” (“Parents to Israeli-born children”) attracts parents who have a Russian-speaking background and were brought to Israel as teenagers (1.5 generation of immigrants). The goal of this nonprofit organization is to build an indigenous bi-cultural and bilingual environment that selects attractive features both from these parents’ Russian-language heritage and from the larger Israeli culture in order to create a unique blend. Family trips, social networks, volunteer projects, and community support bring families together from all parts of Israel. This is a unique example of a large community sustained not only through virtual internet communication but also through real-life face-to-face gatherings and cultural events. Qualitative pedagogical research on educational bilingual activities at the community level is scanty and requires further systematic study. An action research project in the field of informal community education could explore actual strategies of fine-tuning creative activities promoting balanced bilingual development, such as family bilingual-theater festivals, birthday parties based on original literary pieces and their translations, intergenerational bilingual workshops, etc. (Kopeliovich 2016). Raising public awareness about multilingualism and multiculturalism in Israeli society is currently a major challenge. To face this challenge, a branch of the network “Bilingualism Matters” was opened in 2018 in Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan) by Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem, Prof. Joel Walters, and a group of leading Israeli scholars. The aim of this educational initiative is to make current research achievements accessible to parents, teachers, educational language policy makers, and speech therapists through on-line publications, parents’ evenings, and other attractive forms of public education. To sum up, research on FLP focuses on different aspects of interaction in multilingual family environment, pedagogical strategies for acquiring languages in the family, and the creation (or strengthening) of community ties between families in order to promote the goals of early bilingual education. The systematic analysis of the relationship between FLP and the children’s actual bilingual proficiency remains a major research goal.

Critical Issues and Topics An historical perspective on the preschool bilingual education in Israel and the review of current educational practices show a major shift from a strictly monolingual ideology towards accepting and promoting multilingualism. The Jewish state preschools went through different stages: they served as major agents in the revival of the Hebrew language, as tools of suppressing minority languages, and as an arena for bringing up new generations of multilingual children. Although at the level of society, shifting away from a monolingual bias seems explicit and well-articulated, each individual parent, educator, therapist, and community leader may still need to go through this complex gradual process of shifting the educational paradigm. Individuals, families, communities, and educational institutions may still be

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implicitly influenced by societal myths and beliefs about monolingualism as a key to promoting the Hebrew language. The emergence of educators who are sensitive to the Israeli multilingual milieu is a primary issue for all levels of society. Lucas et al. (2008) advocate the concept of the “linguistically sensitive teacher”; it implies that even those teachers who do not teach the language of the dominant society as a school subject (e.g., content teachers and classroom teachers) must be aware of the language needs of their students who come from diverse linguistic backgrounds in order to scaffold their language acquisition. Consequently, teacher-training programs have to incorporate essential knowledge and skills required for linguistically sensitive educational practices. Successful implementation of changes in Israeli pre-service and in-service teacher-training programs is one of the most important issues for further development of wellbalanced multilingual patterns in Israeli preschool education. Another important issue in the process of preschool teacher training involves the trainee’s personal linguistic experience. Thus, negotiating a trainee’s linguistic history and his or her current use of languages can become a key to this person’s growth as a linguistically sensitive educator. A similar process may be important for language policy makers at the family and community level. Personal growth through reflection on one’s own linguistic history is crucial for early bilingual education in the family. Parents have to make vital decisions at the beginning of their parental practices and will need to negotiate their educational priorities with their partners and with educators. Furthermore, a crucially important issue is parents’ negotiation with their children as agents of language maintenance and use, rather than as passive recipients of the parents’ decisions. Putjata (2017, 2019) explores the children’s own perception of their shift towards multilingualism and reveals their complex inner world that cannot be ignored by FLP makers. Therefore, children’s agency must become an integral part of any FLP plan; as children grow up, flexibility in the negotiation of family language use is important. Another critical issue both in the bilingual preschool and in the bilingual family or community is related to actual language management and teaching strategies as opposed to ideological debates and purely theoretical arguments. The analysis of successful experience of multilingual families and bilingual preschools highlights the crucial role played by educators and specifically, by the practical skills developed by educators which enhance balanced bilingual development. Schwartz (2019) differentiates between language practices as opposed to educational strategies that systematically transform actual language practices at home and in the preschool classroom, such as translanguaging pedagogies, incorporating children’s perspective on the use of languages, and ritual language practices. It seems that it is not enough to post the “right multilingual slogan” on the official site of an educational institution. Instead, success in early bilingual education is built on systematic observations, realistic evaluation of teaching practices, and the constant, tedious work of accumulating and refining successful teaching strategies. These findings are in accordance with Spolsky’s ideology-management-practice model (Spolsky 2009) at different societal levels. Although educators are viewed as the anchors of the learning process, there are other forces that are critical for reaching the desired goals in the field of early

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bilingualism, namely, peer mediators in the classroom and communities of families coalescing around specific educational institutions. The ability to activate these powerful sources of positive energy and support is one of the essential tools in the kit of a successful bilingual educator. Thus, making educators aware of potential advantages of the close-community support is vitally important. Furthermore, Israeli educators from different cultural backgrounds bring their diverse pedagogical traditions to the Israeli early bilingual education sector; the dialogue between different schools of thought can lead to cross-fertilization of their methodologies. For example, a significant discrepancy between Western dualimmersion programs and the approach based on Vygotsky’s theory is related to the choice between insisting on the clear separation of languages, on the one hand, and translanguaging (allowing a natural flow of both languages in the preschool classroom) on the other hand. In fact, effective solutions to real-life challenges may be rooted in the skillful refined combination of both approaches, in cooperative learning of educators, and in widening the range of practical tools. As a result, the invaluable experience and real-life wisdom of every educator may eventually transcend the limits of a particular system of education with its methodological guidelines and theoretical background. As the current review of educational practices shows, early bilingual educational settings in Israel are the result of different sociolinguistic situations and serve different purposes (see section “Bilingual Preschools in Modern Israel”). Therefore, the critical issues and challenges which need to be faced are unique for each type of early bilingual education. Thus, in Hebrew-Arabic kindergartens, the discrepancy between minority and majority language status is a major challenge, since the motivation of the dominant-language speakers to learn the “minoritized” language is low. For early bilingual programs preserving the heritage language, the obvious challenge is the children’s proficiency in the societally dominant language, Hebrew, and their readiness for interaction with peers from mainstream preschools. Moreover, use of the heritage language may decrease in many families as soon as they integrate into the dominant society (unless special systematic and skillful actions are undertaken), while first-born children and single children have better chances to maintain the heritage language. Proficiency of bilingual children in the home language presents a new pedagogical challenge for contemporary bilingual programs fostering heritage languages. Finally, quality assessment of bilingual preschools requires serious attention. “Bilingual” has become a “buzz word” for attracting Israeli parents. Should every setting that involves two languages be called “bilingual education,” or only programs that monitor the interaction of languages in the children’s development? Advertisements of bilingual preschools promise happiness and endless opportunities in the future for the child. How can one evaluate the quality of language teaching and ensure the integrity of the educational process? There is a fine line between growing up in a nourishing multilingual milieu and being overwhelmed by chaotic educational and linguistic stimuli in different languages. Parents, teachers, educational counselors, and speech therapists need to collaborate in order to protect multilingual children’s “linguistic well-being” in Israel.

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Future Research Directions Future research goals in the field of early bilingual education require conducting more systematic studies of the pedagogical and social practices in bilingual-education settings in Israel. It is important to bridge the gaps between the flourishing research on the development of the individual bilingual child and the emerging pedagogical research conducted in preschools. Otherwise, sociolinguistic researchers may fail to interact with educational practitioners as their target audience. Pre-service and in-service teacher training requires special attention as a potential arena for significant changes in Israeli early-educational settings (both bilingual and mainstream ones). Research priorities need to include the process of a new, emerging identity of an educator as he or she shifts from a monolingual to a multilingual educational philosophy. Raising a new generation of linguistically sensitive educators requires incorporating systematic qualitative studies (such as action research and observations) into teacher-training practices. Another aspect of research development is widening the range of settings that attract the attention of scholars. Thus, bilingual preschools described in the present chapter deliberately invest time and efforts into creating active communities of families through joint after-school activities. These informal educational practices centering around the formal educational settings call for systematic qualitative research that may help educators in their search for practical strategies that would enhance early bilingualism through a community network of families. Bilingual informal educational activities at the community level have great potential for further research and practical application. Furthermore, the family and community aspects of early bilingual education in Israel are investigated mostly among Russian-Hebrew and Arabic- Hebrew bilinguals. Hopefully, the rise of interest in family language management will bring about more systematic sociolinguistic studies conducted on different ethnic groups in Israel in order to create a more adequate holistic picture. Further research into Israeli early language education will benefit from connecting the local context with the wider international research. For example, there is room for research into grassroot initiatives aimed at heritage language maintenance, including those that are conducted through the Internet (see ▶ Chap. 26, “Early Language Education in Australia,” by Schalley and Eisenchlas in this volume). In addition, the use of multiple modern technological tools for promoting heritage languages (Little 2018) is open for research in the Israeli multilingual context. Moreover, Israeli early education provides fertile ground for the rapidly developing worldwide tendency to focus on speaker-centered approaches to bilingualism, rather than on languages as abstract objects of study with a binary division between minority and majority languages. Further research will benefit from current speaker-centered methodologies, for example, the method of language biographies focusing on the full range of diverse linguistic resources of each speaker (Busch 2017). In accordance with current international research, children’s genuine voices should constitute an inseparable part of the data for an adequate and profound analysis of educational practices (Fogle 2013; Putjata 2017, 2019; Schwartz

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2010). Israeli research in the field of language impairments and bilingualism in preschool children continues to develop and advance our understanding of this intriguing field.

Conclusions The present chapter ties together practical educational experiences in Israeli preschools and ongoing theoretical research in the field of early language education. Israel is a multilingual country that has made an abrupt ideological switch from pursuing Hebrew dominance to accepting, enjoying, and monitoring bilingual development. This social change is reflected in the field of early bilingual education, namely, the emergence of bilingual educational institutions, grassroots initiatives, and community programs as well as changes in Family Language Policy. The particularly rich sociolinguistic mosaic of contemporary Israel provides fertile ground for research and for the accumulation of valuable pedagogical experiences in the field of early bilingual development. Future research goals and challenges require making real changes in the teachertraining system and educating preschool teachers to become more linguistically sensitive. Another target is parents’ education for making informed decisions concerning their FLP and the choice of educational settings for their children. At present, these are major areas for real-life changes in early language education. In both these targets, special attention needs to be paid to concrete hands-on pedagogical strategies grounded in natural translanguaging practices, rather than theoretical and abstract ideals or attractive popular slogans exploiting beliefs about the future assets conferred by bilingualism. The contribution of Israeli research and educational experience to the international corpus of studies of early language education is significant, while many intriguing challenges and questions are open for further research, as it has been outlined in the present chapter.

Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education in Australia Acknowledgments The present paper was supported by the Research Authority of Herzog College, Alon Shvut, Israel.

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children. In R. K. Silbereisen, Y. Shavit, & P. F. Titzmann (Eds.), The challenges of diaspora migration in Today’s societies – Interdisciplinary perspectives from research in Israel and Germany (pp. 63–82). London: Ashgate. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden/Oxford: Basil/Blackwell. García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickey, T., & de Mejia, A. (2014). Immersion education in the early years: Special issue. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 17(2), 131–143. IGUM official site. (2019). Retrieved April 2019 from https://e-goom.co.il/about/2lang.html. [in Russian]. King, K., & Fogle, L. (2006). Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents’ perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6), 695–712. https://doi.org/10.2167/beb362.0. Kopeliovich, S. (2009). Reversing language shift in the immigrant family: A case study of a Russian-speaking community in Israel. Saarbruken: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller. Kopeliovich, S. (2010). Family language policy: From a case study of a Russian-Hebrew bilingual family towards a theoretical framework. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: An International Journal (DIME), 4, 162–178. Kopeliovich, S. (2011). How long is ‘the Russian street’ in Israel? Prospects of maintaining the Russian language. Israel Affairs, 17(1), 108–124. Kopeliovich, S. (2014). Happylingual: A family project for enhancing and balancing multilingual development. In M. Schwartz & A. Verschik (Eds.), Successful family language policy: Parents, children and educators in interaction (Multilingual education, Vol. 7) (pp. 249–276). Dordrecht: Springer. Kopeliovich, S. (2016). Community educational projects attuned to the delicate linguistic ecology of Israel: Enhancing Russian as a heritage language within a balanced multilingual paradigm. Israel Studies in Language and Society, 8(1–2), 140–170. Little, S. (2018). ‘Is there an app for that?’ Exploring games and apps among heritage language families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development., 40(3), 218–229. Lucas, T., Villegas, A., & Freedson-Gonzalez, M. (2008). Linguistically responsive teacher education: Preparing classroom teachers to teach English language learners. Journal of Teacher Education., 59, 361–373. Meir, N., Walters, J., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2016). Disentangling bilingualism and SLI using sentence repetition: The impact of L1 and L2 properties. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20(4), 421–452. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006915609240. Minkov, M. (in progress). Early literacy development in immigrant families: How bilingual ideology, management and practice predict children’s early literacy. PhD dissertation in progress. Tel-Aviv University. Israel. Putjata, G. (2017). “New language education policy” – Policy making and enhancement of migrantrelated multilingualism in student’s own perception. A case study with Russian speaking Israelis. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 20, 259–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-017-0742-6. Putjata, G. (2019). Language in transnational education trajectories between the Soviet Union, Israel and Germany. Participatory research with children. Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung, 4-2019, 390–404. Schwartz, M. (2008). Exploring the relationship between family language policy and heritage language knowledge among second generation Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 29(5), 400–418. Schwartz, M. (2010). Family language policy: Core issues of an emerging field. Applied Linguistics Review, 1(1), 171–192. Schwartz, M. (2013). The impact of the First Language First model on vocabulary development among preschool bilingual children. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11145-013-9463-2. Schwartz, M. (2017). Rationalization of First Language First model of bilingual development and education: A case of Russian as a heritage language in Israel. In O. Kagan, M. Carreira, & C.

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Chik (Eds.), A handbook on heritage language education: From innovation to program building. New York: Routledge. Schwartz, M. (2019). Strategies and practices of home language maintenance. In A. C. Schalley & S. A. Eisenchlas (Eds.), Handbook of social and affective factors in home language maintenance and development. Mouton de Gruyter. Schwartz, M., & Asli, A. (2014). Bilingual teachers’ language strategies: The case of an ArabicHebrew kindergarten in Israel. Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 22–32. Schwartz, M., & Gorbatt, N. (2016). ‘Why do we know Hebrew and they do not know Arabic?’ Children’s meta-linguistic talk in bilingual preschool. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(6). 21st century pre-school bilingual education: Facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts. Schwartz, M., & Gorbatt, N. (2017). “There is no need for translation: She understands:” Teachers’ mediation strategies in a bilingual preschool classroom. Modern Language Journal, 101(1). Schwartz, M., & Gorbatt, N. (2018). The role of language experts in novices’ language acquisition and socialization: Insights from an Arabic
Hebrew speaking preschool in Israel. In M. Schwartz (Ed.), Preschool bilingual education: Agency in interactions between children, teachers, and parents (Series multilingual education). Dordrecht: Springer. Schwartz, M., & Moin, V. (2011). Parents’ assessment of their preschool children’s bilingual development in the context of family language policy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2011.638078. Schwartz, M., & Shaul, J. (2013). Narrative development among language-minority children: The role of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26(1), 36–51. Schwartz, M., & Verchik, A. (2013). Achieving success in family language policy: Parents, children and educators in interaction. In M. Schwartz & A. Verchik (Eds.), Successful family language policy (Multilingual education, pp. 1–20). Dordrecht: Springer. Schwartz, M., Wee Koh, P., Xi Chen, B., Sinke, M., & Geva, E. (2016). Through the lens of teachers in two bilingual programs: A look at early bilingual education. Language, Culture, and Curriculum. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2015.1103250.1-26. Shehory-Rubin, T. (2008). Melting pot on the playground. Panim – Tarbut, hevra, ve-hinukh (42). Histadrut ha-morim. Retrieved March 2019 from https://www.itu.org.il/?CategoryID¼1298& ArticleID¼10453. [in Hebrew]. Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2012). Family language policy – The critical domain. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1), 1–9. Spolsky, B. (2014). The languages of the Jews: A sociolinguistic history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B., & Shohamy, E. (1999). The languages of Israel: Policy, ideology and practice. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Spolsky, B., & Shohamy, E. (2001). Hebrew after a century of RLS efforts. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Can threatened languages be saved? (pp. 350–363). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stavans, A. (2015). Enabling bi-literacy patterns in Ethiopian immigrant families in Israel: A socioeducational challenge. International Journal of Multilingualism, 12(2), 178–195. Walden, T., & Shehory-Rubin, T. (2018). Not from the birth, but from the kindergarten. Ben-Gurion University. [in Hebrew]. Walters, J., Armon-Lotem, S., Altman, C., Topaj, N., & Gagarina, N. (2014). Language proficiency and social identity in Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children. In R. K. Silbereisen, Y. Shavit, & P. F. Titzmann (Eds.), The Challenges of diaspora migration in today’s societies – Interdisciplinary Perspectives From Research In Israel and Germany (pp. 45–62). London: Ashgate. Wei, L. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 31(1), 9–30. Wonder School. (2019). Retrieved September 2019 from http://wonder-school.org/bilingualism/

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Language Situation in Luxembourg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Languages in the Luxembourgish Education System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Luxembourgish System of Early Childhood Education and Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent Changes in Early Language Education Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language Education Policy in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translanguaging as Part of a More Inclusive and Socially Just Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Professional Development in Early Multilingual Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Review of Research on Early Language Education Prior to the 2017 Legal Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Pilot Study on Multilingual Education in Non-formal Early Years Settings Prior to the 2017 Legal Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mandatory Professional Development in Formal and Non-formal Early Education . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developing Multilingual Practices Through the Project MuLiPEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Accomplishments of the Professional Development Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C. Kirsch (*) Department of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] C. Seele RAA Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e.V., Waren/Müritz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_28

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Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

This chapter examines recent language education laws in Luxembourg as well as the ways in which early years practitioners appropriated the new policies and put them into practice. The chapter begins with a brief introduction of the linguistic landscape in Luxembourg and a summary of the dynamic development of the country’s early childhood education system. Special emphasis is put on recent changes in language education policies, which call for a more inclusive and multilingual early language education. Monolingual practices now need to open up to flexible language use and offer children opportunities to capitalize on their entire semiotic repertoire for communicating, meaning-making, and learning. The central concerns of this chapter are the ways in which policy changes influence educational practices in formal and non-formal settings and how professional development shapes this process. In order to address these questions, the authors review literature on language education policy, translanguaging, and professional development and examine studies on early language education in Luxembourg. Next, they discuss recent initiatives of professional development in formal and non-formal early years settings as well as their outcomes. Finally, they present critical issues such as the practitioners’ reflexivity and responsibility and the sustainability of professional development. Future research directions include family language policies, partnerships between families and early childhood institutions and children’s languaging practices inside and across these institutions. Keywords

Luxembourg · Language education policy · Early multilingual education · Multilingual pedagogies · Translanguaging · Professional development

Introduction “Opening children’s minds to multilingualism and different cultures is a valuable exercise in itself that enhances individual and social development and increases their capacity to empathize with others” (European Commission 2011, p. 7). This powerful statement comes from the guidelines for early language learning developed by the European Commission. The document is based on the idea that children develop attitudes toward languages and cultures at an early age and that effective teaching sets the foundations for later language learning and promotes tolerance, understanding, and respect. Multilingual programs have been implemented in early childhood and care (ECEC) in Austria, Switzerland, some federal states in Germany, and, lately, Luxembourg. In order for this education to be inclusive and empowering,

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professionals need to break with monolingual practices based on monolingual ideologies. However, research studies show that multilingual programs still focus on the majority language at the expense of home languages (Brandenberg et al. 2017; Kratzmann et al. 2017). Language education policies, however, are not translated directly into pedagogical practice in a linear top-down process (Ricento and Hornberger 1996; Johnson 2013). (According to Johnson (2013, p. 9), the notion of language education policy refers to mechanisms, regulations, and discourses that impact “the structure, function, use, or acquisition of language” in educational contexts.) Rather, professionals negotiate and appropriate these policies in active ways (Menken and García 2010). Professional development may support them in the process of developing new pedagogies. The present chapter presents an overview of the multilingual education system in Luxembourg and presents two education acts in 2017, which called for multilingual education in formal and non-formal early childhood education. It presents the ways in which the policy changes influence practices and in which professional development shapes policy implementation. The professional development was effective in that practitioners deepened their understanding, reflected on practices, and began to make changes. The chapter ends with thoughts on reflexivity and sustainability and offers ideas for further studies.

The Language Situation in Luxembourg The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a small country in Western Europe neighboring France, Germany, and Belgium. With its three official languages – Luxembourgish, French, and German – as well as 47,4% foreign residents of a population of 626,100 (STATEC 2020), multilingualism is an everyday reality. The largest immigrant communities are the Portuguese, followed by the French, Italians, and Belgians. The language situation in Luxembourg is very dynamic and has been constantly evolving in the last decades on account of globalization, migration, and information technology (Horner and Weber 2008; Fehlen and Heinz 2016). The triglossic language situation is rooted in the German and Roman sovereignties who governed Luxembourg from the Middle Ages. When Luxembourg gained independence in 1839, it lost the francophone “Province de Luxembourg” (Luxembourgish Province) to Belgium. As a result, the population was mainly Germanophone. Nevertheless, the state continued to show allegiance to both German and French because the latter was the language of the bourgeoisie, state administration and high culture (Weber and Horner 2012, p. 7) and the former the language of the majority of the population. Luxembourgish, a Moselle Franconian dialect, was also spoken although it was not recognized as a language in its own right. It was only during the late 1970s and early 1980s, in an era of heightened immigration, that political pressure grew to strengthen the role of Luxembourgish. The language law of 1984 recognized Luxembourgish as the national language. It has equal status with German and French as a language of administration. The position of Luxembourgish continued to be strengthened in the following years. The language has been standardized and has escaped its earlier confinement to

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the private and oral sphere. It is now being used in the written media, social networks, and public sector. Furthermore, increasingly non-citizens learn the national language. German is used mainly in the print media and official communication. French changed its status from an elite language to a lingua franca used, firstly, between the Luxembourgish-speaking and the non-Luxembourgish-speaking residents and, secondly, among migrant groups as well as in large segments of the labor market. About 188,000 people commute daily from the neighboring countries to work in Luxembourg, speaking mostly French. Portuguese is also widely spoken owing to the size of the community. Many Portuguese migrated to take up employment in the steel industry. After the steel crisis of the 1970s, the tertiary sector continued to develop and attract migrants from Europe and beyond. With the growing heterogeneity of the population and at the workplace, English gained importance. According to the census of 2011, the languages most spoken at home, in school, and at work are Luxembourgish, French, German, English, and Portuguese – with every resident speaking at least two languages on a daily basis (Fehlen and Heinz 2016).

Languages in the Luxembourgish Education System The Luxembourgish school system has always been at least bilingual. The Education Act of 1843 called for the use of standard German and French, with the aim of promoting elite bilingualism. However, as Weber and Horner (2012) report, French was little taught mainly on account of the lack of qualified bilingual teachers. German, therefore, became the dominant language. It was both the language of alphabetization and instruction. The Education Act in 1881 made schooling compulsory for 6- to 12-year-olds and introduced French as a subject from Year 2. The end of the nineteenth century saw a rise of Luxembourgish nationalism partly due to the immigration wave to the steel industry. This led to an emphasis on Luxembourgish, mirrored in the Education Act of 1912: Luxembourgish was introduced as a school subject. As seen in section “Language Education Policy in Practice,” Luxembourgish was not yet officially recognized as a language. This situation had changed almost 100 years later, when the Primary Education Act of 2009 construed Luxembourgish as the language of integration. Luxembourgish was expected to contribute to school success and social cohesion. It became the principal language of communication during compulsory preschool for 4- to 6-year-olds and the language of instruction in non-academic subjects. German remained the language of alphabetization and the language of instruction in academic subjects. Oral French remained a curriculum subject in Year 2 while children became literate in French in Year 3. Still today, French gradually replaces German as the medium of instruction in most streams of secondary schooling. This traditional sequential and separative approach and its underlying ideal of the “threefold native speaker” (e.g., Fehlen 2009) have increasingly been questioned by educationalists, researchers, politicians, and parents over the last years – not least because of its failure to meet the needs of an ever more heterogeneous

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school population (Weber 2016). In 2016/2017, 64% of the 4- to 6-year-olds spoke a first language other than Luxembourgish (MENJE 2019). Large-scale assessment studies such as PISA and PIRLS and the national épreuves standardisés (standardized tests) repeatedly showed that academic achievement depends largely on students’ socioeconomic, migrant, and language backgrounds (Berg et al. 2007; MENJE 2018a). To reduce the persistent inequalities, the government launched a series of reforms comprising a closer focus on language policies and practices in early childhood education. The new Children and Youth Act of 2017 and changes to the Primary Education Act in the same year require teachers and caregivers to develop children’s skills in Luxembourgish, familiarize them with French, and value their home languages. To ensure continuity in primary school, oral French is introduced as a school subject in Year 1 alongside German, and home languages have a small space in the 1-h language awareness course in primary school. Italian- and Portuguese-speaking children can attend “integrated classes,” offered by some municipalities, where they can learn science in their home languages. In general, children of migrant background, whose families wish to further develop home languages, attend a community school. These classes exist in Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Japanese, and Dutch, to mention a few. They operate out of state-school hours and cater mainly for children from the age of 6. An exception is the Russian community school which also takes preschool children. Furthermore, there are several private and international schools with preschool classes, which differ from the language regime of the state schools. The focus in this chapter, however, will be on the state preschools and the childcare centers that adhere to the national framework plan as introduced by the Children and Youth Act of 2017.

The Luxembourgish System of Early Childhood Education and Care The Luxembourgish system of ECEC for children up to the age of 6 is divided into formal and non-formal educational institutions (see Fig. 1). Quality development in both domains has been monitored by the Ministry of Education since 2013. Following the UNESCO’s (1998) definition, formal education is organized within the official school system, while non-formal education takes place in out-of-school educational institutions, such as nurseries and day care centers (MFI and SNJ 2013). In Luxembourg, formal education for young children has a longer tradition with the introduction of a 2-year compulsory preschool for 4- to 6-year-olds in 1992 and of an optional preschool year for 3-year-olds, called the éducation précoce (early education), in 1998. The Primary Education Act of 2009 integrates both offers into formal schooling, and preschool teachers follow the national primary school curriculum. By contrast, non-formal education in both state and private institutions for younger children is a more recent development and expanded rapidly, especially after the introduction of childcare vouchers in 2009 and the passing of a new Children and Youth Act in 2016 and 2017. (Through the system of childcare

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Formal education (cycles 1-4 of primary school)

Non-formal education (prior to and out-ofschool)

éducation précoce

private and communal day-care centres for 0- to 4year-olds

(optional preschool year for 3- to 4-year-olds)

éducation préscolaire (compulsory preschool for 4- to 6-year-olds)

private and communal day-care centres for 4- to 12year-olds ;

éducation primaire

day-care homes for 0to 12-year-olds

(primary education for 6- to 12-year-olds)

Fig. 1 Formal and non-formal early education in Luxembourg

vouchers, parents’ financial contributions for childcare services are state-subsidized according to parents’ income. The Children and Youth Act has been modified in 2016 and 2017, now defining quality standards to which all childcare services must adhere in order to participate in the voucher system.) The provision of places in day care centers for children until the age of 4 years has risen more than sixfold over the course of the last 10 years. In parallel to this massive growth, there has been an increasing concern with the quality of childcare services, ultimately leading to the adoption of a series of measures of quality monitoring. These include the implementation of a national curriculum framework for non-formal education (MENJE and SNJ 2018). Early childcare has thus been vested with explicit educational objectives, calling, for example, for the holistic promotion of children’s social, emotional, cognitive, motor, and language development (Honig 2015). Staffing is one main difference between the formal and non-formal education sectors. Teachers operate in the formal sector, and caregivers work in the non-formal settings as well as in the éducation précoce where they collaborate with a teacher. Most professionals in schools and in state-funded day care are Luxembourgers and speak at least the three official languages. By contrast, the non-formal sector employs a high proportion of non-Luxembourgish-speaking staff, especially in the private, for-profit centers, where it is up to 50% (Honig and Bock 2017, p. 11). Many of these professionals are French speakers. Teachers and caregivers can get their

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educational degree in Luxembourg or elsewhere such as Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany, or Portugal. They are therefore not specifically prepared for the multilingual situation in Luxembourg.

Recent Changes in Early Language Education Policy Formal preschool education has been introduced with the explicit aim of promoting Luxembourgish as the common language of communication and integration, and furthermore as a starting point for the development of literacy skills in German in primary school. Historically, official discourses have focused almost exclusively on the Luxembourgish language, thus leaving little space for the legitimate use of other languages in preschool (see, for example, MENFP 2005). Luxembourgish was construed as the sole language of integration, leading to a monolingual approach, where even during breaktime or between peers, children were discouraged from using their other languages conceived as an obstacle to the learning of Luxembourgish. Qualitative studies showed that some teachers nevertheless implemented multilingual practices to address the children’s diverse language needs (Christmann 2011; Kirsch 2017, 2018). Regarding the language use in non-formal early education settings, there were no formal policy guidelines until 2017 – it has been left to the day care centers themselves to decide on their linguistic profile and pedagogical approaches. Since non-formal childcare is largely a private sector, much has depended on the composition of staff and the demands of their clientele (see Honig and Bock 2017). As a result, a diverse linguistic landscape has evolved in the non-formal domain over the last years, with structures where French is the dominant language of everyday communication, others where Luxembourgish is so, and yet others with a bilingual or multilingual approach in, for example, French, Luxembourgish, German, or English. Earlier ethnographic research in these settings highlighted that multilingualism was a reality in the everyday practice but caregivers nevertheless tended to hold on to monolingual norms and models when planning activities or representing their practice as “language promotion.” This was the case even in the bilingual centers (Neumann and Seele 2014; Neumann 2015; Seele 2015, 2016). Following the critical debates about the continuing inequalities in the Luxembourgish education system as well as the development of multilingual early education programs on an international level (García et al. 2017), there has recently been a paradigm shift in Luxembourg’s early language education policy. The legal changes in 2017 made multilingual education mandatory in the formal and nonformal sector. The new curriculum frameworks in both sectors call for multilingual approaches, drawing on children’s home languages as resources and giving space to both Luxembourgish and French – although differently weighted in the different settings (see MENJE 2018b, c; MENJE and SNJ 2018). (In preschool, for example, Luxembourgish remains the primary language of communication, while there is only a minimum of 30 minutes per week envisaged for the familiarization with French. In day care, however, all centers are obliged to hire at least one full-time staff (40 h)

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with a high level of proficiency (C1 of the European framework of reference) for each language, Luxembourgish and French. French is therefore much more prevalent in the non-formal education sector.) The framework for non-formal education demands the centers to integrate multilingual education into their pedagogical concepts, document its implementation, and further qualify their staff through professional development. Similarly, teachers and educators in the formal sector have to attend further training on multilingual pedagogical approaches (see subsections “Major Accomplishments of the Professional Development Initiatives”). These recent developments attest to a shift from fixed to flexible multilingual education in Luxembourg (Weber 2016). There is, however, still little understanding of, firstly, the ways in which educators appropriate these policy changes and implement them in their daily practice and, second, the challenges the professionals face in this process.

Main Theoretical Concepts Language Education Policy in Practice Many authors agree that language education policies are multi-layered, dynamic, and processual rather than being static products that are simply implemented in a linear, top-down manner (Ricento and Hornberger 1996; Hélot and Ó Laoire 2011; Johnson 2013). Shore and Wright (2011, p. 1), for example, state that “policies are not simply external, generalised or constraining forces, nor are they confined to texts. Rather they are productive, performative and continually contested.” Language education policies are therefore not limited to official legal texts and documents but also include the practiced classroom policies (Bonacina-Pugh 2012), where certain rules and routines are established in both implicit and explicit ways and influence the actors’ language choices and practices. By interpreting and appropriating policies and translating them onto the local level, educators play a crucial role and become policy makers themselves (see also Menken and García 2010; Bonacina-Pugh 2012; Kirsch 2018 as well as ▶ Chap. 7, “Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education”). Johnson (2009) highlights the agentive role of local educators in responding to and shaping the language education policy inherent in the No Child Left Behind Act in Philadelphia. He insists that “educators are not helplessly caught in the ebb and flow of shifting ideologies in language policies—they help to develop, maintain, and change that flow” (ibid., p. 155). Similarly, Young and Mary (2016) describe how a preschool teacher in France resists the prevailing monolingual ideologies and succeeds in implementing a more multilingual and inclusive language policy in her classroom. These examples attest to the flexibility and variability of policy appropriation at various levels of practice. They show that policy discourses may have both constrictive and enabling effects on the actual educational practice and that educators may become active agents of social change in this process (see also Gort and Pontier 2013; Hickey et al. 2014).

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Translanguaging as Part of a More Inclusive and Socially Just Pedagogy Flexible and dynamic educational approaches such as “multilingual pedagogies” (García and Wei 2014; Weber 2014) are inclusive, empowering, and supportive of social justice. These pedagogies call on practitioners to provide all learners with equal opportunities to participate, draw on their resources, and develop their multilingualism. Furthermore, they build on social-constructivist theories which ask for dialogue, collaboration, and co-construction of knowledge (García and Wei 2014). They are learner-centered and offer spaces for flexible language use. Although multilingual pedagogies have been shown to raise student achievement (García and Wei 2014), they are underdeveloped, and research on them in ECEC is scarce. Translanguaging is a pillar of multilingual pedagogies as it allows educators and learners to make meaning “across” languages. In this chapter, the authors understand translanguaging as the interconnected and coordinated use of a speaker’s whole semiotic repertoire to communicate and make meaning (García and Otheguy 2019). Going beyond the view of language as a resource, García and her colleagues think of translanguaging as a theory which holds that all language users have a singular linguistic repertoire and that they select and combine linguistic and non-linguistic resources to suit their communicative situation. It looks at language use from the perspectives of the speakers rather than focusing on the languages per se. However, it also acknowledges the effects that named languages and language ideologies have had and continue to have on learners. For instance, many students of migrant background cannot access the curricula given the language barriers (García and Seltzer 2016). Of particular relevance for this chapter is the notion of translanguaging as a pedagogy, defined by García and Seltzer (2016, p. 23) as “the strategic deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire to learn and develop their language repertoire, and at the same time work toward social justice by equalizing positions of learners.” This pedagogy recognizes the existence of multiple languages in educational institutions and leverages the students’ dynamic languaging in teaching and learning. García, Johnson, and Seltzer (2017) identified three components of a translanguaging pedagogy: stance, design, and shifts. The stance is the belief that students can capitalize on their diverse language practices for learning. The design refers to the exposure to languages offered and the planned curriculum and activities. Finally, the shifts denote the teachers’ flexibility to adapt their teaching to the students’ needs, for instance, through translanguaging. These three components are applicable to formal and non-formal early childhood institutions albeit the learning being less formal in the latter. For instance, the preschool teachers studied by Garrity et al. (2015) and Kirsch (2017, 2020) had a positive stance in that they embraced multilingualism and encouraged the use of languages other than the majority languages. They designed a multilingual classroom environment and offered a range of activities that enabled children to capitalize on their diverse

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linguistic resources. Finally, they used languages flexibly to address the children’s needs. Like early childhood practitioners in other studies, they deployed translanguaging to get and sustain children’s attention, communicate, provide input, develop understanding, develop communicative skills, build relationships, and facilitate transitions (see also Velasco and García 2014; Young and Mary 2016; Gort and Sembiante 2015). Translanguaging as a pedagogy can be transformative because it can challenge hegemonic forces and ideologies, empower individual learners and teachers, and promote dialogic teaching within an inclusive classroom. However, studies show that practices do not automatically change on account of European or national appeals or requirements to adopt multilingual approaches (Brandenberg et al. 2017; Kratzmann et al. 2017). Professional development can help practitioners implement new policies and transform practices.

The Role of Professional Development in Early Multilingual Education Professional development (hereafter PD) has been defined by some scholars as the systematic effort to ensure that professionals are adequately qualified when working with children and parents and to provide them with opportunities to enhance their professional learning (Egert et al. 2018; King 2014; Peeters et al. 2014). There are several models of PD ranging from training models, where practitioners update their skills or learn to implement policy changes, to communities of practice models and transformative models. In communities of practice, professionals collaboratively decide on what they want to develop, and they may engage in mentoring and coaching. Transformative models of PD encourage professionals to enter in dialogue with relevant stakeholders, raise their awareness of social and political issues, and promote enquiries or action research to make changes. In each of these models, the practitioners take on more or less active roles. PD is more likely to lead to sustainable change if the approach is collaborative, inquiry-based, and performance-based and encourages reflection (Kirsch and Aleksić 2018; Kirsch et al. 2020; Peeters et al. 2014). There is consensus from several meta-analyses that PD in language education in ECEC can influence the practitioners’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices to some extent (Egert et al. 2018; Peeters et al. 2014; Peleman et al. 2018). Among these studies, few examined language education, and those that did tended to focus on children with a language delay (Buschmann and Sachse 2018; see also ▶ Chap. 22, “Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education” by Alstad). In the United States, for instance, Hamre et al. (2012) demonstrated that the early childhood teachers learned effective interactional strategies. While the correlation between this training and the teachers’ knowledge and skills was high, the correlation between the teacher outcomes and teacher-child interactions in the classroom was modest. In other words, the practitioners did not manage to systematically apply their knowledge in their daily practice and improve the quality and quantity of the interactions with

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children. By contrast, the studies by Girolametto et al. (2012) in the United States and Buschmann and Sachse (2018) in Germany revealed more encouraging results. After the training, the professionals used more language-modelling strategies (e.g., questions, expansion), and the children spoke more and more frequently. A similar study was conducted with bilingual children, and the findings show that the teachers changed their interactional practice and that the children improved their skills in German (Sachse et al. 2016). Apart from changing knowledge, skills, and attitudes, practitioners have also been shown to develop a sense of professional identity and develop confidence in interacting with other stakeholders (Trodd and Dickerson 2018). In sum, recent ECEC policies have called for more flexible language approaches, which may include translanguaging. The implementation of policies is not straightforward and practitioners may benefit from participating in PD. However, PD can only influence attitudes, knowledge, and skills to some extent, and the influence on practices may even be less important as there is no direct relationship between beliefs and practices (Pajares 1992). For instance, the belief that multilingualism is an asset and that the use of home languages in the classroom promotes the learning of the majority language does not result in professionals implementing multilingual approaches in education (Alisaari et al. 2019; Kirsch and Aleksić 2018; Kratzmann et al. 2017).

Major Contributions The following sections provide both an overview of past research studies in Luxembourg and some insights into current initiatives of professional development in multilingual education and their outcomes.

A Review of Research on Early Language Education Prior to the 2017 Legal Changes There is little research on early years education because ECEC has only recently taken foot in Luxembourg and the research interest in this field in general is a rather new phenomenon. A noteworthy exception is the ethnographic study by Davis (1994) on language practices in schools and families. Regarding preschools, she states that Luxembourgish is the dominant language and that neither the language practices of children with lower socioeconomic status nor those of children with “migration background” find much consideration. Other qualitative studies in primary education confirmed this strong monolingual orientation, indicating in particular that the language of Portuguese children is often devalued and excluded in schools (e.g., Maurer-Hetto 2009; Gómez Fernández 2011). Case studies by Christmann (2011) and Kirsch (2017, 2018) show that exceptions nevertheless exist and that individual preschool teachers implemented multilingual practices, where they welcomed and explicitly included children’s home languages. The

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teacher in the study of Kirsch encouraged children to use home languages and capitalized on these, for instance, in storytelling activities on the iPad app iTEO. Much seems to depend on the teachers’ practiced language policy and on their efforts and willingness to transcend the institutional monolingual habitus. This conclusion is supported by a quantitative survey on the optional preschool year indicating that all practitioners agreed that home languages were important, but, nevertheless, only a few of them also used them in class (MENJE and INSIDE 2015). Only 25% of the professionals reported that they told stories and 23% that they sang songs and chanted rhymes in home languages. In the non-formal early education domain, some ethnographic studies pointed out a similar dilemma between monolingual norms and multilingual practices (Neumann and Seele 2014; Neumann 2015; Seele 2015, 2016). Caregivers used many different languages when talking to parents or when children felt sad or distressed or simply did not understand. However, when their explicit aim was the promotion of Luxembourgish, the caregivers tended to exclude these other languages and perceived them as an obstacle for the children’s learning. Even in bilingual centers, languages were strictly separated, and the professionals held on to monolingual norms (Neumann 2015).

A Pilot Study on Multilingual Education in Non-formal Early Years Settings Prior to the 2017 Legal Changes Aims and Design of the Pilot Study The program of early multilingual education introduced in 2017 for day care centers (Chambre des Députés 2017) rests on three pillars: encouraging an early contact with Luxembourgish and French through everyday high-quality interactions; valuing children’s home languages, especially through an educational partnership with families; and networking with schools, medical and therapeutic services, and cultural or other local associations to facilitate transitions and enrich children’s linguistic and cultural experiences. In order to take account of the diverse local contexts of the crèches (e.g., staff composition, linguistic and cultural diversity of families, organizational and structural features), the program only provides a general framework that is open to local adaptation. Before its nationwide implementation, the Ministry of Education conducted a pilot study from January to December 2016 to further develop the first draft of framework in the light of the local conditions, build on existing practices, and identify potential needs and challenges. The project design consisted of four interconnected domains (see also SNJ 2017): the local language profiles with statistic information on the specific language situation of the centers; local action plans, where the professionals decided on future actions and documented their implementation; professional development and coaching with regular expert input and meetings to reflect on their respective practices; and evaluation through a continuous dialogue between the professionals, center directors, parents, and children about the different expectations and

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understandings of quality in early language education. The eight centers that participated in the project provided insights into their varying local situations and needs as well as their promising practices and innovative strategies in dealing with multilingualism in their everyday experience.

Professional Learning Outcomes One important finding of this pilot project was the identification of similarities among the centers despite their many differences. There have always been multilingual practices – for example, through songs, books, and conversations with parents or other actors in diverse languages. But most of the educators had neither consciously reflected on their multilingual practice nor included it in their pedagogical concept. A main concern for them was therefore to find ways in which to integrate multilingual approaches more systematically into their professional practice and deal with language education in a more conscious and focused way. The practitioners agreed that children’s linguistic resources should be valued and that the introduction to other languages should occur in a sensitive, playful, and nonformal manner. Their aim was not to reach specific, pre-defined levels of competence, but to foster awareness and openness toward linguistic and cultural diversity as well as pleasure in communicating in different languages. However, the educators also expressed some needs and prerequisites – for example, time for preparation, reflection, documentation and exchange, development of professional knowledge and skills, as well as appropriate observation tools and pedagogical material. They were unsure of how to develop working partnerships with the diverse parents and with formal educational institutions. These questions, needs, and experiences fed into the further development of the various official policy documents as well as into the design of professional training programs for formal and non-formal early childhood education sectors.

Mandatory Professional Development in Formal and Non-formal Early Education To enable all professionals to better comprehend and implement the policy changes, the Ministry of Education offered PD to all actors. While the PD draws on existing models of multilingual education like the language awareness approach (MENFP 2010), translanguaging pedagogy (García and Seltzer 2016), and the notion of plurilingual and pluricultural competence (Cavalli et al. 2009), the trainers adapted them to the specific multilingual context of Luxembourg and the early childhood domain.

Aims and Design of the Professional Development in Formal Early Education Since 2016, approximately 1500 teachers and caregivers from state preschool classes have deepened their knowledge about the theory and practice of early multilingual education during 4–9 h of training. The PD focuses on overarching pedagogical

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principles and concrete didactic strategies. The principles include an emphasis on interaction and meaning-making, an orientation toward children’s resources and needs, as well as a transversal and holistic approach that encompasses all languages and spheres of life. Didactic strategies comprise the distinction of monolingual and multilingual moments, planned activities and everyday routines, and ways to integrate children’s home languages. Besides the mandatory training, the Education Ministry elaborated and disseminated pedagogical documents and materials (MENJE 2018b, c) and continues to offer optional complementary modules. The latter are in high demand, which attests to the educators’ continuing desire to further develop their knowledge and skills.

Aims and Design of the Professional Development in Non-formal Early Education In the non-formal education sector, the ministry offers 30 h of professional development with national and international experts to the so-called référents pédagogiques (specialized educators). These specialized educators are named by their institution and should act as multipliers in their team, passing on knowledge and stimulating reflection and exchange. Their training consists of six modules including information on the national framework plan, theories related to language development and multilingualism, multilingual pedagogies and approaches, observation and documentation of practices, partnership with parents, and networking with other institutions. In 2017 and 2019, more than 700 educators completed the PD. The ministry also organizes regular exchange meetings, where these specialized educators can discuss their practice, share resources and ideas, and collaboratively work on solutions to common challenges. The following example of a recent research project at the University of Luxembourg draws on the same basic pedagogical principles as the two mentioned training programs and brings together practitioners from both education sectors for a longer time period.

New Projects Developing Multilingual Practices Through the Project MuLiPEC Aims and Design of the Professional Development The project MuLiPEC (“Developing Multilingual Pedagogies in Early Childhood”) addresses the call for multilingual early childhood education in Luxembourg. Funded by the National Research Fund and the Ministry of Education, the research project aimed to help teachers and caregivers develop multilingual education through professional development. The PD had three parts: training sessions, network meetings, and coaching. The 15-h-long training sessions run in the summer of 2016 and were delivered to 46 teachers and caregivers. Seven of these continued for another year and took part in six network meetings organized from September 2016 to September 2017. The participants were also coached in their institution by Kirsch.

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At the time of the PD, the law on multilingual education had not been voted yet but was vividly discussed in the media. The following qualitative and quantitative methods were used to evaluate the influence of the PD: a questionnaire, observations in the institutions, observations during the PD, and video recordings of language activities and interviews. Videos of activities and practices as well as more information on the project are displayed on the project’s website http://mulipec.uni.lu. The aims of the PD were to further the professionals’ understanding of multilingualism and language learning and help them implement activities in several languages. The topics covered included perspectives on multilingualism, theories of language learning, pedagogical principles, literacy activities around books, songs and rhymes, as well as language-supportive strategies. Furthermore, the practitioners and the researchers discussed activities which they had video-recorded in the institutions (Kirsch et al. 2020).

Professional Learning Outcomes The findings of the 5-point Likert-style questionnaire completed by 44 practitioners before and after the training sessions indicated that the professionals had further developed their knowledge and understanding of language learning. For instance, they realized that the use of languages other than Luxembourgish was not detrimental to the learning of Luxembourgish (García 2009). Furthermore, they had begun to question their focus on Luxembourgish and open up toward multilingual education. Finally, both their interest in activities in languages other than Luxembourgish and the number of actual activities in other languages increased over the course of the PD (Kirsch and Aleksić 2018; Kirsch et al. 2020). Nevertheless, such activities remained rare. The interviews and the observations of the seven professionals, who were followed over a whole academic year, provided evidence of change in their daily practices. The practitioners moved away from a practiced monolingual policy and implement multilingual activities (Kirsch and Aleksić 2018; Kirsch et al. 2020). While all seven professionals suggested activities in Luxembourgish, German, French, and the children’s home languages, only five designed a child-centered and holistic language learning environment where children encountered multiple languages both in daily interactions and in guided activities such as dialogic reading, story retellings, games, songs, and rhymes. To support children in their learning process, all seven practitioners deployed a range of language-supportive strategies such as listening carefully, repeating, suggesting alternatives, asking open and closed questions, elaborating, rephrasing, and giving corrective feedback. They also made good use of mime, gesture, intonation, and visual support to ensure comprehension. The use of similar strategies has been reported in other ECEC studies (Andúgar and Cortina-Peréz 2018; Gort and Pontier 2013; Kirsch 2017; Mifsud and Vella 2018). Translanguaging, another scaffolding strategy found in the abovementioned studies, was also dominant in the Luxembourgish settings. All practitioners switched to home languages to communicate, make meaning, instruct, and discipline. Very few of the children enrolled in three of the four settings spoke Luxembourgish. and,

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therefore, the use of the home language was an important communication tool. The findings furthermore indicated that translanguaging developed into a pedagogy in the preschools. From February 2017, thus, 9 months into the PD, the three practitioners begun to use translanguaging more strategically. They spoke some French, Spanish, and Portuguese to French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking children when they judged that this switch promoted learning (Mård-Miettinen et al. 2018; Mifsud and Vella 2018; Palviainen et al. 2016). Translanguaging enabled the teachers to increase the quantity of input and improve the quality of the adult-child interactions. The three professionals reported that the flexible language use strengthened the relationships between the adults and children, which, in turn, contributed to language learning. The findings of the project indicate that the PD had influenced the professionals’ practices but that not everybody moved at the same pace. The professionals’ learning depended, among others, on their experiences and the children’s linguistic backgrounds. The two teachers and the one caregiver who worked in the preschools were more used to monolingual policies compared to the caregivers in non-formal settings. However, the former also enjoyed more independence than the latter and, therefore, found it easier to implement change and transform their practice. Furthermore, the teachers were more at ease with planning holistic and meaningful language activities than the caregivers. Finally, professionals who worked in settings with a higher number of children of migrant background found it easier to use languages more flexibly compared to those who worked in settings where more children had already learned to communicate in Luxembourgish.

Major Accomplishments of the Professional Development Initiatives The following table summarizes the respective target audience and design of the recent professional development initiatives in Luxembourg (Table 1). Considering the findings of the project MuLiPEC, the researchers concluded that their enquiry-based and performance-based model of PD in combination with the coaching had been effective. It had contributed to the development of multilingual pedagogies, where practitioners offered activities in multiple languages and where Table 1 Summary of the professional development initiatives Provider Education Ministry Education Ministry (National Youth Service) University of Luxembourg

Target professionals Approx. 1500 teachers and caregivers in the formal education sector (preschools) Approx. 700 caregivers in the nonformal education sector (day care centers)

Design and time frame 4–9 h of basic training; optional complementary modules

46 teachers and caregivers from both sectors; 7 of these were followed long-term as part of the research

15 h of basic training; six network meetings with the focus educators; coaching during one academic year

30 h divided into six modules; optional exchange meetings after the completion of the PD

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children and adults could use languages flexibly. Translanguaging enabled the professionals to value home languages, develop a good rapport with the children, accommodate for their needs, and contribute to their learning and development (García et al. 2017; Kirsch 2020). The systematic use of language-supportive strategies and the flexible use of languages across guided and spontaneous activities were indications that the professionals – at least those in preschools – had internalized the strategies which had become part of their practice. Through the PD, the professionals became aware of their views, collaboratively analyzed their beliefs, constructed new knowledge, reflected on their practice, and transformed it to some extent, similarly to practitioners elsewhere (Buschmann and Sachse 2018; Egert et al. 2018). The influence of the PD organized by the Education Ministry was equally positive. The feedback of the participating educators indicated that they became more aware of their own linguistic practice and developed knowledge and a better understanding of language acquisition, multilingualism, and language-supportive strategies. They appreciated the exchanges with other professionals and experts because they received valuable suggestions, new ideas, and inspiration for their own practice. Little is known, however, about the extent to which they transferred this knowledge into their daily routine and how sustainable these accomplishments are in the long run. Continuous coaching, as offered in the MuLiPEC project, may be a promising model of PD on early language education in the future.

Critical Issues and Topics Reflexivity A major discussion point in the MuLiPEC project became the flexible language use. In all settings, the teachers and caregivers translanguaged and translated to gain and sustain attention, facilitate communication, ensure comprehension, or make children feel secure (Mård-Miettinen et al. 2018; Mifsud and Vella 2018). Yet, the practitioners in the formal settings monitored their language use more carefully than those in the non-formal sector, and their translanguaging resembled the “responsible code-switching” described by García (2009) and Palviainen et al. (2016). By contrast, the practitioners in the non-formal educational institutions in Luxembourg switched to the child’s home languages without always considering the need for such a switch. One focus of the coaching and the PD sessions was, therefore, a reflection on the use and purposes of translanguaging. The spontaneous and not carefully monitored use of translanguaging as a scaffolding strategy may lead to exclusive rather than inclusive practices where the more widely spoken languages in Luxembourg such as Luxembourgish, German, French, English, and Portuguese are used and, thus, valued over others. Giving more status to some languages may mean that children with other linguistic resources may feel “othered” (Thomauske 2017). Translanguaging is central to an inclusive approach to multilingual education, but practitioners need to use it responsibly and, in general, monitor the language use in daily interactions. Hamman (2018), for instance, showed that the flexible language

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use in a dual language context in the United States led to unequal participation: the English-dominant children had more opportunities to develop and show their expertise than the Spanish-dominant ones. Having analyzed the PD initiatives, the authors argue that a reflexive language use is essential to avoid a highly formalized language-separating and normative approach to early language education. At the same time, they advise against an unconscious and arbitrary mixing of languages void of pedagogical objectives because this may lead to exclusive practices.

Sustainability Further challenges concern the sustainability of the newly developed educational practices and the ways in which opportunities for change relate to possibly unequal opportunities for agency that the practitioners exert in their respective settings. The authors noticed that the learning experience and the change of practice depended on the professionals’ linguistic and educational background, their professional experience, and the educational setting. Those working in formal settings were alone in their classroom or worked in a team and seemed to have more agency (Dubiner et al. 2018; Priestley et al. 2013) than the professionals in non-formal settings. The latter worked in a bigger team, had stricter hierarchical structures, and experienced many changes in the student and the staff rolls over the year. The authors conclude that PD can contribute to changing knowledge, attitudes, and practices to some extent, but for this to be sustainable, it is important to involve the management team. This conclusion is in line with studies that have shown that PD is likely to be effective and sustainable if it is long-term and collaborative, includes coaching, involves the management, and is based on a dynamic view of systems (Buschmann and Sachse 2018; Egert et al. 2018; Peleman et al. 2018; Peeters et al. 2014). Besides the need for adequate training, it is of particular importance that all professionals independently of the educational sector have the necessary time and resources both to exchange and collaborate with their team and external actors and to document and reflect on their educational practice.

Future Research Directions The experiences of the diverse trainings and the findings of the project MuLiPEC have shown that the practitioners began to reach out to parents in order to include home languages in their institutions in more meaningful ways. Some of them produced books in the children’s home languages with the help of the parents, some a multilingual dictionary; some invited the parents to tell stories, sing songs, or perform dances; others had parents record stories on iPad; and again others organized festivities with and for the parents and children (Kirsch 2019). However, these were irregular activities rather than an established practice. By contrast, collaboration with parents was a distinctive part of a preschool teacher’s practice observed over several years by Kirsch (2018). Partnerships with parents and

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networking with other institutions are part of the national framework of non-formal education and a key development area for the Ministry of Education from 2018. These calls for partnerships are based, among others, on research findings showing that collaboration with parents can contribute to emotional, social, language, and identity development and raise school achievements (Betz et al. 2017; Cummins 2009; Taguma et al. 2012). In response to these needs, Kirsch, Neumann, and Aleksić will carry out a project focusing on partnerships with parents and multiliteracy practices in day care centers. (See https://compare.uni.lu) Further areas for future research include the children’s diverse experiences and practices in the differing institutional settings that constitute their complex care and education arrangements (e.g., Bollig et al. 2016) as well as the connections and transitions between early years and primary school settings and their effects on children’s language biographies and learning experiences. Ethnographic perspectives might be particularly promising to shed light on the ways in which professionals actively put the national curriculum frameworks into practice and on the opportunities and challenges that arise when they attempt to realize a more inclusive and participatory educational practice.

Conclusions This chapter summarizes the history as well as recent developments in multilingual education in the formal and non-formal early education sectors in Luxembourg. Of central importance were two education acts of 2017 which led to a policy change calling for multilingual education. To help implement the policy, the Education Ministry and the research project MuLiPEC organized professional development, thereby offering practitioners theories, documents, ideas, and a space for reflection. The chapter shows the ways in which the practitioners and their teams negotiated and appropriated the new policy and concepts. They thereby became agents of social change (Menken and García 2010). What this chapter has additionally revealed is the speed with which this change has happened over the last few years. The next years will need to be dedicated to consolidating and further developing the promising practice based on these first experiences and research findings.

Cross-References ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education

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Early Language Education in Russia

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Linguistic Situation in Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preschool Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teaching Russian to Migrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minority Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teaching Foreign Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multilingual Education in Siberia: Sakha (Yakutia) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tatarstan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Komi Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mordovia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Udmurtia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chuvashia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Projects in Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of the Enets Language on Taymyr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Language Nest in Karelia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case of Nivkh on Sakhalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German as a Heritage Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Multilingual education in Russia has many layers, replete with both traditional stereotypes and new meanings. First and foremost, it is the teaching of Russian as the state language to those minorities and immigrants who do not yet speak it. It E. Protassova (*) Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: ekaterina.protassova@helsinki.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_31

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also includes bilingual education in national settings, and language revitalization. Lastly, it refers to the teaching of foreign languages. Educators take a variety of approaches to multilingual teaching, from old-fashioned lessons to immersion, language nests, and translanguaging. Teaching a second language to young children is common and is accompanied by certain objectives set by the state, and/or local authorities, and/or individuals. For the national minorities, the teaching of their own language is both symbolic (witnessing of their language’s status and role) and reunites them with their own past and kinship. The minor indigenous languages are mostly taught in various projects initiated through non-governmental and non-profit organizations, activists, and other sponsors (cf. Wiley et al. 2014). As far as endangered languages are concerned, it may be the last chance to impart the natural heritage speech to future generations. Parents who enroll their children in foreign language study early usually expect them to achieve a high level of proficiency. The new tendency is to enhance children’s cognitive development through bilingual education. Children become acquainted with the local languages in different situations, to varying degrees, and by diverse means, from singing songs and reciting poems, to communicating during everyday activities. Many of minority languages are vulnerable or critically/severely/definitely endangered, according to UNESCO (see Ethnologue 2021 for statistics and data). This chapter describes the difficulties involved in transmitting some endangered indigenous languages as well and why it is important to focus on such situations in the early childhood because otherwise these languages could be extinct. It concludes with suggestions for state policy aimed at preventing their extinction, which should include a widening of general knowledge about multilingualism. Keywords

Russia · Bilingual upbringing · Minority languages · Endangered languages · Language nest · Foreign language teaching

Introduction Russia is a multilingual state with changing language politics; thus, there are varying goals for multilingual education. This chapter outlines the linguistic situation in Russia, focusing on the use of languages in preschool education. Diverse languages are used in the educational system. Some preschools have to teach Russian as the state language, others must support bilingualism. Some aim to revitalize endangered languages, and still others have introduced foreign languages into their curriculum. The problems associated with this state of affairs are raised here, and situations in preschools observed and documented by stakeholders and researchers are used to exemplify and describe them. These situations are described in the cases of Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Sakha (Yakutia), Komi, Mordovia, Udmurtia and Karelia. Different

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attempts to educate children bilingually in the Omsk Region, the Taymyr Peninsula and Sakhalin Island are also illustrated. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that, from a sociolinguistic perspective, researchers should study and support a positive family language policy as well as the real progress made in family language transmission or language use in preschools.

The Linguistic Situation in Russia In Russia, a state with more than 160 indigenous languages (Census 2010), language policy plays a tremendous role in the maintenance or loss of minority languages. During the Soviet era (1922–1991), some indigenous ethnic languages (such as Alyutor, Koryak, various Dagestani languages) were neglected in preschool teaching, if compared with the so-called titular languages of the national republics,1 which enjoyed full support in education. Within Russia, some languages had large numbers of speakers and were represented at all levels of the educational system (Bashkir and Tatar, for example). Others were spoken by a smaller number of people and could hardly be taught to everyone interested. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation turned to its own minorities. In the 1990s, ethnic mobilization (increase in the collective activities of people fighting for their ethnic rights, for example, the use of their language in social spheres) was encountered in many places (Mikhal’chenko 2016). Nowadays, there are 85 so-called subjects (administrative divisions) of the Russian Federation, some of which have their own national language and/or minority languages. Among them, there are 22 national republics (some of which have numerous languages), which have their own laws regarding language education policies. Moreover, a national territory may be a region (krai), a part of a region, a district, or even a village. Language use in these regional subdivisions is governed by separate legislation. The Constitution of the Russian Federation allows for the use of Russian and the national languages for different functions. According to the Constitution, all languages are equal, and language discrimination is forbidden. The Law on the Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation (1991, with later amendments), and the Law on the State Language of the Russian Federation (2005, with amendments) proclaim Russian as the means of national communication, and its literary norms must be protected. In some regions, 35 languages are state languages of the republics, and there are also official languages. For example, in Karelia there are three official languages (besides Russian as the state language), namely, Veps, Karelian, and Finnish. Citizens may choose the language of education if it is available; arrangements may vary between regions and ethnic localities. But

1

The national republics, which are now independent, were the following: Belarus; Russia; Ukraine; Moldova; the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; the Caucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia; and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

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the general tendency is to study in Russian (up to 97% of schools), and other languages are studied as just school subjects (Marten et al. 2015; Bowring and Borgoyakova 2017). Russian was recognized as a state language in 2005, and its teaching is guaranteed by the state. All state languages of the national republics, as well as their minority languages, are taught to varying degrees. In 2018, the amended Law on Education provided for parents to define what their children’s native language is, and for their children to be educated in that language. As a result, many students from ethnic backgrounds choose Russian, and the learning of ethnic languages has fallen dramatically (Dugarova et al. 2020). In the national republics and regions, linguistic situations can either enhance or impede the teaching of local languages to preschool children. As linguists suggest, the state language is quite different from the abundant dialects, regiolects and ethnolects of Russian that are widely spoken in everyday life in the country (Mayorov 2013). Moreover, Russian is still a second language for the linguistic minorities who speak a non-Russian tongue as the dominant language (as in some parts of Burjatia, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Sakha (Yakutia), Tyva, and elsewhere, cf. Sannikova 2008; Bicheldej 2015; Cyrenov 2015; Ivanova 2015). Furthermore, Russian is a new language for a growing number of immigrants from the non-Russian-speaking community, predominantly from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (such as Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan). Bilingual situations range from Russian dominance to different levels of proficiency in the local languages, as well as the need to study the local state or heritage language.

Preschool Education Language regime in nurseries, kindergartens and preschools in Russia never used to be subject to any strict requirements, and it usually depended on the dominant language of the teacher and the enrolled children. The first language was normally the prevalent tongue in preschool education, and schools operated in Russian. There were also programs and materials for preliminary study of the Russian language from the age of 5. The study of Russian became increasingly obligatory in preparatory classes (for children aged 6) and was mostly done in the preschools for 3–6 aged children as well. In addition, many day care centers experimented with teaching foreign languages for preschool children, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. Under the current system, preschool education in Russia is not compulsory until the age of 6.5–8 years. Although education is provided free of charge, day care must be paid for, depending on the region, type of preschool, and the family’s financial situation. Educational institutions start from the age of 2 months. They are called preschool educational organizations, and can be state, municipal, or private. When the national languages became the focus of attention, an awareness of the necessity of bilingual education began to grow (Protassova 2010). Many republics adopted their language laws and favored their titular languages (meaning the name

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of the republic is stated, e.g., Kalmyk in Kalmykia). The Russian government feared, however, that the republics would become too autonomous and too nationalistic, speaking in their own languages about things that cannot be understood by those who only speak Russian (Lyubimov et al. 2018; Zamyatin 2018). In Tatarstan, for example, the need for Russian-speaking children to study more hours in Tatar than in Russian, without comprehending the study contents and with poor educational materials, demonstrated that the introduction of too much of the national language in the absence of solid linguistic and methodological fundamentals, to the detriment of the Russian language, could be premature (Arutjunova 2019; Bowring 2019). The results of bilingual assessment in Russia show that performance in both languages improves with age, and that in bilingual settings children perform equally well in both languages (Ushakova et al. 2020). Despite the long history of bilingual education and Vygotsky’s insights into multilingualism, which he formulated almost a hundred years ago (Vygotsky 1928; written much earlier), not all representatives of the teaching community accept the idea of early bilingualism, and many are concerned about the negative effects of overburdening preschoolers.

Teaching Russian to Migrants Russia is one of the countries that receive the highest number of immigrants in the world, and the presence of newcomers to preschool education is apparent everywhere, from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Immigrants mainly come from the former Soviet republics, where Russian used to be the principal means of communication, and where it remains in use today. It is difficult to say how many of them arrive with a good knowledge of Russian. Migrant languages are spoken by the largest communities of immigrants, and include Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Moldovan, Tajik, and Uzbek. These languages are only taught where community resources are available, in community centers, and religious organizations. Migrant languages can be learned in study circles in such places as the Houses of Nationalities (a kind of club for people of different ethnic backgrounds). Some schools used to receive heritage language support. These have been transformed into schools where migrant languages are maintained through irregular lessons and the national component of education. This means that some festivities can be held according to the national or religious calendar. Paradoxically, this includes those conducted in Russian as a national language. The longest-existing diasporas in Moscow – Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Tatar, Ukrainian, and Azerbaijani – have preschools and schools or centers where their languages and cultures can be supported (Kos’mina 2007; Androsova 2012; Grigorieva and Belotserkovskaya 2014). When several children with a different L1 attend a preschool class with the language of their surroundings as the dominant L2, this type of L2 acquisition can be called submersion. When most of the children in the group are proficient in the target language, the newcomers learn it after them, imitating and generalizing their actions and verbalizations. The experience of teaching submersion Russian to

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immigrant and minority children includes structured teaching for the immigrant children, combined with mainstream lessons and activities for the whole group. Children’s achievements can be tested before they enter the school (Hamraeva 2013). At the same time, in such preschools, ethnic cultures are celebrated through projects dedicated to the cultures of the different peoples of Russia and the world, and the acquisition of principles of intercultural communication (Protassova and Rodina 2011). Children learn about the linguistic and ethnic diversity of Russia and the world, and to recognize the ethnic components of clothes, music, festivities, and food. They may learn how to greet, thank, apologize or congratulate in the target language, and communicate according to the cultural principles of the respective peoples. Educators tend to regard the teaching of Russian as a state language for immigrant children as a problem only on the school level. Preschool teachers generally believe that children learn language while participating in activities together with other children. They think that children need to become fully proficient in Russian before starting school, and they have made additional efforts to arrange courses in Russian language and culture for migrant children (Rodina 2013; Protassova and Rodina 2014; Ushakova 2019). A series of educational materials by Kalenkova (2013) facilitates the teaching of Russian as a second language to immigrant preschool and primary school children.

Minority Education Nowadays, the republics are refining their approach under the auspices of the Russian President’s Order (Ukaz 2012) on the Strategy of the National Policy of the Russian Federation until 2025. This means that they are trying to adapt their own wishes to the government’s language policy, which usually supports the national cultures, but much less the actual study of minority languages. It is also notable that educational principles are not uniform among the national republics and territories. At the same time, the Law on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1999) provides for the support of any language, regardless of the number of its speakers. With only very few speakers, many of the indigenous languages are endangered. Thus, revitalization measures are needed. There is currently a growing activism on an international level, aimed at promoting the revitalization of endangered languages (e.g., Campbell et al. 2015). The United Nations General Assembly declared the year 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. As a result, a large complex of various events in Russia were dedicated to the study of indigenous languages and the education of minorities. This activism encourages language learning among parents and possible stakeholders (such as museums, ethnic festivals, ethnic sporting events, film and poetry competitions, etc.). Problems of minority education are the responsibility of the Federal Institute of Educational Development in Moscow, more specifically, the Scientific and Research Center for National Problems of Education (the former Institute of National Schools), which draws up standards and basic programs, and monitors the educational situation (Artemenko 2020). Teachers exchange pedagogical ideas during

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conferences, and their results are regularly published (Artemenko 2015; Ostapova and Fedina 2019; Ostapova and Chujashkina 2021). The Herzen Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg provides higher education for teachers of the national languages, and has a center for bilingual educational issues (Krugljakova et al. 2017). Preschool teachers do not normally receive their degrees from this institute, however, but from the local colleges of education.

Teaching Foreign Languages Russia has a long history of teaching foreign and second languages at preschool age. In the seventeenth century it was Polish, in the eighteenth century it was Italian, then the classical languages, and later French, German, and English. English is the most popular language nowadays, although French, German, Spanish and Chinese are also studied. Methods of teaching have normally mirrored general global tendencies and the needs of the different layers of Russian society; that is, foreign languages are for the better-off, and Russian is for the minorities (Protassova 2018). A variety of methods are currently implemented, whereby historically formed traditional approaches are combined with modern communicative and immersive techniques (Protassova and Rodina 2019a, b). Experienced teachers retain routine methods, while newly qualified teachers are split into those who are eager for change and innovation, and those who think that “everything was better before” (Gal’skova and Nikitenko 2019). As a result of globalization, there is a growing international tendency to lower the age of exposure to L2. English is taught at home, in clubs, in mother-and-child groups, in day care centers, on the Internet, and through structured lessons in preschools. The “50/50” model refers to the teaching of both languages, L1 and L2, in equal proportions. This approach is implemented in the private English Nursery and Primary School (since 2004; englishnursery.ru). During the first half of the day, a native English-speaker carries out different activities in a small group. The working sheets are common to all activities, unlike the general practice of Russian preschools. The educational process is based on the British program. A bilingual teacher assists. In the afternoon, the Russian program is employed; the bilingual teacher teaches in Russian, while the English-speaker assists. As a result, children are dominant in Russian and attain a very good, almost age-appropriate proficiency in English (Hamraeva et al. 2019). An example of a trilingual setting is the Moscow preschool Italo Calvino, which educates children aged 3–5 in Italian, Russian and English (schoolitalia.ru/ru/nasha-shkola/detskiy-sad). The variety of approaches will certainly be increased in the near future.

Main Theoretical Concepts Because this chapter is about the diversity of teaching a second language at a young age in Russian Federation territory, some theoretical notions must be introduced first. Part of the language planning in Russia is setting requirements for teaching new or

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maintaining existing languages. The country’s latest educational concepts for local languages advocate keeping the status quo: those who have already acquired a language may continue to use it in the educational institution, but those who do not know it are exempted from compulsory linguistic education in that language. If families live in a national territory, they may learn about its ethno-cultural component from a historical and contemporary perspective. This means becoming acquainted with specific cultural features of the local life relating to its ethnic composition, traditions and history. Such subjects are taught everywhere in Russian. As such, this approach is perilous for language revitalization (measures to maintain and enhance language use when the number of its speakers declines) as it does not stimulate multilingualism and does not give everyone an equal chance to study a local language. The opportunity is often not seized because the Russian language might be sufficient to satisfy all of a person’s needs, although its cultural value is only symbolic. For instance, there are numerous choirs and ensembles, exhibitions of national arts and crafts that represent the history of the respective peoples’ folklore. Yet, without support for teaching the language from the authorities and the community, these peoples lose their language and put their ethnolinguistic vitality - their ability to survive as an ethnic group, with their own language and identity – at risk. As far as educational institutions are concerned, the problems that educators in Russia encounter do not differ greatly from those of similar institutions elsewhere. The multilingual approach of preschools, although seemingly non-ideological, has always been to deal with policies at different levels: governmental, municipal, institutional, and family (cf. Kirsch 2018), and therefore, to adjust the realities to the possibilities. The spectrum of existing instructional methods is always adapted to the political situation and the local context (Bangma and Riemersma 2011): Who is the teacher – an L1 or an L2 speaker? How are they educated? Which language do they teach, officially or unofficially? Is it free of charge or on a honorarium basis, to the representatives of which social class, for how long, with what kind of teaching materials – authentic or self-made – for what purposes, etc.? Stephen et al. (2016) shows that multilingual preschools accepting children aged between 3 and 5 often encounter such pedagogic challenges in their efforts to provide quality education. The professional development of preschool teachers, especially considering linguistic diversity within the group, should also include intercultural education training that makes them familiar with cultural biases, ethnic stereotypes, principles of intercultural communication, etc. (Michel and Kuiken 2014). Professionalization of the multilingual principle in education can still be improved, e.g., raising language awareness while dealing with linguistic diversity in the classroom, and transforming language ideologies (Putjata 2018). National activists are usually dissatisfied with the rate of the language shift to Russian (when the national or ethnic language is abandoned in favor of the dominant language) and try to reverse the language shift (to come back to the use of the national or ethnic language), which actually needs thorough and detailed language planning (from general language state policy to the regional educational policy) (Fishman 1991).

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There can be a variety of programs in early language education (Siguan and Mackey 1987), and not all of them bring long-lasting results or implement the declared policies (Freeman 2007). The role of education is increasing for the lesser-used languages, which do not have many speakers left (Edwards 2006). It is important to diversify approaches by combining successful pedagogic practices with language immersion, especially in the language revitalization initiatives. For example, the language nest educational approach for the revitalization of endangered languages was first used in New Zealand for Maori, later in Hawaii for Hawaiian, and then in Lapland (Finland) for the Inari Sámi language (Pasanen 2015). In small groups, children learn from adults who can speak a rare language, through communication in everyday life. If older people speak the language fluently, they may be present or participate in the general activities. In New Zealand, the language nests started from a traditional way of life, and later expanded to modern settings, whereas in Finland, they have been modernized, and serve the needs of contemporary people who have a specific way of life in the North. In Hawaii, technological development has produced digital methods of revitalization (Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla 2018). The specific feature of Russian research into foreign language teaching is that it focuses on polycultural education, which means bringing together children of different ethnic backgrounds, and teaching friendship and tolerance (Sysoev 2006). It explores differences and similarities more than it advocates interaction. Scholars investigate the different side effects of teaching foreign languages, and the combination of a foreign language and its culture, to address the question: how does a child who learns two languages develop esthetically, musically, and personally (e.g., Arhangel’skaja and Kartashova 2017)? In general, the instruction of every language taught in Russia is loaded with cultural associations and superstitions, and takes place on a scale of prestige gradation, which can be understood as a hierarchy. At the preschool level, the Russian language is practically compulsory, and the content that includes preparation for school should be transmitted in Russian. The minority languages taught differ in status: those languages that are the respective state languages of the national republics are compulsory to a certain extent. Parents usually decide in which language their children should study (this option is available to everyone, depending on the situation). Thus, multilingualism has many facets, aspects and features in Russia. Traditions are interrelated with the needs of modern societies, and regions vary in the degree of multilingualism and the composition of polyethnic settings.

Major Contributions In the established and developed national republics with their own language laws, the situation of the multilingual education of quantitively large minorities, as in the Komi or Chechen Republics for example, are monitored by local ministries of education, institutes of educational development, universities and pedagogical colleges. The main emphasis of the educational establishment is on methods of

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language teaching. Moreover, researchers tend to analyze how many children study languages, but not so much what they can actually say in these languages. The level of children’s competence in the target languages varies from complete monolingualism in the minority language (in some remote villages) to superficial knowledge of symbolic language tags (greetings, songs, politeness formulae). Although there are no areas of the Russian Federation that might be defined as completely monolingual, the administrative borders do not reflect the real ethnolinguistic situations, for historical reasons. Some languages exist in diasporas, meaning in the national territories and outside of them, in other settlements. The big cities also have linguistic minority communities (sometimes with preschools and schools teaching in the respective languages). The following overview of major contributions starts with a focus on early multilingual education in Siberia.

Multilingual Education in Siberia: Sakha (Yakutia) Siberia, this vast but sparsely populated territory, seems to have found the most impressive solutions in Russia. The Yakuts (or Sakha) make up more than half of the population (figures vary) of Siberia. The local state language Sakha (Yakut) can be used in any sphere of life, not only in the preschool curriculum. Thus, young children are exposed to real-life daily linguistic practices in this language in diverse societal domains. Preschool educators teach both the Russian (an Indo-European language) and Yakut (also called Sakha, a Turkic language) state languages, but they also provide lessons in the indigenous minority languages (Dolgan, Evenk, Even, Yukaghir, and Chukchi, belonging to different language families). Preschools also teach foreign languages, often more than one: English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish and Chinese, according to the choice of parents. Many initiatives are very successful; their results show that preschool children are able to use three languages in everyday communication or during preschool activities. Some projects include mathematics and science methods, with an ethnocultural component connecting theoretical issues to the local specificity (e.g., children learn how to make traditional toys, study geometrical forms, and count the necessary materials in Yakut). Children frequently learn how to play the Yakut musical instrument, the khomus. Current researchers and teachers are grateful to the educationists of the past, especially such organizers of preschool education in Yakutia as Elizaveta Kornilova (1887–1999), who initiated language education, organized the national kindergarten operating in Yakut and teaching Russian (1925), and introduced many new concepts (e.g., hygiene) to educators. Many of her alumni have become experts in Yakut (Gabysheva 2010). Nowadays, it is very important to increase teaching in Yakut in Siberia’s principal city, Yakutsk, where only 19% of preschoolers study in that language. According to Grigorieva (2014), the problem lies in an unbalanced bilingualism (the younger generation is shifting toward Russian), and the unwillingness of the non-indigenous ethnicities (including immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, who form a large enclave) to study Yakut, which was once the lingua franca of Siberia. Thus, preschool teachers

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in Yakutsk try to maintain knowledge of Yakut by encouraging parents to use the language at home. Out of more than 700 preschool institutions, around 20 urban (over 2,000 children) and 434 rural (about 22,000 children) institutions currently operate in Yakut, and 52 institutions with more than 1,500 children altogether operate in both the Russian and Yakut languages. Six institutions offer lessons in Even, a rare Tungusic language (150 children) (data from the Ministry of Education). A good example is the Micheer preschool, led by Trofimova, who has studied methods of teaching all children bilingually through specially designed lessons and everyday activities (Trofimova 2008). Most of the children in this preschool are Russiandominant, and proficient in Yakut to varying degrees. Children are proud of their heritage and try to acquire both languages. More intensive methods are implemented in the national preschool Keskil (associated with UNESCO), the flagship of early bilingualism. Besides all-Russian programs for preschool education, teachers also use the Yakut regional program Toskhol. They employ plenty of national games and toys in instruction, and all visual aids are very environmentally oriented. The Yakut national ethos, Olonkho, provides a source for teaching moral values, for the strategic table game Sonor, for creating pictures and figures, and for presenting theatrical performances. The traditional Yakut calendar serves as a natural basis for arranging year-long thematic activities, both indoors and outdoors: initiation into learning; lessons in the museum of national culture; men’s and women’s activities; the involvement of parents in the “Day of the Earth”; and the national celebration of Yhyakh (the longest days of the year, symbolizing a new beginning). Many activities are project and phenomenabased, and presuppose the use of three languages: Yakut, Russian and English.

Tatarstan Tatarstan is situated in Central Russia, on the Volga River. It is a culturally and economically well-developed republic, where the national language plays an important role in the public sphere. Study in the Tatar language (which belongs to the Turkic language family) is possible at all levels of education, and this is the preferred language of the ethnic Tatars, who comprise 53.2% of the population. Russian and Tatar are the two state languages in the republic, and the principle of bilingualism is prioritized. Preschools are one of the elements of the whole system of ethnolinguistic education. Half of almost 2,000 early years education centers operate in a national language, predominantly Tatar, but also Chuvash, Udmurt and Mari (Yalalov 2019). The government has introduced various programs2 and innovative methods, including online games and computer programs, which should contribute to the

Such as the Tatarstan government’s program for the “Preservation, Study and Development of the State Languages of the Republic of Tatarstan and other Languages of the Republic of Tatarstan in the Period 2014–2020.”

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improvement of bilingual education, by abandoning the learning of language as a strictly philological exercise, identifying areas for more practical applications of language, and accepting learning as a means of communication and cooperation. The local administrations are proposing to implement organizational, motivational, professional and methodological measures for enhancing the teaching of the national language and culture and envisage that up to 64% of ethnic Tatar children will learn Tatar by 2020. This should serve to reverse the tendency among the Tatar youth to adopt Russian as their mother tongue, because Russian surpasses Tatar in all social spheres. Furthermore, in some regions, the lack of proficiency in Russian might impede career advancement (Gabdulhakov 2010; Gabdulhakov and Hisamova 2012; Gabdrahmanova and Sagdieva 2016). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general level of proficiency in the Tatar language should have been raised more quickly than it was. In the 1990s, preschool teachers were recruited from among those who spoke Tatar. Various courses, such as in-service training, were organized at a later stage. Today, all teachers must be balanced bilinguals whose vocabulary is measured through tests, and those who are not sufficiently proficient in either language receive special training through online courses. In some early learning institutions, teachers of Tatar give lessons to teachers of Russian through informal activities involving communication, such as socializing while drinking tea or making costumes for festivities, or they imitate everyday situations and try to use Tatar in appropriate situations (Gabdrahmanova and Sagdieva 2016; Bayanova and Shishova 2019). According to the Ministry of Education of Tatarstan (personal report, 2021), children in Tatarstan’s bilingual preschools are divided into subgroups of not more than 15 participants, on the basis of the level of their initial knowledge of the target language (Tatar or Russian, limited or full proficiency). If this is not possible, teachers mix the groups and give additional lessons to those who need them during the day. Teachers play with children aged 3–4 years in the target language outside, and during sports lessons. Teaching begins for children aged 4–5 years in the form of structured 15-min lessons three times a week. For children aged 5–6 years the lessons last 25 min, and 30 min for 6-year-olds. Two lessons a week are held in special classrooms, and a third via video. Each lesson includes greetings, vocabulary exercises, grammar rules, phonetics, articulation, utterances, and observation. In addition, exercises involving descriptions of pictures with a specific plot, conversation, stories about the children’s own life, reciting poems and fairytales are also included. It is predominantly a very teacher-centered structural approach. Peer learning and non-structured free play activities are, of course, also natural forms of communication in the target languages, but these are not frequently encountered. Significantly, there is no option for flexible instructional practices; teachers are not allowed to deliver the language in a different way, and any alteration is forbidden. The child’s agency (autonomy, motivation, interest in the target languages) is not celebrated. All subjects are prescribed and written down. From the teachers’ point of view, language delivery in such a prescribed curriculum is easy, because all the necessary materials are ready-made, including large pictures, flashcards, workbooks, copybooks, and videos. Special rooms for lessons in each language should

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have the state symbols for both languages, photos of sights of the town and other important or interesting places, albums showing works of decorative and applied arts, didactic games, children’s drawings and paintings, projects, mnemonics, and toy characters from Tatar fairytales. In addition, parents may continue to teach the languages at home, repeating the language activities and learning the languages together with their children. Preschools have all materials and technical support, and the Ministry of Education and Science uploads all new materials on the Internet. The underlying idea is that for many children, Tatar and Russian are taught in an artificial environment of preschool education which has developmental potential, and not in the family (Gabdrahmanova and Sagdieva 2016). The role and the attitude of parents are important. All languages are evaluated, and the teaching process is monitored by academics from the universities. The chance to combine many languages under one roof is what induced the owners of the Bala City private preschool and primary school (kids.balacity.ru) in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, to introduce four languages through immersion and structured activities: Tatar, Russian and English, along with supplementary Chinese. The last two languages are taught by young and ambitious native speakers, who find favorable career opportunities here in natural communication with children. The space and teaching materials are divided between the respective languages, and the location of classes and class content are determined in accordance with strict timetables. To recap, in establishing a balanced bilingualism in the Tatar and Russian languages in Tatarstan, measures are taken to follow the prescribed path of language learning. This republic is marked by cooperation among parents, educational groups, and scientific institutions, as well as the introduction of innovative concepts and the application of contemporary technology.

The Komi Republic The Komi Republic has an elaborate system of preschool Komi language teaching supported by the local authorities and activists. The ethnic Komi, who speak a Finno-Ugric language, comprise approximately 24% of the population in the Republic of Komi in the North-east of European Russia. Around 40% of the ethnic Komi reported Russian to be their mother tongue. Activists of the national movement Komi Vojtyr spread language learning among the population, and the Laboratory of National Problems of Preschool Education at the Komi Republic Institute for Educational Development manages and monitors the linguistic situation and the development of teaching materials (kriro.ru). The theater stages shows for children in the Komi language, and the National Museum organizes excursions and workshops for children in the Komi language and in Russian (Ostapova and Kulysheva 2016). About 500 preschools implement three models of teaching Komi (as a compulsory subject and as a state language): (1) for predominantly Komi-speaking children with Komi as the language of instruction, and lessons of Russian; (2) the teaching of

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Komi during lessons and in everyday life (immersion), where most of the activities are in Russian, aimed at families who want to revitalize their heritage language; and (3) for predominantly Russian-speaking children with lessons of Komi two times per week. When teachers are not sure what activities they can use to engage with children in the Komi language, how to explain things, or what materials to use, they switch to Russian. Local programs for teaching Komi exist for every type of the above-mentioned models in early years education (Ostapova and Kulysheva 2016). On the community and family level, there are diverse language revitalization initiatives aimed at encouraging Komi language use. The republican TV is implementing a new educational program, Dzoljuk, for the teaching of the Komi language, and activities are held twice a month (vk.com/club69286686). This program travels through the republic and meets local speakers of Komi and their children, often on vacation or other festive occasions. New technology is becoming available in remote villages through a “pedagogical airlift.” Parents are stimulated to play together with children in amateur theaters. Clubs for parents meeting once a month allow for different kinds of interaction, motivating them to continue to use the Komi language at home (Ostapova and Kulysheva 2016). Despite all of these measures, however, the Komi language is in decline due to its minority status.

Mordovia The Mordovian Republic belongs to the Volga Federal District and is located in the eastern part of European Russia. Around 800,000 people live here. There are two main Mordvinic languages; Moksha and Erzya, both of which are of Finno-Ugric origin. Both are languages of administration, art, media, literature, education, and official use. Approximately 40% of the population state that they are ethnic Mordvins (Pussinen 2016). Almost all Moksha and Erzya people speak Russian, but very few Russians speak a Mordvinic language. Although the study of Mordovia’s languages could be intensified, the political establishment has no interest in doing so (Abramova 2015). In rural areas, many children use their ethnic languages at home, but outside, they usually switch to Russian. Research shows that balanced bilinguals who speak a Mordvinic language fluently learn Russian better than those who have not acquired it fully. All the necessary legislation has been put in place for the introduction of both languages in preschool education. Approximately 51.4% of preschools currently provide teaching of the ethnic languages, mostly in the form of language circles (15–20 min twice a week for children aged 4–6, and 30–35 min twice a week in the preschool group). This provides the children with an opportunity to learn words and folklore, speak in whole sentences (i.e., use the ethnic languages productively), and reproduce phrases in conversation and play. It is notable in this respect that, in this republic, much attention is paid to crafts and literature in education, and to the national cultures of the peoples of Mordovia. For example, in these learning circles, children learn the names of the parts of the national costume (Kirkina and Shchemerova 2016).

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In addition, there are two experimental preschools, one for Moksha and one for Erzya, that offer immersion programs. The goal is to organize as many activities in the ethnic languages as possible, but in practice, it is not so easy for teachers to use their L1 Mordvinic in a structured way. Some lack sufficient knowledge of the language, and parents are more interested in Russian than in Moksha or Erzja. Moreover, both languages are spoken in families and in preschools where they tend to be mixed, and in situations such as this, Russian serves as a lingua franca.

Udmurtia Udmurtia belongs to the Volga Federal District and has approximately 1.5 million inhabitants. Udmurt, another Finno-Ugric language, is spoken predominantly in rural districts, but has started to make its presence known in urban areas too. Ethnic Udmurts and Besermyans make up around 28% of the population. Udmurt is not the only national language of the republic (although it is the state language). Besermyan and Tatar, for example, represent other minority languages. This fact inspires teachers to celebrate all languages, and, for reasons of equality, children speaking the Udmurt language are not prioritized. Poor living conditions in the rural areas induce people to migrate to the towns. Many children have already switched to using Russian at home in communication with relatives, and in its area of use, Udmurt has dwindled to a kitchen and countryside language (cf. Protassova et al. 2014). Researchers have developed a corpus of folklore-based materials for the use of Udmurt in preschools, among them a wide range of activity games (Kuznecova 2017). Experimenting with different ways of instruction, they applied full immersion and “50/50” models, including collaboration with families and the community. Specifically, all everyday routines are in Udmurt only; teachers who know the language are encouraged to use it in their educational activities. Some preschools invite special teachers of Udmurt if none of the staff can speak it (Kuznecova 2009). The methodological basis of ethnic language teaching is strong in Udmurtia. Teachers are encouraged to promote the Udmurt language. While describing Udmurt cuisine, children prepare, taste, and eat typical dishes. A traditional elf brings a letter that requires the dramatization of a fairy tale. Multimedia presentations show different parts of the republic and the people who live there. In a play town, children play with toys and think up different activities. Educators work with parents to organize excursions to libraries and museums, where the guides relate myths and legends, and show the children how to make national toys. All activities are thematically integrated and accompanied by conversations in Udmurt (or other minority languages) (Kuznecova 2016).

Chuvashia The Chuvash Republic is situated in the Volga-Vyatka region, and has 1.2 million inhabitants. Chuvash is a Turkic language. About 70% of the population are ethnic

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Chuvashs. The language is commonly used in rural areas, unfortunately, less so in the towns and cities (cf. Alos i Font 2014, 2016; Protassova et al. 2014). The language input may be organized in Russian or in Chuvash, depending on the day of the week, the L1 of the teacher, or specific activities. All pedagogical staff use one of these languages constantly, and encourage children to do the same. In reality, most teachers speak Russian automatically, without giving much thought to their use or choice of language. They allow Russian to dominate their Chuvash, or they cannot speak in a clear or simplified form of Chuvash, as they do not appreciate the difficulties experienced by people for whom Chuvash is not their mother tongue. This seems to be because they are not aware of the disadvantages of segregating the two languages, or of the benefits of a bilingual approach to education. Unfortunately, and in some cases erroneously, they believe that a knowledge of Russian is better for the children, that bilingualism causes a delay in speech development, and that small children find it difficult to learn two languages (Ivanova 2015). This does not appear to impede the acquisition of English as a third language, however, and more and more state and private (the latter are few in number) early learning centers are adopting a trilingual model. The main program is usually taught in Russian, and other languages are taught in the form of lessons. I observed role play, games, rituals, routines, instances of reading, traditional and modern handicrafts, dances, drama and songs in the Chuvash language. To accentuate the ethnicity of the cultural content, children were dressed in national costumes (field notes, 2016). The overview of the implemented initiatives relating to ethnic languages in preschools shows that, despite the proclaimed interest in minority language education, little is being done to make people understand the privileges of learning a minority language as L1 and the specificity of learning a minority language as L2. Bilingual education is not a valid term yet. People usually speak in terms of teaching and learning languages, or teaching in a language. For many educators, bilingualism (dvujazychie in Russian) still symbolizes something dangerous.

Projects in Progress The indigenous languages used by only a small number of native speakers could easily become extinct if no efforts are made to revitalize them through the language nest educational approach (known as technology in Russian), which was supported by the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs in 2019 (fadn.gov.ru Accessed 5 May 2019). In the following subsections I will discuss some cases where I have participated in this “technology.”

The Case of the Enets Language on Taymyr Forest Enets, a moribund dialect of the Samoyedic language of northern Siberia (belonging to the Uralic language family), is spoken in the Yenisei village of

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Potapovo. In order to reach Potapovo visitors need to fly to Norilsk, take the car to Dudinka, and from Dudinka travel several hours along the Yenisei River (about 4 h on ice in winter, or about 2 h on water in summer). There are very few speakers of this language left. In the same village, there are other representatives of minority languages typical of the Taymyr peninsula, which is the northernmost part of the Eurasian landmass: Nenets; Nganasan (both Samoyedic); Dolgan (Turkic), and Evenk (Tungusic). Russian Germans, whose ancestors were expelled from the mainland also live in this territory, and some of them still speak German. In Potapovo, there is a school and a preschool where the local languages are taught. Materials for teaching the Enets language were prepared by the teacher, Rosljakova (2016). These included a book featuring Naïve-style paintings by a homegrown artist, who depicted the traditional life of the Enets people. These were the pictures that hung on the walls of both educational institutions before they were destroyed in a fire. In the preschool, which implements the language nest methodology, one older and experienced teacher (the master), one younger assistant teacher (the apprentice), and two specialists from Dudinka worked with a group of children who spoke the Enets language. The language input accompanied all activities the whole day. The senior teacher was very talkative and addressed the children all the time. An Enets tent had been erected in the room, with all necessary traditional objects, such as plates, tools and toys, to enable pupils to speak about everyday items without borrowings from Russian or translations into Russian. Code-switching usually happened when more contemporary subjects were discussed. Children not only learned many poems and words but were also able to understand phrases and give cohesive and creative answers to questions. In every lesson, children learned something new, and reproduced pivot phrases in new contexts. This worked well, and seemed to be promising for the future of Enets. Another interesting approach used on Taymyr are nomadic schools (also for preschool children) for all languages spoken in tundra areas. Teachers fly by helicopter to the remote camps where the nomadic peoples live, and teach their pupils intensively on site for 2 weeks. In the case I observed, children use their languages with their parents all the time and receive a short course in Russian when the teachers arrive. When necessary, the teachers accompany the families for some time on their travels. This is often a good experience for future teachers studying pedagogy at the college in Dudinka. This approach seems to be more humane than taking small children away from their parents and putting them into boarding schools, a practice that was common in Soviet times.

The Language Nest in Karelia Karelian is one of the regional languages of Russia and Finland and is used for official purposes in the Republic of Karelia, along with Veps and Finnish (all three are Finno-Ugric languages), Russian being the only state language. Karelian and Veps are endangered languages. Other areas with a Karelian-speaking population are

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the regions of Tver’, Murmansk and Novgorod, and the Leningrad Oblast’. Most Karelians live in Karelia, but fewer than a half of them speak the language. Elderly people use it in everyday life. Their children understand the language, but do not transmit it to the next generation. Young people, however, have adopted an activist approach, and have decided to re-identify (Aleksahina 1998) themselves and start using Karelian as much as possible (nuorikarjala.ru). The Karelian language in Karelia has two dialects: Livvi-Karelian and Karelian proper (there is no standard language form) and uses the Roman script (an exception for Russia, where legislation requires most languages to use the Cyrillic script only). Around 24 preschools offer Karelian language teaching for fewer than one thousand children, and some children learn the language in supplementary education. There are a lot of events organized in Karelian, but the level of proficiency remains low (Reshetina 2016). Some teachers are adopting new methods, but many still prefer to organize traditional lessons; it has been easier for them to stick with familiar methods, without aiming for second language acquisition. Thus, in 2012, in the Karelian village of Vedlozero, where more than a half of the population are ethnic Karelians, these activists created the Home of the Karelian Language (HKL) (karjalankielenkodi.net) for the purpose of interacting with families and society at large. The HKL organizes language courses for parents, help with finding appropriate words in Karelian, and materials for reading in Karelian. According to Antonova (2019), the elderly inhabitants speak Karelian, but younger parents do not, and they have no means of enabling their children to grow up with two languages, because they cannot speak it themselves, or think that only specialists are able to do so. The HKL has produced video and written materials to help young families use Karelian in communication with their newborns and babies (youtube. com/watch?v¼0NB3N_ia7jk&t¼23s, youtube.com/watch?v¼0NB3N_ia7jk Accessed 29 Dec 2018). In April 2017, a mixed-age group of preschool children called N’apukat (“The Little Ones”) was established in the HKL, to function in the Karelian language on an everyday basis. There are two educators, who are professional teachers who speak Karelian to mother tongue standard, and nine children aged 1.5–7 years. One helper prepares food, and one person coordinates. This is a private initiative. The inhabitants of the village donate their vegetables for school lunches, and the general atmosphere is very cozy. It is a language nest with full immersion: all adults speak the target language of Karelian and encourage children to use it as much as possible. The language of the children remains Russian; when they use it in conversations with adults, the adults repeat what was said in Karelian and answer questions in Karelian, to facilitate the children’s comprehension. Children feel safe in the comfortable, natural and interesting surroundings. The locals can always control what is happening, as the preschool is open for parents and those language speakers who would like to communicate with the children. Everyone prepares traditional Karelian dishes together and organizes festivities for the whole village. Thus, the language is a tool for life, not an exhibit in a museum. The needs of all children, the wishes of parents, and the potential of the site are considered. All help from the elderly is welcome. Karelian is becoming more and more popular (ibid.). In spring 2019, the

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language nest received financial support from the municipality for the first time, in the form of a salary for two educators. After reflecting on their experience, participants in this project said that it was no longer a strain to follow the rules. Four times a week, children are divided into two groups, where they carry out age-appropriate activities. Those who are 5–6 years old start to learn literacy, while the younger children are taking to their nap. Crafts are very useful; they allow children to repeat the same phrases many times over. Children like to mimic the intonation of animated films when the sound is switched off, they repeat the replicas with variations, numerous times, remember phrases, and change the general outline. When going out for a walk, children observe nature and learn to love the place in which they live. All the formulas for describing the weather and seasonal changes in the environment are repeated continuously. There are discussions about simple subjects, like a hill, a bridge, a rock, a leaf, a puddle, a dog, or firewood. Children learn to be attentive and use the Karelian language as an instrument for monitoring developments; phenomena that are easily expressed in Russian become something special, worth being described in Karelian too (ibid.). The results show that children already understand everyday routines in Karelian. For example, they can answer in the target language or use some Karelian words in Russian sentences. They never rejected the language, even at the very beginning. The timetable makes it clear what will come next, and children know what is going to be discussed. Children may not understand initially, but they imitate what the others do; they are then able to grasp the content and answer individually. Later, they help newcomers to understand what the teacher is saying. Children still speak to each other in Russian, although sometimes they employ Karelian words. Russian remains the stronger language, as it is spoken predominantly at home, in the media, and in society (ibid.). An expansion of this initiative would ensure a greater number of bilingual speakers of Karelian in the future.

The Case of Nivkh on Sakhalin There are four lesser-used languages on the island Sakhalin that are currently in need of revitalization: the Nivkh, Uilta, Evenki, and Nanai languages. The first is a Paleoasiatic isolate, and the others are Tungusic. Efforts to revitalize them have been undertaken with different sources of financial support (Baranova 2008; Mamontova 2017; Gruzdeva and Janhunen 2018). The main methods proposed were family nest (similar to the language nest method), language camps, immersion groups, and a master-apprentice program for adults (Hinton et al. 2018). Before and after the Second World War, there were Nivkhs who did not know any Russian. By the end of the twentieth century, there were fluent bilinguals. Nowadays, many of them still speak this language, although Russian has become their dominant language, the one they prefer in their everyday communication, as it is more modern and connects them with the outside world. Preschool education in Nivkh is formally provided in Nekrasovka (the official Russian name for the village of Pomorvo) and in Chir-Unvd, where most of the

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Nivkh population live. The village of Nekrasovka has an ethnic center and museum of Nivkh culture (kykhkykh.org). Members of the crafts circle produce traditional and innovative objects, and try to speak to each other in Nivkh. The preschool functions in the school building. The school also has an exhibition dedicated to the traditional way of life and the Nivkh history and culture. The preschool teacher tries to conduct lessons of the Nivkh language by using a traditional approach (learning by heart, repeating questions and answers, naming objects and actions). In revitalization projects under the guidance of Dr Ekaterina Gruzdeva from the University of Helsinki and local activists, attempts have been made to instruct Nivkh teachers on how to speak with children in their language, starting with a few words and gradually composing longer texts. Teachers have also needed to learn how to organize communication, use visual aids, and find resources to motivate children through play. Some Nivkhs in Chir-Unvd have prepared their own teaching materials based on the local realities. In Nivkh, all the parts of a fish have special names; different objects are counted in different quantities or by using different counting systems; verbs that express movement to the sea are different from verbs that express movement from the sea. The librarian has prepared Naïve-style paintings to teach the Nivkhs’ history and traditions, and young teachers have learned from the elderly. It may well be the case that Chir-Unvd, the place where the Nivkhs have historically celebrated traditional festivities in summer and where the majority of the population are Nivkhs who use the ethnic language in everyday conversations with each other, will someday develop into an ethnic tourist attraction. If that happens, the children may then be more interested in acquiring the language. Opportunities to organize immersion in the Nivkh language are hampered by the unwillingness of the local people to make efforts to speak in a language of which they have only a limited knowledge. For example, one of the participants reported that she is unable to teach boys as she does not know the language spoken by men (field notes, 2018). Most of the speakers have limited knowledge of Nivkh grammar, and do not know how to structure the language, or how to make it comprehensible to the students. If they start to speak in Nivkh, children do not understand them, so they switch to Russian to explain what they mean, and then continue to speak in Russian. To work in the preschool, staff need a formal qualification in pedagogy; linguistic competence in Nivkh is not evaluated. Actual speakers of the language are unable to enter the preschool as ethno-tutors because the admission of outsiders is prohibited (a special medical and police permit is required in order to work with children). There are insufficient materials for the teaching of Nivkh.

German as a Heritage Language German is the ethnic language of the Russian Germans, who originally spoke different dialects (Berend 2011). Although many families have been repatriated to Germany, they maintain connections to their relatives in Russia. There are still places where Germans live and have their early learning centers (i.e., Moscow, Altai, the Omsk Region, Novosibirsk, and Tomsk) and where different programs for German

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are implemented through Deutsch mit Schrumdi (Graf et al. 2015, available for children aged 4–7 in 160 preschool groups in Russia). Some educational materials come from Germany. Russian educators devise their own system of teaching for local preschools and primary schools (e.g., Judina 2008; Utehina 2012; Saharova 2016). In the Omsk Region, the German language variant of Plattdeutsch needs revitalization, as this local dialect is dying out, while renewed connections with Germany have enabled the import of non-indigenous variants of this language, predominantly Hochdeutsch. The Fairytale day care center in Azovo is attended by 274 children aged 2–8. All inscriptions are in two languages: German and Russian. In addition, teachers have had training in preschools in Germany. They try to address children in German as often as possible, and use educational poems, theatrical activities and songs. They also use symbols, pictures and gestures to explain meanings. The general atmosphere stimulates the use of the German language, but the local variant does not have sufficient support. Plattdeutsch functions in a limited number of situations, but the preschool enables children to become acquainted with the language of their ancestors. Revitalization projects must take the local realities and people’s superstitions into account. They require hard work with children and their parents every day. All efforts may be in vain if there is no continuity between preschool and school, educational institutions and communities, if the learning of languages is only supported by the activists and not the broad masses of the population, who are still ignorant of what bilingualism is, and what a treasure the indigenous languages represent.

Critical Issues and Topics In a country with a centralized language policy, it is difficult to support local linguistic initiatives. Many scholars are sure that most of the indigenous languages will die out soon, and nobody can reverse or at least stop this development. Other scholars would like to promote language immersion in early years, as this prepares the new generations of indigenous language speakers, who will be using modernized variants that meet the needs of tomorrow. Here, I will be looking at several problems arising from the current situation. Not all educators in Russia are aware of the terminology differences used in official documents, such as native / non-native / second / state / foreign language, Russian as a state for migrants, bilingual education, basic / advanced level of language proficiency, profile level of teaching Russian. These concepts interfere with or confuse matters, and do not give an adequate picture of the linguistic situation in Russia, its regiolects, or its language policy, or they conceal the fact that in multilingual Russia, some people use Russian as a lingua franca. Local languages still exist in rural areas and in the highly educated urban families. In the towns, especially the major cities, native speakers switch to Russian. In their experience, urban dwellers do not speak the ethnic language so often, and the

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language they do speak is a dialect different from the standard language used in the schoolbooks. They are ashamed of speaking their mother tongue, or disagree with the norms of the “literary” language. They refuse to transmit it to their children, even if both parents are minority language or dialect speakers. There are some languageconscious parents who speak to their children in their ethnic language or dialect, but this is usually the so-called kitchen language of everyday communication. This impedes the general use of minority languages (cf. Mustajoki et al. 2010). Another problem is the absence of a modernized lexis in the minority languages. Their status is not strong enough for them to develop notions for every new event immediately, and new terms are usually borrowed from English through Russian. For lexicographers, it takes time to introduce new words, and when they are introduced they remain in dictionaries on shelves, unknown to the masses. Although minority languages are taught in schools, there is rarely a difference in the methods of teaching L1 and L2. Teachers lack methods of teaching a minority language as a second language. At the same time, ethnic cultures are cherished, and considered to be valuable assets of the Russian Federation. They are often presented in Russian, with some exoticisms borrowed from the local languages, especially when the ethnic names of food, utensils, plants, animals, clothes, rituals, or musical instruments are mentioned. A large part of language teaching consists in learning poems and songs by heart. Concerts for parents and guests are a common practice for presenting the results of language learning. Culture is usually represented by folklore ensembles. Teachers believe that all wisdom is contained in folklore, even though the ideas are old and not true, and that modern authors are worse than their predecessors. Minority languages are often associated with traditional clothing, which makes them appear different from everyday life, somehow false and more like an experience in an ethnographic museum. Children then perceive the minority language as “the way old people speak,” or “something from out of a museum, outdated.” As a result, there is no motivation to study ethnic languages. Another frequent question asked in respect of early foreign language teaching is whether it can be developmentally appropriate for children to study something alien too early because the consciousness changes while adopting foreign values. This assertion originated with the famous nineteenth century educator Konstantin Ushinskij, and continues today, so that those involved in bilingual education have to repeatedly explain that children’s mental well-being is not impaired by their learning of foreign languages, and they can develop their knowledge of another culture as well as their Russian culture and identity. Another often-heard discussion concerns materials for teaching; whether they should be imported or adapted to the local needs and describe the way of life in Russia. The lotto game is still very popular for teaching languages (Protassova 2018). Unfortunately, despite the colossal experience of bilingual education in Russia (mostly transition from an ethnic language to the Russian language), the level of trust in and support of bilingualism is generally low. People are still wary of bilingual education and think that studying in a minority language impedes the acquisition of Russian (Ceytlin and Eliseeva 2011). At the same time, however, parents do not

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argue this way if English is introduced into the curriculum; in this case, authorities are afraid that children who learn English will not remain patriotic enough. When the new Federal Standards of Preschool Education came into effect, it was too difficult to create localized standards and programs corresponding to the federal ones. Teachers therefore simply took the ready Russian language programs and implemented them in Russian language teaching. As a consequence, young people are attracted by the prospects of living and working in the Russian-speaking regions of Russia, which have more opportunities for employment and entertainment. The trend to revitalize the minority and endangered languages is widely discussed in society and by stakeholders (Zamjatin et al. 2012). Parents and community activists usually support the idea that every child must grow up with his/her ethnic language, and many Russian speakers in the regions have the same opinion, yet they are hesitant to start speaking with children in a minority language.

Future Research Directions Measures should be taken to show how native minority languages could be adopted to local circumstances and used in everyday activities. It is important to carry out action research with parents of potentially bilingual children, to persuade them what the benefits of bilingualism are, and that it is not a question of the national language or Russian but both of them together (cf. Antonova et al. 2016). Scholars must find a way of explaining the structure of languages to people, of getting them to understand how a language is learned and how a culture is acquired. Without an adequate description of languages, teaching remains haphazard and not grounded. There has been almost no research into child language development for most of the indigenous languages of Russia. Such psycholinguistic research could contribute to an understanding of the deficits in L1 and L2 acquisition. Teachers today could use normalization and modernization to create corpora of spoken language (child-directed speech), videos with language use in different everyday situations, play with toys accompanied by natural speech, oral book readings from the Internet – all of these materials bring a language closer to its potential speakers, as demonstrated in the Museum of Nature and Man in KhantyMansiysk.

Conclusions In a number of areas of the Russian Federation, teachers, policymakers and parents feel that their languages are endangered. They want to improve the knowledge of minority languages, but believe that Russian is more developed, prestigious, and useful than the minority languages (Alpatov 2014; Omarov 2018; Khilkhanova 2020). There is a discrepancy between families’ attitudes and official documents. Discussions with and surveys of parents in different regions show that their interests

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concern the future of their children’s multilingualism, because it is a sort of cultural capital that will support their future success (Yusupov 2016; Khaknazarov 2017; Gusev and Shaaly 2020). There are very few publications on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, and earlier consequences of the shift to Russian during Soviet times warn families that if one language is acquired completely, the other will be lost. Thus, the minority language is neglected as they would rather not forget Russian. They also want to rear competent speakers of English, and perhaps other international or important languages as well. The ethnic language may remain in some tag words or songs, and knowledge of folklore may be preserved in translations into Russian. This is not enough for the language’s survival, however, or to reverse the language shift, or contribute to an updating of the language. An adequate language teaching policy could solve some of the problems and manage a system of language teaching that would combine the benefits of multilingualism while minimizing the risks of not learning a language completely or being an incompetent speaker. As a European state, Russia has a long tradition of teaching foreign languages to preschool children, and materials for teaching English prevail. It is easier to invest in learning a foreign language than in learning an indigenous language. Nevertheless, the experience of the Russian Federation, with all its exotic types of linguistic combinations from hundreds of years of coexistence of typologically different languages, is a massive continuum of data on diverse types of language acquisition in various settings. Much needs to be done to research this treasure, and to make the society conscious of the horizons of bilingualism (like in Byers-Heinlein and Lew-Williams 2013). Successful bilingualism, the maintenance of indigenous languages, and the acquisition of minority and foreign languages have become popular in recent years. Hence, young prosperous professionals may wish to create new forms of language learning and teaching for their children.

Cross-References ▶ Early Years Education and the Reversal of Language Shift ▶ Heritage Language Early Years’ Immersion: Irish-Medium Preschools in Ireland ▶ Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chilex ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sociolinguistic Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early Childhood Education in Malta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingualism in Policy Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Development of Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research on Language Use in ECE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Agency in Early Years Bilingual Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingual Education Strategies in Early Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multilingual Classrooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Promoting a Literacy-Rich Environment and Family Literacy Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research into the Nature of Bilingual Education in the Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Creation of Story-Apps and Animated Features in Maltese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Shift in Pedagogy and Implications for Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptualizing Bilingualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multilingual Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Professional Development of Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agency in ECE Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C. L. Mifsud (*) Centre for Literacy, University of Malta, Msida, Malta e-mail: [email protected] L. A. Vella Language Policy in Education Unit, The National Literacy Agency, Hamrun, Malta e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_29

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Abstract

This chapter presents the historical and social ramifications of early childhood education (ECE) in Malta and their impact on early language education (ages 0 to 5). The sociolinguistic situation in Malta is one of plurilingual repertoires with languages at different points on the bilingual continuum. In countries like Malta, it is the whole school population that receives some form of bilingual education in Maltese and English. Bilingualism is at the level of social organization and beyond the individual or nuclear family. The languages of schooling are available in the wider out-of-school environment and learners are in contact with both languages from a very young age. Due to the importance of bilingual education within the Maltese education system, the chapter pays particular attention to issues and challenges surrounding early language education in both Maltese and English. Official policy documents published over the years which relate to early language education in Malta are referred to and compared. The findings from a number of recent studies and their implications for early language education are presented. These studies show how the two official languages Maltese and English are introduced simultaneously early on in kindergarten classes. The strategies adopted by educators are influenced by their ideologies, the extent of teacher agency and the parental and school management expectations involved. The impact on early language education brought about by multilingual classrooms is elaborated upon. The chapter ends by making a case for future research to consolidate further early language education in a context characterized by societal bilingualism. Keywords

Bilingualism · Language education policy · Language ideologies · Early bilingual education · Teacher education · Multilingualism

Introduction In this chapter, the major developments in policy and research in early language education in Malta are outlined. First, a sociolinguistic description of language use in Malta is presented. Then the ways in which early childhood education (ECE) has developed in the last decades are described. References to early language education in major policy documents are made. Following this, the major theoretical concepts that guide early language education policy documentation in Malta are outlined by discussing the role of language ideologies in the conceptualization of bilingual education. Major studies carried out in the local context on language use in ECE, ranging from bilingualism and emergent biliteracy to educators’ beliefs on multilingualism in classrooms are discussed. A presentation of ongoing recent projects follows. Finally, the main challenges and critical issues that are present in the local context are analyzed, and suggestions for future research are elucidated. To conclude, the chapter illustrates how in an ever-changing linguistic landscape of our

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diverse educational contexts, quality early language education can only be successful if children, teachers, and parents exercise their agency, working together toward the same goal.

The Sociolinguistic Situation The Republic of Malta is a small island state located 57 miles south of Sicily, and approximately 200 miles north of Libya and Tunisia in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with an approximate area of 316 km. Only the three largest islands – Malta, Gozo, and Comino – are inhabited. Malta is the largest island, and remains the cultural, commercial, and administrative center. The population at the end of 2014 was of 429,344 (214,735 males and 214,609 females). Around 6.4% of the population is comprised of foreigners (National Statistics Office 2011). Maltese is a Semitic language which employs a Latin-based script. It is the only Semitic language in Europe with the status of a state language (Stolz 2011). The language originated from Siculo-Arabic and was brought from Sicily to Malta in the eleventh century. Malta’s strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea has resulted in a long history of colonization, where various groups fought for power over the island for hundreds of years. As a result, Malta’s history has been one involving a series of dominations: Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, Castilians, and the Order of the Knights of St. John, all of which had some form of influence on the development of language/s on the island. The original vocabulary of the language was Siculo-Arabic and it has incorporated borrowings from Romance (Italian and French) and Germanic (English) sources. The orthographic norm of standard Maltese was established in 1924. The language continues to evolve by introducing loan words from English. The presence of the English language can be traced to the British rule which stretched from 1800 to 1964 when Malta gained independence. In 1934, Maltese was declared a national language while English became an official language alongside Maltese, as well as the language of education, administration and civil service. Malta became a member of the European Union in 2004 and Maltese was made an official language of the European Union. The linguistic situation in Malta is characterized by societal bilingualism (Sebba 2010) and there is a strong political and societal desire to maintain balanced bilingualism. Bilingualism manifests itself to varying degrees. As a result, an accurate representation of the domains in which Maltese and English are used is a complex endeavor as both are present in most contexts, and code-switching from Maltese to English and vice versa, is an ubiquitous practice (Vella 2013). Furthermore, the steep increase in migration has seen a proliferation of other languages in the sociolinguistic landscape. The largest groups of non-Maltese living in Malta came from the United Kingdom, Somalia, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, Eritrea, Russia, and Serbia. In recent years, there has been an increase in migrants from Syria and also from countries in West Africa (Council of Europe 2015; UNHCR Asylum trends 2013, published on March 26, 2014).

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Although Maltese is the preferred language in the home setting for the majority of the population (Vella 2018), family language backgrounds are diverse. At the level of adult–child interactions, it is unlikely for young Maltese children to receive strictly monolingual input (Vella 2013). Evidence shows that Maltese-speaking adults interacting with young children typically engage in lexical mixing, inserting English nominal forms in Maltese syntactic frames (Gatt et al. 2016). For instance, Gatt et al. (2016) describe how Maltese child-directed speech fulfills the role of functional borrowing; a form of core borrowing (Myers-Scotton 2006) specific to adult-to-child language use. They argue, for example, that Maltese adults often use the English word book when speaking to young children in Maltese, but it would be very unusual for the same word to be used in adult Maltese conversations, since the Maltese equivalent ktieb of Semitic origin would be preferred. This is further elaborated in Gatt (2017) where most of her female participants reported to use Maltese sentence frames embedding English lexical items with their children. Gatt et al. (2016) explain this in terms of parents’ efforts to introduce the second language with their children and selective use of equivalents in English are used in response to environmental demands. They conclude, however, that in some instances, fragmented exposure to English appeared unable to support the children’s bilingual development beyond the lexical domain. Caruana (2007, p. 188) argues that an understanding of the linguistic situation in Malta relies “heavily on the heritage of the historical and political permutations of the past.” Within the local context, language use is linked to ideologies of social class, geography, and levels of education. For instance, Bonnici (2010) and Vella (2018) argue that at times Maltese nationals who speak English are linked to snobbery, while those who find difficulty in expressing themselves in English are associated with lower socioeconomic groups and with low levels of education. Language use and ideologies have also been linked to geographical areas. Although the Maltese islands are small in size, (total area of 246 km2) differences in language use by geographic area can be traced. Traditionally, the Northern Harbour areas of Malta, particularly the Eastern Coast (specifically Sliema) have been considered as the locus of English-speaking individuals in Malta. In such situations, Maltese individuals choose to speak English at home and in their social interactions. This area is particularly contrasted with the western, the Southern Harbour, and the South-Eastern areas which are perceived to be more Maltese dominant.

Early Childhood Education in Malta Education in Malta is offered by three different providers: the state, the church, and the independent sector. Approximately, 60% of students attend state schools, 30% church schools, and 10% independent schools (Eurydice 2015). Traditionally, school type has been closely associated with language use. Overall, independent schools are known to be largely English-speaking, while in state schools, Maltese is more prevalent (Vella 2018). The situation in church schools is considered to be more

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varied (Camilleri Grima 2013) with studies showing that children come from both Maltese and English-speaking backgrounds (Vella 2018). Early childhood education in Malta caters for children aged up to 7 years. Early childhood education was officially acknowledged as a cycle in its own right, distinct from the junior years (ages 8–10) and the secondary years (ages 11–16) in the National Curriculum Framework for Malta (Ministeru tal-Edukazzjoni 2011). Children who are under 3 years of age attend childcare centers, whereas those between 3 and 5 years of age attend kindergarten centers spread over 2 years (kindergarten classes 1 and 2), which are usually housed in a primary school. Kindergarten education provision is currently available within all state primary schools (which is free), and most of the independent and church schools (which are fee-paying). Almost 100% of children attend kindergarten education. The centers are regulated by the Directorate for Quality Standards in Education (DQSE) of the Ministry for Education and Employment. Historically, ECE settings were set up in response to economic demands and an increase in women’s participation in the workforce (Gerada 2002). In the period from 1839 to 1944, licenses were given to women to run private infant schools, based on their perceived moral character and virtue rather than qualifications (Sollars 2018). Free state provision for 4-year-olds has been available since 1975, and for 3-year-olds since 1988. Throughout the years, changes in demography, the increase of females in employment, plus the reduction in the availability of grandparents as they increasingly form part of the workforce, led to the setting up of childcare facilities. Free childcare support was established in 2014. Parents could send their children to childcare centers, provided they were in employment or full-time study. The required qualification for kindergarten educators is a two-year diploma, according to the Malta Education Act (2016). The Malta College of Arts Science and Technology and a number of private entities offer Diplomas in ECE. The University of Malta introduced an undergraduate degree in ECE in 2009. However, when university students obtain their degree in education with a focus on the early years, most of them are offered teaching positions in the primary sector (Baldacchino 2018).

Bilingualism in Policy Documents The state of current early language education in Malta has to be interpreted within the broader language in education provision across the different cycles. This section traces the ways in which bilingual education in Malta has been operationalized and defined in major policy documents. These policy documents (except for The Language Policy for the Early Years, 2016) target students of all ages. However, as we shall discuss, they have impacted the ways in which early language education has evolved and been conceptualized throughout the years. Up until the late 1990s, no official guidelines were issued to preschool educators for the promotion of languages in the local context. Bilingualism in education was referred to for the first time in The National Minimum Curriculum (Ministry of Education 1999). This policy document was prescriptive in its recommendations and

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advocated for a model of bilingual education based on the strict separation of languages in the primary years. There were no specific recommendations for language development in ECE settings. The document presents code-switching from Maltese to English and vice versa as a last resort to dealing with pedagogical difficulties: Only in those cases where this poses great pedagogical problems, does the National Minimum Curriculum accept code switching as a means of communication (Ministry of Education 1999, p. 53).

The philosophy guiding The National Curriculum Framework (2011) was a radical revision of the recommendations set in the previous policy document. It was innovative as it moved away from a prescriptive curriculum toward a framework based on learning outcomes which are conducive to lifelong learning. It recommended a more cross-curricular, thematic approach that reflects real-life situations and encourages a transfer of skills from one learning area to another. In addition, the document recognized the fact that language is a key tool to facilitate communication, which in turn helps cognitive and social development. It maintained that the overall objectives of language development in the early years (ages 0–7) should enable children to increase their awareness of the functions and purposes of language skills which will make them a versatile tool for any member in a society. The policy recommended that children are to be supported to gain flexibility and control over language through correct and appropriate choice of words, by extending their vocabulary, by learning how to assert themselves. With regard to bilingual development, the document recommends that the child’s first language is respected and promoted, and at the same time, the child is exposed to the second language. The assumption in this document is that the mother tongue is Maltese and the second language is English. Children are to be exposed to the two languages “in meaningful ways which would serve to promote learning and understanding of the world which goes beyond language learning itself” (Ministeru tal-Edukazzjoni 2011, p. 49). Bilingualism in education was further elaborated in The National Literacy Strategy for All in Malta and Gozo (Ministry for Education and Employment 2014b). The strategy outlines concrete measures to ensure that all stakeholders develop literacy skills to participate fully in society. With regard to the development of literacy with young children, it specifically recommends an early start for the learning of Maltese and English. The Strategy recommends that language immersion is to be adopted in early childhood education through the following language learning strategies: Language Exposure where students are immersed in the target language, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) where the second language is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of nonlanguage content, and Language Tandems where different staff use different languages. This is usually based on the ‘one person-one language’ principle (Ministry for Education and Employment 2014b, p. 29).

Learners are to be provided with specific learning opportunities to ensure proficiency in both languages. The notion of bilingual education is further elaborated with a focus on emergent biliteracy skills, termed as “dual literacy” (Ministry for Education

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and Employment 2014b, p. 29) in early childhood education as one of the most important first steps in a child’s educational experience. In 2014, The Language Policy in Education Committee was set up by the Ministry for Education and Employment, with the primary aim of drawing up recommendations for language policy in education for the early, junior, and secondary school years. In line with efforts to provide recommendations for all stakeholders on language education, the Language Policy Unit of the Council of Europe was invited to carry out an analysis of the language education policies in Malta. Two reports were published, the Country Report for Malta (Ministry for Education and Employment 2014a), which outlines the language education provision in Malta at that time, and the Language Education Policy Profile for Malta (Council of Europe 2015), which provides recommendations for the provision of language. The Language Policy for the Early Years (Ministry for Education and Employment 2016a) presents recommendations for the promotion of bilingualism with children in the early years (ages 0–7). The recommendations were drafted based on discussions with major stakeholders, the recommendations in the Language Education Policy Profile, classroom observations, and interviews with educators. The policy outlines the models of bilingual education that can be adopted by educators, ranging from those characterized by the separation of languages to those that include some form of flexible use of languages, described as “language mediation” strategies. It was the first attempt to legitimize the switching from one language to another for pedagogical purposes by educators. Early years educators can choose how to promote Maltese and English, provided that all children are able to develop their bilingual competence. The policy moves from a more centralized approach that can be traced in previous policies where a model of bilingual education was prescribed, to an approach which empowers teachers to choose the strategies to promote bilingual education based on learner needs and learner characteristics. It also promotes teacher agency as educators are encouraged to make informed decisions about how to implement specific policies and strategies like “language mediation” in their classrooms (Ministry for Education and Employment 2016a, p. 13). The decisions regarding which languages are to be used as the medium of instruction and the strategies to be adopted rests with the preschool senior management team and the class teachers. Educators and parents are encouraged to work together to ensure that children develop their linguistic competences (▶ Chap. 21, “Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts,” by H. Ragnarsdottir, this volume). More recently the consultation document, The National Policy of the Teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language within the Framework of Bilingualism and Plurilingualism (Ministry for Education and Employment 2019) outlined the recommendations to strengthen migrant children’s bilingual development. The policy emphasizes the need for balanced bilingualism to be strengthened in all schools (p. 7). At the same time, it acknowledges that Malta is becoming a plurilingual country and that “ways should be found for students to still use their native language if this is not taught as a subject” (p. 8). However, there is no mention as to what schools can do to maintain home languages or which resources can be allotted to this

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scope. The consultation document states that all children aged 0–5 should be given the opportunity to develop their competencies in Maltese regardless of whether it is the child’s first, second, or third language. Children who do not reach the expected level in Maltese to continue the Learning Outcomes Framework for the Teaching of Maltese (as a native language) will follow the Learning Outcomes Framework for the Teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language at the age of 8.

Main Theoretical Concepts Early childhood education in Malta is characterized by bilingualism as both Maltese and English are indispensable for functioning fully in Maltese society. The development of early language education in Malta can be interpreted in the light of García’s (2009) model of bilingual education. García (2009) draws a distinction between monoglossic and heteroglossic perspectives in bilingual education. A bilingual program informed by monoglossic language ideologies rests on the assumption that monolingualism is the norm and that a bilingual is two monolinguals in one (Grosjean 1989). The basic philosophy of such programs is the acquisition of two or more languages leading to the ultimate learning goal which is balanced bilingualism. This refers to a type of bilingualism where the speaker is equally fluent in the two languages across various contexts (Baker 2011). Historically, bilingual education was informed by monoglossic language ideologies with its emphasis on language separation strategies and the promotion of balanced bilingualism. In light of the ever-changing linguistic landscape, bilingualism in early language education has evolved to embrace more heteroglossic ideologies, which encompasses flexibility in the use of languages. Models of bilingual education can take on two forms: additive or subtractive. In a subtractive model, students’ home languages are used temporarily with the ultimate goal of creating monolingual speakers of the dominant language of society. Additive bilingual education advocates the nurturing of bilinguals who develop equal competencies in both languages of instruction (Flores and Baetens Baerdsmore 2015). Flores and Baetens Baerdsmore (2015) argue that additive bilingual education programs may serve a contradictory role in society. Such programs advocate the bilingual development of learners, but at the same time their conceptualization of bilingualism as double monolingualism erases the fluid language practices of learners who do not compartmentalize their language practices into neat discrete languages (García 2009). García (2009) challenges the notion of balanced bilingualism and monoglossic perspectives by arguing for a more heteroglossic perspective which acknowledges multilingual speakers’ fluid language practices. She draws on Williams’ (2002) notion of translanguaging to refer to the “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds.” Referring to the context in which they inhabit beyond the classroom García, Flores and Chu (2011, p. 147) argue that translanguaging is not only a way to “scaffold instruction, to make sense of learning and language; rather, translanguaging is part of the metadiscursive regime that students in the twenty-first century must perform.”

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Since its inception, efforts to promote bilingualism in ECE in Malta have been informed by an additive bilingualism philosophy. The underlying definition in documents like the National Minimum Curriculum (1999) echoes Bloomfield’s (1985, p. 56), definition of bilingualism as “a native-like control of two languages,” where the bilingual attains such a highly developed proficiency in the second language that it becomes indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. However, García et al. (2011) argue that bilingual competence in the two languages is rarely balanced and this is influenced by the speaker’s opportunities to use the two languages in all domains of life. A closer look at the recommendations in the National Minimum Curriculum (1999) and the National Curriculum Framework (2011) reveals that bilingual education takes the form of dual-language immersion which exposes young children to two languages in early years’ settings. The discourse surrounding the language learning goals refers to the acquisition of the first and second languages in a balanced way, specifically referring to “the Mother tongue and a second language (Maltese and English)” (Ministeru tal-Edukazzjoni 2011, p. 13). While additive bilingualism is promoted, teachers are given little guidance on how to manage flexible language practices that are present in schools and in wider society. Such practices were specifically discouraged by the National Minimum Curriculum (1999). More recently, The Language Policy for the Early Years (Ministry for Education and Employment 2016a) promotes a more heterogeneous model of bilingual education. The policy promotes the notion of educator agency, where educators use their professional and experiential knowledge to choose from an array of strategies that can promote child language development. Biesta, Priestley, and Robinson’s (2015) model posits teacher agency within an ecological perspective and explains how it is influenced by the teachers’ past experiences, including personal and professional biographies. The policy document defines “language mediation” as a form of flexible bilingual strategy where educators can switch from Maltese and/or English to cater for learner needs and to scaffold instruction in preschools. One should note that the discourse surrounding the notion of “language mediation” reveals the central concept of “help” via language. It is a scaffolding strategy (Vygotsky 1978) for those children who need additional support in the preschool language classroom. The use of heterogeneous models does not automatically mean the abandonment of separation strategies. The policy document also outlines strategies by means of which educators can adopt the separation of languages. The underlying philosophy in all of the aforementioned policy documents is to provide all children with the opportunity to develop bilingualism in Maltese and English. In doing so, they advocate a type of subtractive bilingualism for those children whose first language is neither Maltese nor English. Flores and Baetens Baerdsmore (2015) argue that ignoring immigrant languages points to larger societal inequalities that also need to be addressed. As a result, the heterogeneous ideologies identified above are likely to benefit speakers of Maltese and/or English. The basic assumption in these policy documents is that children’s first and second languages are Maltese and English.

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While acknowledging diversity as an important feature in today’s schools in the National Curriculum Framework, and the importance of positive attitudes to all languages in the Language Policy for the Early Years, there is no reference to the maintenance of first languages in schools. This responsibility lies on parents as they are encouraged to use their first language in the Language Policy for the Early Years. The 2019 document recognizes the need for this, but at the same time does not offer any recommendations as to how this can take place in practice. This can be interpreted in light of the country’s lack of teachers who can teach immigrant first languages. However, Beatriz Aris (2015) argues that many effective bilingual and multilingual programs around the world feature strong parental involvement – as classroom volunteers, on parent and community advisory boards, and in some cases in parental administrative control over the schools. Research in other contexts reveals ways in which parents are used as resources to support and promote first languages in preschools such as in Schwartz (2013) and Schwartz and Verschik (2013). Finally, these policy documents and educators’ practices are all influenced by ideologies held in wider society. Woolard (1998, p. 235) defined language ideology as “a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk” (p. 235). Within the local context, popular and official discourse on language use revolves around language ideologies that are steeped in the postcolonial mindset where the monolingual norm is valued. Maltese and English are at times, placed as competing entities, which should be kept separate (Vella 2018). The use of Maltese and English exists on a societal level in Malta, that is at the level of social organization, rather than solely within particular individuals or families. Therefore, both languages coexist in all domains. All children have access to Maltese and English to varying degrees outside of their preschools (Gatt 2017). Therefore, fluid language practices occur not only in classrooms, but in their everyday interactions. Such practices can also lead to varying attitudes toward the role of code-switching and appropriateness of such practice, as elaborated in Vella (2013, 2018). Such considerations may affect the way educators perceive heterogeneous strategies in bilingual education, as opposed to strategies where languages are kept separate. Mifsud and Vella (2018a, b) discuss how ECE educators make reference to the use of code-switching in society, which they do not approve of, when they refer to their own language mediation strategies in class. As a result, they were at times reluctant to admit that they switch from one language to the other with young children. This shows that although recent policy documents promote different models or strategies of bilingual education, depending on learners’ needs, educators must be offered training and resources on how to translate these into practice.

Major Contributions This section provides an overview of informal initiatives to foster the acquisition of languages at the preschool level that go beyond activities organized by educators in ECE settings. The initiatives discussed in this section exemplify a variety of

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programs developed and implemented by diverse actors at all levels of language planning. The initiatives discussed here are not intended to be exhaustive but rather to give a snapshot of early childhood language education in Malta. Studies on early language education are also outlined and contrasted. The studies show that despite being small in size, Malta’s linguistic landscape is complex, with educators modeling their notions of bilingual education to fit their beliefs, preschool policies, individual learner needs, and macro-language ideologies presented above.

The Development of Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Early Years The general targets for children attending kindergarten education are outlined in the Learning Outcomes Framework (Ministry for Education and Employment 2016b). The Learning Outcomes Framework was designed for educators and learners to exercise autonomy in their teaching and learning, away from centrally-imposed knowledge-centric syllabi. In this way, educators are given the opportunity to develop programs that fulfill the framework of knowledge, attitudes, and skillsbased outcomes to cater for their student population. The ECE curriculum focuses on the children’s holistic development rather than on solely cognitive development and literacy and numeracy objectives. It stands in contrast with the previous notions of ECE based on prescriptive frameworks which account for a school-readiness approach. In terms of language development, one of the main desired outcomes of the Learning Outcomes Framework for the early years is that children become effective communicators in their first and second languages. The language development outcomes are listed as “can do” statements and are spread across four levels (Levels 1–4) encompassing ages 0–5. For Level 1 and 2 (ages 0–3), there is a difference in the expectations in learners’ first language and those for the second language. For instance, children are expected to recite nursery rhymes, listen to and understand stories, and hold simple conversations in their L1 and only “sometimes in L2” and “beginning to understand simple stories in L2.” However, for Levels 3 and 4 (ages 4–5), this sequential approach is abandoned as there is no distinction between the outcomes for the first and second languages for instance in the following taken from Levels 3 and 4: Level 3: I can communicate independently and initiate a conversation verbally in L1 and L2. I listen attentively and respond appropriately in L1 and L2. Level 4: I can use Maltese to achieve my communicative goals. I can use English to achieve my communicative goals. I recite a selection of songs, rhymes and stories in Maltese. I recite a selection of songs, rhymes and stories in English.

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Research on Language Use in ECE Traditionally, school type has been closely associated with language use. Overall, independent and church schools, especially single-sex girls’ schools and schools in the Northern Harbour region, are known to be largely English-speaking, while in state schools, both teachers and pupils have been found to employ extensive EnglishMaltese codeswitching in the classroom (Camilleri 1995). In an exploratory study on language use in early childhood education, Vella, Mifsud, and Muscat (2018) reported the findings from a mixed-methods study to investigate the strategies adopted by educators and how these might vary according to school type. The quantitative study was based on a survey with 440 ECE educators teaching in Kinder 1 and Kinder 2 classrooms (ages 3–4 years). The educators were asked to report their language use and activities used to promote Maltese and English. In general, the classrooms can be described as bilingual to varying degrees. The data reveal that the two languages are introduced simultaneously early on. In terms of differences between the state and church schools’ sectors, Maltese is predominantly used in state schools, while in church schools English dominates. When asked about the activities which promote Maltese and/or English, the majority of educators in both sectors stated that they organized activities in Maltese and in English during speaking and listening skills activities. The most notable differences between the two sectors lay in the emergent reading and writing skills, with state schools favoring the use of Maltese and church schools using English. This can also be seen in the introduction of the alphabet, where educators introduce the Maltese alphabet in state schools and the English one in church schools. Despite following the Learning Outcomes Framework, which encourages educators to move away from a curriculum based on the teaching of the alphabet and number system in kindergarten, it is worth noting that only 9% of educators do not organize any activities related to the alphabet. Furthermore, in all schools, Maltese is mostly used in classrooms during cooking, role play, and free play activities. English is predominantly used during activities that involve technology. The majority of educators (73%) use English only when they organize activities related to numeracy. This is guided by the rationale that in later years, Mathematics textbooks are in English. Therefore, educators feel that they need to expose learners to terminology in English. Most educators adopt a flexible model of bilingual education as 70.5% feel that they need to switch from one language to the other to facilitate comprehension. The data from the quantitative study were corroborated by those from the qualitative one, where Vella et al. (2018) discuss the findings from five case studies. The case studies illustrate ways in which educators promote Maltese and English using different strategies, ranging from strict separation in the independent school, to a hybrid model of both separation and flexibility in the state schools and to one that is mainly characterized by flexibility in the church school. The data provide insight into the complex multilingual reality of Maltese classrooms and bring to the forefront the challenges faced by these educators. Most challenges relate to the tensions that arise when schools impose policies of language separation and educators feel the need to engage in flexible language practices to cater for all linguistic needs. The authors

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conclude that the “interplay between the local context, the school’s language policies and the needs of each student necessitates educators to be agents in their choice of bilingual pedagogy and teaching strategies” (Vella et al. 2018, p. 78). The study does not specifically address the needs of children whose first languages are neither Maltese nor English. However, it also provides insight into the reality these children face when educators are not aware of their needs or of inclusive strategies based on language use. The observation data revealed that in most of the case studies, educators were not aware of the children’s first languages and they assumed that they were competent in English. Moreover, the authors point out that some children were silent throughout the observed sessions as their cultural heritage and first languages were not acknowledged.

Teacher Agency in Early Years Bilingual Education The extent of teacher agency in Maltese preschools was explored by Mifsud and Vella (2018a). Through classroom observations and interviews they illustrate ways in which the social background of children and teachers’ language beliefs, the sociolinguistic context (national and local), as well as the school language policies influenced the two teacher participants’ agentive roles. The educators, Ms. Carla and Ms. Sabrina echoed ideologies of social language use in the way they describe groupings of the children in their classes, and their parents and their language use (based on the language attitudes and ideologies discussed in the previous sections). They attributed children’s low levels of proficiency in English to the low levels of education of the parents. The teachers believed that English was the language which promoted social mobility and educational attainment. More specifically, Ms. Carla, who worked in a church school, with English as the main language of teacher–child interactions, adopted a more flexible approach. Ms. Carla did not dismiss the children’s use of Maltese. Her classroom was a dynamic bilingual environment where switching between Maltese and English was a legitimate practice. Ms. Sabrina, working in a state school where the main language of teacher–child communication was Maltese, felt constrained by the school’s imposition of a language separation policy. Ms. Sabrina continually reminded the children that they had to use Maltese, even while working in groups. The authors contextualize these differences in agentive decisions in light of the emphasis on language separation placed by the senior management team, in Ms. Sabrina’s case, and also of teachers’ beliefs of the aims of preschool education. Ms. Carla focused mainly on children’s socialization and affective needs, while Ms. Sabrina emphasized on their academic achievement. Also, these decisions have to be interpreted within the demographic characteristics of the classroom. In Ms. Carla’s classroom, English was the main medium of instruction, a language of prestige in the local context. This provided her with opportunities to switch from English to Maltese, as this flexibility was by no means threatening the status of English. Ms. Sabrina promoted Maltese in a context where English was widely spoken and highly esteemed. She described how the children preferred to use English, regardless of their competence in the language.

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Therefore, in promoting, and perhaps, safeguarding the Maltese language in a “protected space” (Hickey et al. 2014, p. 230), she might have felt less empowered to code-switch from Maltese to English. In light of these constraints and possibilities, the authors conclude that teacher agency in early childhood education can be achieved through professional development, where educators are given the necessary tools to grapple more realistically with the contradictions they face between their own ideologies and those imposed by the macro-context around them.

Bilingual Education Strategies in Early Language Education Mifsud and Vella (2018b) provide further insight into how early childhood educators conceptualize models of bilingual education in local kindergarten classrooms. They present findings from two case studies which illustrate ways in which contradictions between educators’ beliefs and prevailing ideologies on language use create tensions. The classroom observations illustrate ways in which teachers’ beliefs on bilingual education are translated into practice. Despite adopting different models, based on the level of separation and flexibility, similarities were also traced in the educators’ strategies to mediate language learning, such as use of gestures, the importance of repetition and establishing a clear classroom routine. The authors conclude that the findings call for a “need for a re-examination of the model of bilingual education, traditionally based on language separation” (p. 93). These ideologies are not only present in kindergartens but even in child-care centers which cater for children aged 4 months to 3 years. Baldacchino (2018) reports how educators in her study believe that young children benefit from bilingual education. She explores ways in which language ideologies are linked to geographical areas in Malta. She observed instances in a childcare center in the central part of the island, where Maltese was completely absent from interactions with children. Children were offered books in English, while Maltese was never used in any of the communication at the center. In the center which was situated in the southern part of the island, both Maltese and English were present and there the educators’ employed strategies related to flexible bilingualism. Moreover, her interview data with parents show mixed views about language use with children. Parents from the south of Malta were more inclined to use Maltese, although they try to teach their children some English words, especially by using digital technologies. Those living in central parts tend to prefer to use English with their children. Baldacchino concludes that Maltese-speaking parents in her study are more open to and ready to teach their children the English language, whereas the English-speaking parents do not really see the value of the Maltese language, except for school and examinations later on in life. They also thought that Maltese was a difficult language to learn. The author concludes that language use in ECE settings is affected by the role and status of the two languages in wider society, which in turn is influenced by a British postcolonial mind-set. Thus, postcolonialism impacts pedagogy and practice in ECE settings, including such issues as the choice of the language of instruction and language of communication, the status of the local language or dialect, and the use of culturally appropriate teaching material.

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Multilingual Classrooms Europe is becoming increasingly multilingual, Malta being no exception with a huge influx of foreign workers and migrants in recent years. An estimated increase of 2.8% in the population was recorded in Malta between 2014 and 2017 (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice 2019). In February 2020, there were 578 children (circa 8.2% of the whole state kindergarten student population) (Information obtained from School Information System (SIS) for Maltese state schools) from third countries in Maltese state kindergarten classes. This brings many benefits and also many challenges, both curricular and organizational to schools and classrooms. Through the participation of the Centre for Literacy of the University of Malta in the European Literacy Network COST Action IS1401, the Multilingual Classrooms Questionnaire (MCQ) (Mifsud and Petrova 2017a) was created for the Multilingual Classrooms Project. Through this questionnaire, the authors sought to obtain information about Maltese teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors with regard to multilingualism, rated on a six-point Likert scale. The questionnaire also delved into the strategies adopted by educators with migrant learners. The data for the Maltese study were collected between April and May 2017. Fifty-seven ECE educators completed the questionnaire. When asked for strategies adopted, the most common strategy reported was codeswitching, followed by translation from Maltese to English and vice versa. However, these are mainly used in cases when both Maltese and English were being used in the classroom. In some of the classes, other learners acted as language mediators and translated to peers. Other strategies such as the use of visual materials and body language were reported to be used. Some of the teachers had specific resources in the classroom for teaching language/s to pupils who do not speak the language of the classroom. These classroom resources consisted mostly of online resources, books, videos, puppets, and materials designed by the teacher. The teachers reported positive views about multilingualism. They supported the idea that children should be taught in two or more languages and that they should be encouraged to learn different languages. However, they recognized that teaching multilingual children is more challenging than teaching monolingual children. Some of the challenges of multilingual classrooms perceived by teachers were the need to address the expectations of parents and society, and the need for greater cooperation and coordination among teaching personnel. Some of the barriers perceived by the teachers in the educational adjustment of migrant children were insufficient teacher training on multilingual and multicultural issues, inadequate multilingual programs of study, and schools with limited personnel. The teachers identified parental involvement in school activities and support for the children’s first language inside and outside the classroom as contributing most to the educational adjustments of migrant children. The majority of teachers agreed about the importance of the first language of the children for their home culture. Teachers recognized that the use of first language in the classroom allows children to base their learning of the targeted language on the conceptual knowledge they already possess in their first language. They also agree

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that the school should offer activities aimed at raising awareness about the first language and culture of the migrant children. However, most of the teachers did not consider themselves responsible for helping migrant children to maintain their first language.

New Projects Promoting a Literacy-Rich Environment and Family Literacy Practices The Malta National Literacy Agency was founded in 2015, to implement the recommendations outlined in The National Literacy Strategy for Malta and Gozo (2014). These recommendations for the early years deal with the ways in which children can be exposed to print texts in Maltese and English as a way of fostering emergent literacy skills. The Agency is responsible also for the setting up of classroom libraries in all State school preschools. Children are encouraged to take books home to be read to by their parents so that children are exposed to print material at home. The Malta National Literacy Strategy recommends that “There is promotion of the engagement of parents and those who have the care of children in the literacy education of children” (Ministry for Education and Employment 2014b, p. 32). The National Literacy Agency organizes family bilingual reading sessions on a national level, in Maltese and English, which are called “Read with Me/Aqra Miegħi” (for ages 0–3) and “The Magic of Stories/Seħer l-Istejjer” (for ages 3–5). These sessions are held in numerous locations and at various sites like schools, and parish and community centers all over the islands and are free of charge. Parents and guardians accompany their children to these reading sessions. The aim of these sessions is not only to have stories read to young children, but also to empower the parents to continue the sessions at home. The reading animator works closely with the parents to equip them with skills that can be practiced at home with their own babies and children.

Research into the Nature of Bilingual Education in the Early Years The dissemination of the recommendations outlined in the Language Policy for the Early Years (2016a) is carried out by the Language Policy in Education Unit, which forms part of the Malta National Literacy Agency. Since its inception, the unit has worked closely with educators and education leaders and managers to provide continuous development sessions for educators and child-care workers on the use of languages in education settings. Classroom observation sessions are also held regularly in various schools. These observation sessions form part of the professional support given to educators. The researchers discuss with educators the implications of bilingual education strategies based on the needs of each classroom being observed. In this way, practice and policy recommendations are based on

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direct research evidence from the classroom. Furthermore, seminars for parents on child language development and on the ways bilingualism and multilingualism may be fostered in families are organized.

The Creation of Story-Apps and Animated Features in Maltese Growing numbers of young children use a variety of media devices and applications at home and at an increasingly younger age (Zaman and Mifsud 2017). Maltese parents reported that their children were using digital technologies even at the age of one (Mifsud and Petrova 2017b). One of the main challenges facing the Maltese language is the lack of digital resources available in the language. While English has a strong presence in the digital world, with a myriad of online and digital resources for young children, Maltese is far less well represented. Mifsud and Petrova (2017b) argue that in view of bilingual settings, like the Maltese context where both Maltese and English are the languages of schooling, more digital content needs to be made available in the home languages and in diverse languages as most of the digital content available is in English. Recently, there have been numerous efforts to tackle this issue through the creation of online games and apps in Maltese aimed at young children. Some interactive story-apps in Maltese for young children are: “Żaqqinu jagħżel x’jiekol” (Żaqqinu chooses what to eat) (Fig. 1) and “Ittri kkuluriti” (colorful letters) (Fig. 2). They can be downloaded free of charge. Furthermore, the Malta National Literacy Agency has launched a series of animated cartoons for young children in Maltese called “Emme.”

Critical Issues and Topics We have shown already that ECE in Malta evolved in response to the demands of a labor-market economy, the postcolonial heritage, and the changes in the labor market as more women started seeking employment. The underlying philosophy of preschooling provided in different contexts varies from a play-based or child-centered Fig. 1 “Żaqqinu jagħżel x’jiekol” story-app in Maltese. (Source: eLearning Centre Malta)

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Fig. 2 “Ittri kkuluriti” storyapp in Maltese. (Source: eLearning Centre Malta)

one, where educators facilitate play to foster socialization and cognitive development through experiential learning (▶ Chap. 6, “Early Language Education and Language Socialization,” by A. Cekaite, this volume); to settings with a more structured and didactic approach, where educators lead children in a more structured way through planned activities that focus on early skills such as distinguishing shapes and colors, and learning number concepts and letters and sounds. In this section, we will outline the major issues that emerge from the policy documentation and from the studies cited above. We will focus on these major topics: the shift in the pedagogy for ECE, its implications on ECE language learning and teaching, the way bilingualism is viewed by educators, strategies that are adopted for migrant learners, and possible implications for professional development.

A Shift in Pedagogy and Implications for Language Education In the last decade, ECE in Malta has evolved to include practices which are more child-centered. The philosophy guiding the National Curriculum Framework (2011) and the Learning Outcomes Framework (2016b) was a move towards a child-centered pedagogy. However, research studies show that more traditional conceptualizations of ECE, where children focused on academic and school-readiness activities are still prevalent. For instance, Sollars (2017) discusses how parents in her study expect kindergarten education to be a preparation for formal education and expect educators to teach children academic skills. Vella et al. (2018) report on how the majority of educators in their study organize structured activities related to the alphabet in Maltese and/or English. This discrepancy in policy and practice has also been pointed out by Laevers (2005, p. 19) who argues that “despite the broadening of the scope of the curriculum, literacy and numeracy take a dominant position” in ECE. He also concludes that despite the changes proposed in curricula, toward a more holistic and empowering framework for educators and children, “real challenge lies in the implementation of the innovation pursued by the developers of these curricula” (p. 28). He therefore concludes that educators should receive

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adequate training and in-service support so that they can deal with the demands in ECE. The shift in curriculum has implications for the way languages are promoted in ECE classrooms. In a child-centered curriculum, the focus of language learning and teaching should be on meaningful teacher-to-child and child-to-child interactions. And yet, evidence points to the direction that teachers and parents might still be occupied by the formal instruction of literacy or emergent literacy skills in English and Maltese which, at times, is devoid of any meaningful interaction. There seems to be an over-emphasis on teacher-centered instruction and the predominance of transmission from teacher to child. Gatt and Dodd (2019) call for “an urgent need to focus on language-based activities in both Maltese and English” (p. 18). Such “language-conducive strategies” are aimed “to enhance children’s willingness to communicate” in a second language (Schwartz 2018, p.3) and they are part of the language-conducive context that is “classroom conditions that allow language learning by means of diverse teaching strategies, language-learning activities, as well as the physical and social environment” (Schwartz 2018, p. 6). These activities are designed to support comprehensibility of linguistic information and to enhance children’s production in the novel language, as well as to promote their active engagement in the learning process (▶ Chap. 24, “Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education,” by M. Schwartz, this volume). However, this requires “questioning traditions, shaking cultural beliefs and modifying practices [by] informed, like-minded stakeholders” (Sollars 2018, p. 346).

Conceptualizing Bilingualism The concept of balance when discussing bilingualism in early childhood education merits further analysis. The policy documents and data on educators’ practices highlight the fact that bilingualism has been conceptualized in different ways throughout the years. In general, definitions of bilingualism have encompassed a range of competencies in the two languages and in their use (García 2009). Although balanced bilingualism is an outcome highlighted in Malta’s country report (Ministry for Education and Employment 2014a), this notion is an artifact of a theoretical perspective which takes a monolingual norm as its point of reference. Moreover, this notion of balance has been questioned in different contexts as research shows that balanced bilingualism – in the sense of an equilibrium – is not very frequent nor very stable (Blackledge and Creese 2010). The issue of language separation versus strategies that allow for flexible use of languages is widely contested on various levels. The studies presented in the above sections demonstrate that educators are not always in agreement as to the benefits of the use of flexibility, and the way flexible strategies can be used to cater for learner differences. Flexible language use, that is when speakers switch from one language to another is a normal feature of bilingual communication (Blackledge and Creese 2010), and it may have possible positive effects on the language acquisition of bilingual children in ECE settings (▶ Chap. 29, “Early Language Education in Luxembourg,” by C. Kirsch and C. Seele, this volume). This points to a major issue

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related to professional development. Educators need to be aware of what bilingual development actually involves. Most importantly, educators need to reflect on the way language use is mediating comprehension and how children develop their competencies in the two languages through opportunities for meaningful interaction and language conducive activities.

Multilingual Realities Educators are faced increasingly by a multilingual realities. This presents a series of challenges to educators which are currently not addressed adequately in policy documentation which should open spaces for multilingual education in ECE (▶ Chap. 7, “Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education,” by A. Palviainen and X.L. Curdt-Christiansen, this volume). The National Curriculum Framework recognizes cultural diversity, but the “diversity” principle groups together children from different ethnic backgrounds with those with learning difficulties, and the assumption here is that being a migrant learner is another type of learning difficulty (Darmanin 2013). In the Learning Outcomes Framework (2016b), there is also reference to the first and to the second languages, but the underlying assumption once again is that they refer to Maltese and English. However, in a rapidly changing multilingual context, this assumption does not hold. Most European countries are still grappling with how best to cater for the linguistic diversity that the huge increase in migration has brought along (Michel and Kuiken 2014). Training in multicultural education needs to be integrated into educator preparation programs, and continuing professional development is vital to assist educators in deepening their understanding and honing their pedagogical skills. Such changes would contribute to the implementation of multicultural educational programs that are more attuned to the local educational contexts. Findings from research on ECE’s educators’ knowledge (Michel et al. 2014) show that they feel that they lack the necessary skills to provide language support and feel overwhelmed by the linguistic and intercultural expectations and duties they are faced with. Michel and Kuiken (2014, p. 21) argue that as long as ECE educators are to have the minimum possible qualifications, it is not surprising that “they rely on intuitive and at times naïve approaches to child language support and unknowingly perform poorly when implementing programmes for language development.” Moreover, the policy documents discussed above do not mention first language provision in the early years’ educational settings, except from one recommendation in the Language Policy for the Early Years (2016a), where parents and caregivers are advised to promote the child’s mother tongue. As discussed above, the provision of bilingual education in Maltese and English might not allow migrant children to develop their proficiency in their first languages. The first step is to acknowledge the different first languages in an ECE setting. The second step is to promote maintenance. Relying solely on parents to promote their mother tongue might not be fully effective because “too often, parents may feel that they should encourage the language of the school in the home setting rather than supporting the other language”

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(McRoary 2006, p. 167). Finally, in view of these issues, educators should review appropriate teaching approaches for Maltese and English, taking into account their statuses as mother tongue, second and foreign languages to different pupil populations.

The Professional Development of Educators Laevers (2005, p. 28) argues that professional development should be put “at the centre of any strategy that supports the implementation of new curricula.” Gunhild and Tkachenko (2018) propose that language teaching methods should be reexamined in preschool contexts and that a more holistic approach to language teaching practices should be adopted. Professional development should help educators to assess the cognitive loading(s) of activities, to determine the level of development that appears through the whole range of activities the child is involved in and to see what kind of activities, materials and input can be offered to stimulate children to engage in activities that are relevant for the targeted developmental domains. This has implications for the way languages are used in ECE classrooms. Baldacchino (2018) argues that if high-quality childhood education is the aim of ECE settings, a suitable level of certification of those employed in this sector needs to be first assured and, eventually, standardized. Knowledge of child development as informed by recent research is a must for educators operating in this critical sector. Such training can also take place onsite (Shannon et al. 2015) especially before a new practice or policy is to be embedded. Professional development should focus more attention on the need for mentorship and support in the workplace (Waters and Payler 2015). Studies from other contexts have shown that language-promoting strategies, such as role-plays, are not well understood by infant educators (Goouch and Powell 2013), and that educators vary considerably in their application of such teaching strategies (Degotardi et al. 2016; Torr and Pham 2016).

Agency in ECE Settings Early Childhood Educators have to navigate educational policy and the local ecological context when promoting languages in their classrooms. Professional development and support are a key element in achieving this. ECE settings involve a number of players who need to work together to promote children’s optimal educational opportunities. Schwartz and Palviainen (2016) proposed a theoretical model which takes into account the interaction of child, teacher, and parent agency, for a successful preschool bilingual education. The wider socio-cultural context in which languages coexist will affect the way these stakeholders work together (Bronfenbrenner 2005). Parents need to be informed about the important role of language and literacy in the early years so that they can make agentive choices about language use at home.

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Educators need to be supported through professional development training and support so that they can be agentive in their classrooms. Rather than being at the receiving end of educational top-down policy, they need to be provided with the necessary knowledge and tools to examine the ways educational policies, their own beliefs, professional, and personal experiences can promote their agentive role as educators (Priestley et al. 2012). Research (for example Michel and Kuiken 2014) has shown that the status of ECE educators is among the lowest in the teaching profession. Educators could feel more empowered by being encouraged and supported to exercise more fully their agentive role. In this way, ECE educators are viewed as professionals and specialists in their own field, who can make informed and agentive decisions about their practices.

Future Research Directions Early Childhood Education in Malta has undergone developments throughout the years in response to the economic and workforce needs of the country, together with advancement in pedagogy, aiming more toward a curriculum that puts the child at the center. Successful ECE development, policies and outcomes must embrace historical and ongoing societal changes while addressing “influences which include cultural beliefs, values and norms; socio-political and economic ideologies; national wealth; social welfare approach; racial, cultural, and/or religious diversity; family policies and institutional complexity” (Cochran 2011, p. 67). This means that to consolidate ECE we must learn from the past and keep an eye on the future. Sollars (2017, p. 346) argues that “questioning traditions, shaking cultural beliefs and modifying practices requires a concerted effort of many informed, like-minded stakeholders.” The state of early childhood language education in Malta merits further research to consolidate those practices that are successful and to identify other areas which are lacking. In ECE settings, it is essential that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers continue to expand knowledge about early bilingual development and learning. In general, a systematic mapping and description of early language education in Malta and the effectiveness of its initiatives would be a valid addition to the body of research on language acquisition and development. Future research should primarily consider the bilingual development of young children and the development of emergent biliteracy. Longitudinal studies could trace the bilingual development of children from preschool to the first years of primary school and provide insight into the way children negotiate the use of two languages in their daily lives and in the preschool context. This could be carried out in the form of intervention and action research studies where educators and researchers work together to plan and evaluate the curriculum and the research project. Furthermore, research is needed to highlight classroom practices by ECE educators in multilingual realities. Examples of good practice may be used to empower other educators who might fear change. Educators may serve as a source of inspiration to others to become agents of change.

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Finally, research on ECE, the beliefs of educators on bilingual education, and the philosophy guiding their pedagogy will help policymakers and those who deliver professional development programs, to understand better the challenges faced by educators. This could help the development of professional development programs that are truly attuned to Malta’s bilingual and multilingual contexts, in the light of language use in the wider society and the way in which bilingual children acquire languages in Malta.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have provided insights into the history of ECE in the small island state of Malta, and how language education has been an important feature in its development. The situation in Malta, albeit unique, may serve as a microcosm of the multilingual situation prevalent in the educational contexts of other countries. How languages work in the wider society and the beliefs associated with these languages have an impact on early language education. We strove to highlight the role of bilingualism in the development of early language development in Malta and how there have been several efforts by major stakeholders to maintain it. In spite of its small size, Malta is relatively heterogeneous in its sociolinguistic landscape. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all policy will not address adequately the needs of all educators and young children. Teachers, parents, and children need to be supported to exercise their agency (Schwartz and Palviainen 2016; Schwartz 2018; Mifsud and Vella 2018a) and to work together to create the optimal conditions for early language learning, which place the child at the center and reflect the bilingual and multilingual realities which characterize early childhood education settings in the twenty-first century.

Cross-References ▶ Early Language Education and Language Socialization ▶ Early Language Education in Luxembourg ▶ Educational Partnerships of Teachers, Parents, and Children in Multilingual Preschool Contexts ▶ Language Education Policies and Early Childhood Education ▶ Language-Conducive Strategies in Early Language Education

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Poh Wee Koh and Beth Ann O’Brien

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingual Education Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nurturing Early Learners Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linguistic and Orthographic Overlap Between Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English Language and Literacy Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociolinguistic Factors and Mother Tongue Language Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recent Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aligning the Bilingual Curriculum Ideology and Research Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenges of Maintaining Mother Tongues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socioemotional Competencies and Language and Emergent/Early Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Solution for Incorporating Learning through Play and Explicit Instruction . . . . . . Adequacy of Teacher Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abstract

Research on factors that impact preschoolers’ learning outcomes in Singapore points at a relation between early childhood learning and later school success. These factors are especially interesting in a multilingual context, with a bilingual P. W. Koh (*) Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA B. A. O’Brien National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_32

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education policy, such as Singapore, which offers a unique perspective on the complexities of fostering children’s academic development alongside their duallanguage development. Singapore implements an immersion learning setting, in which all school subjects, except Mother Tongue, are taught in English. Mother Tongue, on the other hand, is taught in one of three designated ethnic languages (i.e., Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil). This chapter examines the issues surrounding language and literacy development of Singaporean preschoolers from Chinese, Malay, and Tamil backgrounds who learn English. An overview of the bilingual policy and preschool curriculum framework is presented, followed by early-research contributions that centers on the influence of home language on English development. Research on the influence of home-literacy environment and mother-tongue language development is then reviewed and followed by a discussion on the challenges relating to bilingual policy, language instruction, maintenance of mother tongues, and teacher preparation as a result of the curriculum shift in preschool. Implications are provided in relation to the findings and future research directions on preschoolers’ learning in Singapore. Keywords

Bilingual policy · Preschool · Language and literacy · Singapore

Introduction The Singapore educational system has garnered much interest because it challenges popular assumptions of language learning, such as the primacy of oral language, the goal of native-like speech, or keeping L1 and L2 separate (e.g., Cook 2008). Specifically, almost all children in the country are bilingual from as early as preschool age, as the language of instruction is English, rather than their ethnic or heritage language. Bilingualism and immersion learning in schools have been associated with low rates of literacy achievement in some countries (Dixon 2009; Snow et al. 1998). However, despite the apparent disadvantage, Singaporean children tend to achieve high levels of literacy and feature in the top tier in performance on global international literacy tests, such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLs) (e.g., Mullis et al. 2007, 2012). As a result, Singapore’s educational system is recognized as high-performing and a model of study in some instances (e.g., Barber and Mourshed 2007; Darling-Hammond 2010; Deng and Gopinathan 2016). Despite success in international high stakes tests, the Singapore educational system faces its challenges, especially in the preschool sector. In the context of Singapore, preschool education in childcare centers (for infants to 6-year-olds) and kindergartens (for 3- to 6-year-olds) (Ang 2006) is not compulsory; however, approximately 99% of the children receive at least one year of preschool education (Ministry of Education 2012; Wong 2012). Nevertheless, in the past decades, the curriculum has been highly varied across preschools, mainly because preschool

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education has been provided by different organizations in the private sector (e.g., religious, community, or business organizations) without a formal curriculum. In addition, there is also a distinction between the goals for childcare centers and kindergartens, because they have been regulated by different government ministries (Tan 2017). On the one hand, childcare centers that cater to children between 2 months to 6 years of age have been licensed by the Ministry of Social and Family Development to meet the social needs of the child. On the other hand, kindergartens for children between 3 and 6 years of age have been regulated by the Ministry of Education in order to prepare children for the educational demands when they enter primary school. However, since 1999, Singapore has actively engaged in significant reforms in preschool education to improve the quality of provision of early childhood education that has been largely unregulated before in terms of curriculum (Ang 2006). Reforms are in response to global trends where countries are increasingly devoting more attention and resources to preschool education, as they begin to recognize the crucial role of early childhood years in later development (Elliot 2006; Hayes 2006). Local reforms focus on three areas, namely, enhancing the quality of preschools, improving the quality of teachers, and upgrading the preschool curriculum. Specifically, the government has established the Early Childhood Development Agency that comprises personnel from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social and Family Development to jointly oversee the preschool education sector to ensure consistency in quality across preschools (Tan 2017). In addition, minimum qualification requirements for teachers have been raised and greater effort has been devoted to preservice and professional development for teachers. Finally, a preschool curriculum framework has been drawn up to provide guidelines of teaching and learning goals for preschools. Although these educational reforms have kept up with international trends and attended to local needs, they also raise new issues that need to be addressed. While some of these challenges reflect gaps and potential misconceptions that are inevitable with extensive policy changes, there are also conflicts in ideology that may derive from existing education policies and practices (Ang 2006; Curdt-Christiansen and Sun 2016). Furthermore, challenges also arise from sociolinguistic shifts within the country. This chapter thus examines the issues surrounding preschool education in the context of Singapore. Specifically, it focuses on preschoolers’ language and literacy development. The chapter provides an overview of Singapore’s bilingual language policy and presents the kindergarten curriculum framework in Singapore. The chapter further reviews language and literacy development of kindergarteners, taking into account the motivation behind different areas of research as well as the changes and advances in research directions over the years. Following that, critical issues and challenges arising from research and trends pertaining to kindergarten reforms and existing policies are discussed. The chapter concludes by identifying gaps in the current understanding of language development in preschoolers in Singapore and suggests future research directions.

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Main Theoretical Concepts Bilingual development involves a set of core linguistic proficiencies, rather than the acquisition of two isolated linguistic systems within an individual. This is articulated in Cummins’ (1991) interdependence hypothesis, as an underlying common proficiency that supports both first (L1) and second (L2) language competencies. Many language skills, from phonological and syntactic awareness to story grammar, show a statistical correlation between bilinguals’ languages, lending support to the hypothesis. At the same time, some skills show less cross-language influence, or “transfer.” These include print-related skills (Abu Rabia 2001; Koda 2005), which are more language specific. Thus, interdependency is qualified, as claimed in Kahn-Horwitz et al.’s (2011) linguistic and orthographic proximity hypothesis, that the relative closeness or similarity between the L1 and L2’s linguistic and print structures contributes to the extent of cross-language transfer. Knowledge about the current bilingual abilities of children is important at both the curriculum and individual levels. For teaching, this will inform approaches that cater more to either second-language learners or to bilingual learners. For learners, understanding their age-relative skills and dominance patterns will inform about their individual needs for support. In light of the bilingual educational policy of Singapore, a better understanding of the competencies that contribute to language proficiency and of how these may be shared through an interlingual interface will inform the best ways to meet children’s needs. To understand the issues surrounding language and literacy development of preschool children in Singapore, it is necessary to examine the key language policy and frameworks in the country. Language policy reflects “practices, beliefs, and management” (Spolsky 2007, p. 3). The first corresponds to the language and speech preferences of individuals that reflect the behaviors of their linguistic community. The second pertains to the benefits and significance individuals attach to language, and the last dimension refers to the adoption or adjustment to language use and beliefs by figures and/or establishments with the power to do so within the community (Spolsky 2007). The following section makes use of these three dimensions as a guide. Specifically, it examines the two language policy frameworks relevant to preschoolers, namely, the Bilingual Education framework and the Nurturing Early Learners framework.

Bilingual Education Framework Singapore is a multiethnic country with three dominant ethnic groups, including Chinese, Malay, and Indian heritage groups. The Chinese constitute the majority, forming 74.3% of the population, whereas the Malays and Indians make up 13.3% and 9.1% of the population, respectively (Singapore Department of Statistics 2016). In the early years after independence was established in 1965, there was much linguistic diversity within each ethnic group. Within the Chinese community, a variety of dialects, such as Cantonese and Hokkien, were used (Pakir 2008).

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Similarly, the Indian community also had different languages, such as Bengali, Tamil, and Punjabi spoken at home (Chua 1964). A few languages, such as Bahasa Melayu (Malay), Javanese, and Boyanese, were also spoken in the Malay community (Dixon 2011), although linguistic diversity in this ethnic group was not as great as compared to the other two groups. The government then took a pragmatic approach to manage the linguistic diversity both within and between ethnic groups by assigning Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil as the official mother tongues for the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities, respectively. Malay and Tamil were chosen as the official languages because they represented the majority language that was spoken within their respective communities. The case for Mandarin Chinese as the official language of the Chinese ethnic group is perhaps more surprising, considering that only approximately 1% of the community spoke Mandarin at home at the time when Mandarin was instituted as the official language (Pakir 2008). This choice was motivated by the fact that Mandarin is the accepted medium of instruction in Chinese-majority societies (De Souza 1980). Today, the three mother tongues constitute three of the four official languages to ensure representation of the main ethnic groups within the multicultural country. The fourth official language is English, and it is designated as the main language of instruction and business transaction for political and economic reasons. Because English is not native to any of the three communities (Arumainathan 1973), it is viewed as not favoring any ethnic group politically. Practically, from an economic standpoint, English literacy gives Singapore an edge internationally (Pakir 2000). The multilingual landscape provides the foundation for the bilingual education framework that forms the core of Singapore’s public educational system today. This framework is unique, because its language ideology fits into neither of the two types of models in Baker (2011). According to Baker (2011), bilingual education models can be broadly categorized into strong and weak forms based on language ideology. Examples of strong forms of bilingual education are one-way, two-way, and immersion programs where the objective is to develop children’s proficiency in both majority and home languages by including instruction in both languages (Hakuta and August 1997). Transitional bilingual programs, on the other hand, represent a weak form of bilingual education because the objective of such programs is to encourage children to eventually achieve proficiency in the majority language. The use of home language as the language of instruction is introduced in the beginning of these programs and phased out eventually (Otheguy and Otto 1980). Singapore’s bilingual policy adopts an “English + 1” model (Chua 2011, p. 125) where children are required to learn to read and write in English as well as in their “Mother Tongue,” as defined above in terms of their official ethnic language, namely, Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil. Since English is designated as the main language of instruction, all content area subjects such as Math and Science are taught in English. Thus, English instruction takes up about 75% of the curriculum time in a week. In contrast, mother tongue is only taught as a subject for about 4–6 h weekly. This stark imbalance in instruction time allocated to the two languages is not consistent with the language ideology of strong forms of bilingual education.

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However, this bilingual model is also not entirely reflective of a weak form of bilingual education, because the objective of the Singapore bilingual policy is to support the maintenance of the mother tongue and to serve as a cultural ballast tying to one’s ethnic heritage (e.g., Ministry of Education 2014). Mother tongue instruction is a mandatory subject in the curriculum for children from the primary through secondary years. Therefore, it would perhaps be more fitting to classify the bilingual framework of Singapore as a hybrid bilingual model that embodies some elements of both forms of bilingual education pertaining to language ideology. Specifically, a more suitable classification befitting this hybrid form would be similar to maintenance or heritage language programs, which aim to add or maintain an ethnic language for the purpose of cultural enrichment and general student success (May 2017). Moreover, despite having a bilingual curriculum, Singapore’s realization of this policy reflects “two monolingual models” (Curdt-Christiansen and Sun 2016, p. 704), rather than an integrated bilingual education model. The two languages are viewed separately in terms of instruction and development (Dixon 2009). This is evident in the fact that English and mother tongues are assigned different functions. English has an instrumental function, adopted as the working language in all formal settings (e.g., schools, government organizations, and businesses) and intranational communication among the different ethnic groups (Dixon 2005). In contrast, mother tongue languages have cultural functions, as use is predominantly for the purpose of maintenance and appreciation of one’s cultural and ethnic identity (Ministry of Education 2013; Rubdy 2001). The different functions of English and the mother tongue suggest that the two languages should neither interfere with nor facilitate each other. Indeed, the current curriculum reflects this mutual exclusivity in that guidelines of instruction of the two languages do not consider the effects of one another. In addition, English and the mother tongue are afforded different status within the language education policy: as reflected in differential curriculum time (75% vs. 25%) and purpose (for content learning vs. as an examinable subject); and in their goals or outcomes (as a societal language vs. a living language for communication). This view again differentiates the Singapore model from other bilingual education models because bilingual models typically assume that there is at least some interaction between the two languages of instruction (e.g., Cummins 1979). The model also appears to challenge hypotheses such as the linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins 1991) that posits cross-linguistic transfer of skills in the first language to the learning of a second language to facilitate the development of the latter. The former prime minister who was behind the development of the bilingual education policy of the country once highlighted that speaking in only the mother tongue at home is not beneficial to English development and that it is necessary to use English at home in order to facilitate development of English skills (Dixon 2005; Platt 1982). There is also a ban on the use of various Chinese dialects, such as Hokkien and Cantonese, in schools, which were the native tongues of many Chinese in Singapore prior to the 1970s, before these made way for the use of Mandarin Chinese as the official mother tongue of the Chinese community (Riney 1998). This ban reflects the

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underlying assumption that the development of these dialects did not have a facilitative effect on the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese or English (Dixon 2005). This assumption does not bear out, however, as it is found in the case study of a Chinese dialect speaker by Newman (1988) that knowledge of the Hokkien dialect facilitates acquisition of Mandarin pronunciation. In a more recent survey study with Singaporean Chinese-speaking university students (Bhattacharjee, Woon, & Styles cited in Wu et al. 2020), students reporting higher levels of early life exposure to either Mandarin or Chinese dialects also rate themselves with higher Chinese Mandarin skills, while this early exposure has no negative impact on their reported English language skills. Nonetheless, the ban has effectively contributed to a sharp decline in the use of dialects in the home in the last 3 decades, from 76.6% of families reporting the use of dialects in the home in the 1980s to less than 20% in 2010. This decline is accompanied by a shift towards greater prevalence of Mandarin and English in homes of Singaporean Chinese (Singapore Department of Statistics 2011). Knowledge of and ability to converse in Chinese dialects among Singapore youth today is also rare (Lee 2012; Ng 2014), which has researchers concerned about the potential loss of cultures associated with these dialects (Lee 2012).

Nurturing Early Learners Framework Preschool education is not compulsory, but bilingual policy is also endorsed in the sector as preschools typically offer a bilingual program. Although the amount of English and mother tongue instruction varies across preschools, a commonality among schools is that English is the main language of instruction (Vaish 2007). As part of government efforts to ensure uniform quality of preschool education in the country, the Ministry of Education introduced the Kindergarten Curriculum Framework that delineates early childhood teaching and learning goals in 2003 (Tan 2017). This framework draws on the principles of constructivist theories of learning, advocating for holistic, integrative, and interactive learning through play, as well as for teachers as facilitators of learning in the classroom (Ministry of Education 2013). According to Shanmugaratnam (2003), support for this framework comes from the positive impact of these principles in teaching on children’s language, cognitive, and social skills. The Kindergarten Curriculum Framework was revised in 2012 and renamed the Nurturing Early Learners framework. The framework reflects efforts to clarify the preschool curriculum by outlining eight key stages of learning outcomes of preschool education that emphasize holistic and life-long learning. These correspond to “know what is morally right and wrong, be willing to share and take turns with others, be able to relate to others, be curious and able to explore, be able to listen and speak with understanding, be comfortable and happy with themselves, have developed physical co-ordination and healthy habits, and love their family, friends, teachers, and school” (Ministry of Education 2012, p. 9). This framework also highlights six areas of learning in which these outcomes could be fulfilled, which are “aesthetics and creative expression, discovery of the world, language and

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literacy, motor skills development, numeracy, and social and emotional development” (Ministry of Education 2012, p. 13). Across this framework, three overarching objectives for preschool teaching and learning regarding the mother tongue involve: communication, culture, and connection (Ministry of Education 2011). Communication goals include having children learn to listen with understanding and speak with confidence. This is done through social interactions, play and role-playing, and both listening and speaking skills are expected to contribute to understanding how oral language relates to print and to lay the foundation for developing later reading comprehension. Children are introduced to print in their mother tongue in kindergarten, and they are given assistance with recognizing print for reading and making marks for writing. Regarding culture, children in kindergarten learn about customs and traditions in order to develop an appreciation for their ethnic culture during mother tongue learning blocks, in which children in the class split into groups to work with a teacher in their mother tongue. Stories about festivals and cultural tales are shared through teacher-led book reading. Finally, the goal of connection involves strengthening familial and community bonds by practicing mother tongue language use daily and by sharing mother tongue learning experiences (Ministry of Education 2011). Two facets of the Nurturing Early Learners framework are especially salient when language and literacy development in the context of preschool education is considered. First, it provides some level of clarification of the bilingual policy at the preschool level. This is evident in the unifying of the provision of bilingual education in preschool by including guidelines and resources for teaching English as well as the mother tongues. Second, as compared to previous frameworks where academic abilities were at the forefront of preschool instruction, greater weight is placed on socioemotional competencies with this new framework (Tan 2017). The Ministry of Education puts forth that preschool education should be targeted at cultivating lifelong learners and goes beyond preparation for entry into formal education (Wong 2000). The intentional shift from academic to socioemotional capabilities thus seeks to (1) change the current competitive learning environment in preschools where heavy academic demands are placed on children (Tan 2017), and (2) move towards a more holistic learning paradigm (Bennett and Kaga 2010) that is increasingly adopted at the international level (Pence and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2010).

Major Contributions Importantly, the kindergarten framework and curriculum highlight the development of communication skills within the language and literacy learning area (as described in section “Main Theoretical Concepts”). The development of oral language communication skills contributes to emergent literacy along the continuum of conceptual (i.e., understanding of function of print) and procedural (i.e., understanding of letters and words) literacy skills, which are two domains of learning described in frameworks of emergent literacy (e.g., Outside-In, Inside-Out domains; Whitehurst and

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Lonigan 1998). The accumulation of skills in these domains is crucial in helping children transition into conventional reading (Whitehurst and Lonigan 1998). Specifically, listening comprehension activities, incorporated in the Singaporean kindergarten curriculum, lay the foundation for later reading comprehension, while speaking in social contexts cultivates use of a variety of words and sentence structures to lay the foundation for later writing competency. At the same time, children are encouraged to recognize printed words through picture books and to construct meaning through shared reading, while gaining awareness of basic features of their mother tongue language. Procedural knowledge, print awareness, alphabet knowledge (naming upper/lowercase letters), phonological awareness (identifying beginning sounds and rhymes), and comprehension (understanding the sequence of a story) are specific skills to be worked on for emergent reading in English, whereas specific English writing skills include name writing, letter forming, copying sentences/phrases modeled by the teacher, and the language experience approach of shared writing. Mother tongue emergent literacy is introduced in a similar manner through shared book reading, and pointing to words in the print, along with introducing new words through songs, and with pictures and objects. Each language also involves specific activities observed in typical Singapore kindergarten classrooms (O’Brien et al. 2019). Whole characters are introduced with word cards for memorization and through stroke writing or copying or with finger spelling in Chinese lessons. The introduction of printed words in Malay occurs by emphasizing pronunciation of individual syllables, then blending the syllables together to form words. In Tamil lessons, children begin to learn the akshara chart. An Akshara is a glyph composed of curved and straight lines (e.g., அ) that may represent a vowel, a dipthong, and in most cases a consonant with an inherent vowel. The teachers’ use of word cards in instruction gets children to phonemically blend the sounds, as well as write the aksharas on paper or in sand or with clay. Early research in language development of preschoolers focused on examining child English language development. Researchers were especially interested in the influence of the home language on English development because of the bilingual status of the children. Findings indicate that home language of bilingual children in Singapore influences English language development. However, the nature and extent of this influence is dependent on the degree of both linguistic and orthographic overlap between L1 and English (Dixon et al. 2012b; Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011).

Linguistic and Orthographic Overlap Between Languages Language combinations in the context of Singapore of the three distinct bilingual child groups reflect different degrees of between-language overlap in linguistic and orthographic characteristics. Overlap can occur in either oral language, as in syllable structure, or written language, in terms of orthography and its relation to the oral language. Both Chinese and Malay oral languages involve mostly simple syllable structure (consonant-vowel, CV, or consonant-vowel-consonant, CVC; Shu and Li 2012; Lee et al. 2012), in contrast to English, and this makes syllables more salient.

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Tamil oral language involves more complex syllable structure (V, CV, CVC, CVCC, VC, VCC). In addition, Tamil and Malay languages are highly agglutinative, with morphemes added as affixes in many words (e.g., Bhuvaneshwari and Padakannaya 2014; Yap et al. 2010), resulting in more multisyllable and longer words (e.g., Annamalai and Steever 1998; Lee et al. 2012; Tadmor 2009). Regarding typological distance between orthographies, Malay-English bilingual children’s learned languages make use of the same Latin script, so they can be considered monoscriptal. Both written languages follow the alphabetic principle, in which graphemes (i.e., letters or letter clusters in the alphabet) represent units of sounds known as phonemes (e.g., /t/, /a/). Therefore, there is likely to be significant overlap in linguistic-orthographic characteristics in the two languages. In contrast, for Tamil-English bilingual children, the overlap is likely to be smaller because Tamil uses a different script from English, meaning they are biscriptal. In Tamil, the basic written unit is an akshara, which, as noted above, is a glyph composed of curved and straight lines (e.g., அ) that may represent a vowel, a dipthong, and in most cases a consonant with an inherent vowel. There are 247 akshara in Tamil, and these sometimes occur in nonlinear ordering within words, or with diacritical marks that change the vowel sound. While akshara scripts share some characteristics with syllabaries, the akshara unit can be visually broken down into the C and V components, such that either syllable or phoneme level representation may be made salient (Padakannaya and Mohanty 2004). For Chinese-English bilingual children, who are also biscriptal, the overlap between Chinese and English is also smaller than for Malay-English bilinguals because Chinese is not an alphabetic script. Instead, the basic written unit is a rectangular-shaped character made up of straight strokes, which may be a single unit or a complex unit (白, 拍) with subcharacter components that correspond to phonetic or meaning-based representations. Characters represent a syllable and a morpheme, and the connection between print and sound is typically opaque (Rickard Liow and Lau 2006). As compared to English and Malay, where graphemes typically correspond to phonemes, graphemes in Chinese map onto syllables [e.g., the grapheme 青 (green) corresponds to the syllable/qing/].

English Language and Literacy Development The limited body of available local empirical evidence has supported the idea that the degree of linguistic overlap between languages of bilingual children affects English literacy development (Dixon et al. 2012a, b; O’Brien et al. 2019; Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011). For instance, in a study conducted with 284 bilingual kindergarteners from Chinese, Malay, and Tamil backgrounds (M ¼ 72.29 months, SD ¼ 3.48 months, Dixon et al. 2012a), Malay-English bilinguals demonstrated higher levels of English phonological awareness (i.e., understanding of and ability to manipulate sound units) as compared to Chinese-English and Tamil-English bilingual children. English shares more phonological similarities with Malay as compared to Chinese and Tamil. This similarity therefore facilitates the cross-linguistic transfer of phonological knowledge to English and this has been reflected in the superior performance of the Malay-English bilingual group on phonological tasks.

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Another study of Chinese-English bilingual kindergarteners (Dixon et al. 2012b), shows difficulty with plurality in English spelling. In contrast to English, plurality in Chinese is represented by adding a morpheme or collective marker such as men (们) after pronouns and nouns, respectively (Chao 1968). These findings suggest that Chinese children’s difficulty with the acquisition of some English language elements (e.g., morphological forms) derives from the lack of linguistic overlap between the two. In a third study focusing on spelling in English among Chinese-English kindergarten children, Yeong and Rickard Liow (2011) found that these children had more difficulty with spelling phonemes that were unique to English (i.e., absent in Chinese), pointing to how the lack of overlap between the languages poses some difficulties in English spelling for ChineseEnglish bilingual children. Finally, O’Brien et al. (2019) showed that the three main bilingual groups in Singapore were differentially sensitive to the unit size of phonological awareness in English. Among 612 kindergarten children followed from ages 5 to 6, the TamilEnglish group showed greater sensitivity to phonemes, compared with greater sensitivity to syllable level awareness for the other groups. The authors suggest that the finding pertaining to Tamil-English children is due to the influence of Tamil on English. Tamil children are possibly sensitive to phonemes as they are represented in aksharas, and the transparency at which phonemes are mapped onto graphemes in Tamil facilitates the development of phonemic awareness. In turn, the same pattern emerged in terms of the contribution to early English reading skills, whereby syllable awareness only contributed to reading for the Malay-English and Chinese-English groups. For the Tamil-English group, the relation of phonological awareness to reading was moderated by children’s vocabulary, where it played a stronger role only for those with higher English vocabulary scores. In sum, this set of findings supports the interdependence hypothesis of Cummins (1991) in that phonological awareness, morphology, and spelling show crosslanguage influence for bilingual children. However, it appears that the degree of overlap between bilingual children’s languages in terms of both oral language and written language similarities also moderates (i.e., facilitates or impedes) the degree of cross-language associations. This follows the linguistic and orthographic proximity hypothesis of Kahn-Horwitz et al. (2011), implying that (1) it is important to consider the language/script sets of different bilingual learners within early childhood classrooms, and (2) early successive bilingualism is important for preschool children in bilingual and immersion classroom settings.

Sociolinguistic Factors and Mother Tongue Language Development Despite the emphasis on bilingualism in the country, there has been a general societal shift in language use from ethnic languages towards English across all three main ethnic groups (Department of Statistics 2016). The maintenance and retention of one’s mother tongue is in part influenced by the status that it is given in the community (Holmes 2008). Therefore, this language shift towards English dominance is not surprising considering that English, situated as being central to

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academic learning and business transactions in the country, is often afforded a higher status than mother tongues. The phenomenon of dominance of English in the home among Chinese families especially has been corroborated in several recent investigations. Between the 1990s and 2010, families with children entering primary school who reported English as the language most often used in the home rose from 28% to 59% (Ministry of Education 2011). By 2016, 76% of 545 families surveyed by Curdt-Christiansen (2016) reported English use, as either predominantly used (40%) or used with a mix of Chinese (36%) in daily interactions with their children. Similarly, among Indian families with children entering primary school, there were 58% reporting English as the dominant language used at home. This shift to English was less pronounced among the Malay community, however, as a much smaller percentage reported English as the main home language. Nevertheless, a shift did occur from Malay to English use with a larger magnitude, almost doubling between 2000 and 2005, and changing from 9% of 5- to 14-years-olds’ families in 2000 (Singapore Department of Statistics 2002) to 37% of 6-year-olds’ families in 2010 (Ministry of Education 2011). This clear shift towards English across all three ethnic groups has led researchers to suggest that Singapore might be heading towards linguistic homogeneity (Riney 1998), namely a monolingual society, with gradual decline in mother tongues. The decline in mother tongue proficiency among Singaporeans over the years has led to more research into the factors that facilitate maintenance of mother tongues. Specifically, studies have focused on sociolinguistic factors such as home literacy factors in language development (e.g., Li and Tan 2016; Sun et al. 2018). This is because mother tongue curriculum reviews conducted by the Ministry of Education have attributed the decline in mother tongue proficiency partly to less frequent use of mother tongues in the home (Ministry of Education 2012). Findings of these studies highlight the importance of the home literacy environment in promoting mother tongues. Home literacy environment encompasses formal and informal teaching activities between parent and child, such as teaching letter names and sounds, as well as shared book reading activities (Sénéchal and LeFevre 2014). It also includes home factors such as parent education, amount of input and exposure to a language at home, and number of books at home (e.g., Bus et al. 1995; Schmitt et al. 2011). For instance, in a study conducted with 76 parents of Chinese-English preschoolers between 2 and 6 years of age (Li and Tan 2016), the frequency of Chinese literacy activities at home (e.g., parent-child reading) was significantly correlated with children’s early literacy abilities in Chinese such as character and word recognition. Because of the significance of this area, research is ongoing, with current investigations including data from large samples of kindergarten children representing all three ethnic groups (i.e., Chinese, Malay, and Indian) that improve the validity and generalizability of findings. In another study, Sun et al. (2018) also reported that whereas factors internal to the child (working memory, nonverbal reasoning, and phonological awareness) contributed more variance to English vocabulary, home factors played a role in Singaporean bilingual children’s mother tongue learning in a study conducted with 805 Chinese, Malay, and Indian preschoolers aged between

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4 and 6 years of age in Singapore. Specifically, home literacy factors, such as the number of mother tongue books and the amount of exposure to the mother tongue at home, are significant predictors of mother tongue vocabulary knowledge among preschoolers. Hence, home exposure constitutes a relevant factor for children’s emergent literacy, especially for mother tongue language proficiency.

Teacher Preparation An area of focus in preschool reform is teacher preparation. In order to improve the quality of the teachers, the government has implemented a number of measures, such as increasing the minimum qualification requirements of preschool teachers from a certificate to a diploma in teaching. In 2013, a professional development master plan was introduced outlining skill and knowledge upgrading opportunities and avenues for preschool teachers (Early Childhood Development Agency 2013). This new initiative brought out the requirement to understand the needs of teachers in order to ensure the effectiveness of professional development programs (Bautista et al. 2016). Subsequently, a large-scale study of 123 preservice kindergarten teachers in Singapore has explored professional development needs pertaining to the learning areas in the Nurturing Early Learners Framework [i.e., Aesthetics and Creative Expression, Discovery of the World, Language (English and Mother Tongue), Literacy (Reading and Writing), Motor Skills Development, Numeracy, and Social and Emotional Development] (Bautista et al. 2016). Teachers were asked to rank on a 4-point scale (1 ¼ no need), 4 ¼ high level) their perceived level of need for training in the different learning areas. Average ratings for the need for professional development in the areas of language (English and Mother Tongue) and literacy (reading and writing) were 3 and 3.18, respectively, suggesting that teachers perceive the need for further training in order to provide effective instruction in language and literacy. The study represents a first step to working towards improving teacher preparatory programs. In order improve teacher training, the National Institute of Education launched a new centralized institute for training preschool teachers – the National Institute of Early Childhood Development, in 2019. The institute provides training courses for certificate-level and diploma-level study as well as continuing education and professional development courses for practicing teachers. By centralizing efforts to train preschool teachers, foundational courses will be more closely aligned across the programs. Early childhood professionals are then awarded qualifications from the National Institute of Early Childhood Development, with a uniform set of standards. The training organization will also allow for more fluid linkages to early childhood research conducted within the National Institute of Education and the Centre for Research in Child Development. Already, in line with the efforts of the Singapore government to reform preschool education, the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project was initiated in 2014 where one of the objectives was to examine facets of preschool education and their impact on children’s bilingual and bi-literacy outcomes. This project has elaborated on the results of previous research with a greater focus on teacher preparation and home literacy factors, as well as on mother tongue

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language and literacy development. These earlier findings are likely to contribute to the training programs within the National Institute of Early Childhood Development.

Recent Projects The Office of Education Research at the National Institute for Education is the primary educational research hub in Singapore and there are three nationally funded ongoing projects that examine the language and literacy issues in bilingual learners. Among the three projects, two focus on mother tongue literacy development in Singapore children, which addresses the need to look at enhancing mother tongue literacy in light of a shift towards English use in the home. Specifically, the first looks at the development of measures to assess the mother tongue oral and reading skills of preschool children in Singapore with the long-term aim of informing mother tongue instruction and intervention in a bilingual learning context. The second focuses on mother tongue maintenance. The study inquires about the development and use of a Mandarin eBook application in facilitating the quality of parent teaching during shared book reading and whether it encourages children to read more in Mandarin and in turn how that affects emergent literacy outcomes. The last ongoing research project aims to examine biliteracy issues which are central but underexplored in the curriculum. This project looks at developing and implementing an interventional school and home program for children from disadvantaged homes that increases children’s exposure to vocabulary in both English and Mother Tongue. In turn, the utility of such a biliterate interventional approach on early literacy outcomes of these children is examined.

Critical Issues and Topics An examination of existing language policies and research findings reveals five critical concerns that need to be considered because they can potentially affect preschooler language development. These concerns pertain to: (1) aligning the ideology of the bilingual education framework and research findings on language as well as emergent and early literacy development among Singaporean preschoolers, (2) challenges regarding the maintenance of mother tongue languages, (3) balancing socioemotional competencies and language as well as emergent and early literacy instruction in the curriculum, (4) a practical solution for incorporating learning through play and explicit instruction under the Nurturing Early Learners framework, and (5) the adequacy of teaching preparation.

Aligning the Bilingual Curriculum Ideology and Research Findings The first critical issue that needs to be considered is the discrepancy between the bilingual framework ideology and research findings. The current bilingual

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framework subscribes to the idea that English and mother tongues are separate subjects that do not interact to influence the development of each other. This is also the prevalent view in the preschool curriculum in that teaching guidelines in the Nurturing Early Learners for each language do not discuss how the two languages might influence one another despite an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. However, research findings with Singaporean preschoolers appear to run counter to this view. As mentioned, the development of English language skills with regards to phonemic awareness and spelling is influenced to some extent by characteristics of the home language of children (Dixon et al. 2012a; O’Brien et al. 2019; Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011). In some cases, the home language has facilitative effects on English learning in that children draw on component language skills that they pick up in the learning of their home language to support reading and writing in English (Dixon et al. 2012a; O’Brien et al. 2019). In other cases, the home language exerts an interference effect in that children experience more difficulty with learning certain language elements of English because these elements are absent in their home language (Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011). The findings suggest that the current framework that assumes the bilingual child as two monolinguals in one may not adequately reflect how bilinguals learn, as the two languages are found to interact (e.g., Creese and Blackledge 2010; Velasco and García 2014; Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011). Revisions to the curriculum might be required to align it with the reality of bilingual learning in Singapore today. In addition, as addressed above, the findings suggest that there are differences in how languages interact and influence English learning across different groups of bilingual children (i.e., Chinese-English, Malay-English, and Tamil-English) (e.g., Dixon et al. 2012a; Yeong and Rickard Liow 2011). These differences should be considered in the curriculum to better cater to the learning needs of children from different bilingual groups.

Challenges of Maintaining Mother Tongues A second critical issue pertains to the challenges associated with the maintenance of the mother tongues. Local research has highlighted the importance of exposure to mother tongue at home in promoting the development of mother tongues of preschoolers (Li and Rao 2000; Li and Tan 2016; Li et al. 2016; Sun et al. 2018). However, as previously shown, official statistics in the country have shown that there is a decline in exposure to and proficiency in the mother tongue at home over the years (Singapore Department of Statistics 2011). According to the findings in a review of the mother tongue curriculum carried out by a committee set up by the Ministry of Education in 2010, the lack of exposure to mother tongue languages at home was the central reason for the decrease in proficiency in mother tongues (Ministry of Education 2011). However, researchers have suggested that the underlying source of the decline in mother tongues is the unequal language statuses given to English and mother tongues (e.g., Cavallaro and Serwe 2010; Curdt-Christiansen and Sun 2016). This inequality is reflected in two ways. First, being the working language of the country, English provides access to

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educational and economic opportunities. Second, the emphasis on English in the school curriculum is reflected in that almost all the important content subjects are taught in English, taking up most of the curriculum time, and accounting for the majority of high-stakes testing. In contrast, mother tongues are taught as second language subjects. Therefore, the differential functions and emphasis on English versus mother tongues at both the educational and societal levels have led to the perception of English use being afforded higher status (Bokhorst-Heng 1998). This perception has encouraged increased use of English in the home and larger community over time, often at the expense of mother tongue use (Dixon et al. 2012c), leading to further decline in children’s overall exposure to and proficiency in their mother tongues (Chinese Language Curriculum and Pedagogy Review Committee 2004; Curdt-Christiansen and Sun 2016). May (2006) has cautioned that there is a danger of dominant languages completely displacing the less dominant ones in societies where multiple languages are spoken because there is often greater privilege and importance attached to the dominant language. Therefore, it would be necessary to first address the issue of the inequality in statuses of English and mother tongue in order to tackle the language shift problem (Ng 2014). The review of the mother tongue guidelines led to recommendations to use different teaching methods for different groups of children of different mother tongue proficiency (Ministry of Education 2011) to address the language shift issue. These methods include simplifying the mother tongue curriculum in a bid to help children who are not as proficient in mother tongue to cope with the demands of the language (Zhao and Liu 2008), which is well-intentioned. However, it is possible that this may further reduce the quantity of mother tongue input which could be counterintuitive, as the problem that it sought to address is to encourage the use of mother tongue languages among young children in their daily interactions. Hence, re-examination of the underlying antecedents to the language shift is needed to effectively negotiate the issue of declining use and proficiency of mother tongues.

Socioemotional Competencies and Language and Emergent/Early Literacy A third critical concern presents itself in the relative emphasis of different learning areas and stages of learning outcomes, namely pertaining to language and literacy instruction under the new preschool framework. The shift towards a more holistic framework represents a significant change in ideology in preschool education for a country which has traditionally placed a great deal of emphasis on academic achievement. However, although the framework points out the importance on building academic skills (literacy, numeracy, and science), it appears to place greater emphasis on social and emotional skills (Tan 2007). The merging of a curriculum foci on children’s social needs (from the Ministry of Social and Family Development’s childcare model) and primary school readiness (from the Ministry of Education’s kindergarten model) is a positive step. However, an examination of the desired

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outcomes of kindergarten outlined in the Nurturing Early Learners framework shows that only one of the eight outcomes is related to language and literacy (i.e., to be able to listen and speak with understanding). Most of the outcomes are associated with socio-emotional competencies (e.g., to be able to relate to others, to be willing to share and to take turns with others). Although the move towards a holistic education framework is welcomed, there is also the concern that in the bid to do so, increased emphasis on socio-emotional competencies instead of language and literacy might see a swing from one extreme to another. As a result, preschools might move from a traditional focus on academic drilling and testing to fostering social and emotional aspects at the expense of language and literacy. This concern is warranted due to research findings among preschool teachers in other countries that have demonstrated how teachers prefer certain skills over the others. For instance, in a study conducted by Piotrkowski et al. (2000) within a school district in New York, only 19% of kindergarten teachers believed that knowing the alphabet was absolutely necessary. This was in contrast to that of more than 60% of teachers who reported socioemotional competencies to be essential skills in preschool. Research conducted at a smaller scale in Singapore also appears to support Piortrkowski et al.’s (2000) study. In an interview study conducted by Lim and Torr (2008) with eight local preschool teachers, most participants highlight the importance to build up children’s confidence, with one participant stating that writing and spelling was secondary to confidence building. Researchers have pointed out that high-quality preschool education is one where both socio-emotional and academic skills are developed adequately (Wall et al. 2006). The placement of some skills to the exclusion of others in preschools might lead to a negative effect on the quality of preschool education in the long run. Alternatively, it is possible to merge multiple modes of learning, such as using storybooks to promote perspective taking and pro-social behaviors to achieve a happy medium (e.g., Cook et al. 2018).

Practical Solution for Incorporating Learning through Play and Explicit Instruction The fourth critical issue pertains to the nature of instruction of emergent literacy skills under the Nurturing Early Learners framework. The framework emphasizes constructivist educational philosophies, in which children take an active role in the creation of knowledge (Zulkifli 2007). Researchers indicate that the framework advocates for a less instructional approach to allow for learning through play (Tan 2017). Teachers take the role of “interested supporters in learning” (Ministry of Education 2012, p. 21) to support children’s learning by planning interactive classroom activities and creating an environment that encourages children to learn through exploration (Ministry of Education 2012). The Nurturing Early Learners framework guidelines highlight the importance of promoting incidental learning in the classroom and that teachers should model the correct use of language (Ministry of Education 2012, p. 22). However, explicit instruction does not appear to be

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mentioned, even though much research has supported the necessity of explicit instruction in code-related skills (e.g., letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and phonics) in helping children negotiate the demands of reading in later years (see Castles et al. 2018, for a review). Even though it is not explicitly stated in the framework guidelines, many classrooms do have phonics programs that are used, albeit not consistently across classrooms. Teaching of mother tongue early literacy skills is also often observed in classrooms, but again this is not done uniformly across classrooms, leading to a patchwork of preparedness. Although incidental learning is one way to acquire skills, such as in the case of vocabulary, research suggests it should not take the place of explicit instruction (e.g., Sonbul and Schmitt 2009). Instead, structured teaching, in which a scope and sequence is specified, should be coupled with developmentally appropriate activities (in line with a play-based curriculum) in promoting learning. Specifically, research with Singaporean teachers shows that teachers’ beliefs about language and literacy are gradually shifting from focusing on explicit instruction in code-related skills to incidental learning strategies with the introduction of the Nurturing Early Learners framework (Lim and Torr 2007). Indeed, in an observational study of 51 preschool classrooms during mother tongue lessons, only 2% of teachers often taught language forms (e.g., having children spell, read or write, or teaching decoding strategies), while 44% rarely did so (O’Brien et al. 2020). This discrepancy between framework instructional principles and empirical findings in reading practices poses a concern on how language and literacy development of children might be affected, particularly when children are learning to read in two languages and must quickly become proficient in both languages over the early primary school years.

Adequacy of Teacher Preparation A final critical issue that needs to be considered is associated with teacher preparation. Teachers’ mastery and knowledge of emergent and early literacy concepts (e.g., consonants, blends, and phonemes) affect the quality of their instruction that in turn impact student literacy outcomes (e.g., McCutchen et al. 2002). However, research in the USA, Canada, and Australia has consistently shown inadequate teachers’ knowledge of linguistic concepts required to provide effective instruction for beginning learners (e.g., Binks-Cantrell et al. 2012; Mahar and Richdale 2008; Moats and Foorman 2003). Locally, research with current preschool teachers suggests that they also have concerns about the adequacy of their linguistic knowledge (Bautista et al. 2016; Lim and Torr 2008). As part of the three-pronged approach to reforming preschool education in Singapore, the government has taken steps to improve the training and preparation of preschool teachers. All teachers are required to have at least a diploma in teaching where they attend a professional certificate course comprising of both coursework and practicum components. However, researchers also suggest that it is unclear if

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these steps prepare teachers well for preschool teaching, because there might be differences in quality of the programs offered by the different diploma/certificate programs (e.g., Tan 2017). It is also unclear whether these programs guarantee that the teachers acquire adequate linguistic knowledge as research has shown that different teacher preparation programs can result in vastly different teacher linguistic knowledge outcomes (e.g., Hudson et al. 2021). This may be a concern because under the current kindergarten framework, there is no preset syllabus for language and literacy. Teachers are required to plan appropriate activities to cater to children’s learning through their observations of children’s abilities, interests, and learning needs. Therefore, adequate linguistic knowledge is crucial for developing instruction that adequately supports children’s language development. Relatedly, research supporting cross-linguistic transfer of skills between languages shows that the degree of similarity between the structures of the two languages of bilingual children can moderate the extent of transfer. Teacher preparation courses thus need to incorporate content that raises awareness of crosslinguistic transfer between the English and the respective mother tongues represented in Singapore. This may provide them with insights into the advantages and challenges for the different bilingual learner groups in Singapore (i.e., EnglishChinese, English-Malay, and English-Tamil) because of the overlap (or lack thereof) between the two languages they learn. Courses that provide teachers with opportunities to apply knowledge about cross-linguistic transfer in pedagogy may also be beneficial. In sum, although there has been a greater focus on teacher training to provide preschool instruction, questions about teachers’ mastery of literacy concepts, as well as about their understanding of how languages interact with one another to moderate learning of bilingual children, need to be further explored.

Future Research Directions A review of the literature in this chapter reveals a number of critical concerns that reflect the gaps in our understanding of issues surrounding language and literacy development of preschoolers under the new preschool framework. These gaps in understanding point us to several future research directions. First, future research thus needs to systematically examine the nature of the interaction between languages among the different groups of bilinguals using large-scale empirical studies. Additionally, qualitative approaches in the form of ethnographic studies that examine bilingual learning and teaching experiences from multiple perspectives (e.g., child, teacher, parent) should also be provided. These may bring meaningful data to gain insight into the issues pertaining to learning to read in two languages within the bilingual educational system in the country. In addition, research should also consult relevant major hypotheses and theories to guide bilingual language policy and pedagogy in the country. Specifically, the interdependence hypothesis would be useful as a guiding framework in the development of effective bilingual teaching strategies that account for the interaction

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between languages of bilingual children in Singapore. The linguistic and orthographic proximity hypothesis (Kahn-Horwitz et al. 2011) would be useful in considering the extent of overlap in characteristics of the two languages of a bilingual might moderate language and literacy learning and outcomes. Another area for future research is teacher training in literacy and language awareness. Research has underscored the importance of adequate linguistic knowledge on the teacher’s part to ensure effective beginning literacy instruction is provided. However, little is known about teacher knowledge, specifically, whether preparation programs provide adequate training in this area. Future research should thus examine the gaps in linguistic knowledge that preschool teachers might have and inquire about how training programs can efficiently address these gaps. In addition, the significant shift in preschool ideology means that teachers would have to re-center their teaching philosophies and adjust their approach to teaching and learning accordingly. Future research should also focus on examining teacher instructional strategies in the area of language and literacy (e.g., phonology, morphology, vocabulary, reading comprehension). These should be taken under the new framework as to whether these strategies align with evidence-based practices in the literature (Lim and Torr 2007, 2008). Finally, the Nurturing Early Learners framework guidelines advocate for teacherparent partnerships (Epstein 2001) to better support children’s learning. Home literacy practices have been found to be an important predictor of language development in both English and mother tongues among Singaporean preschoolers (e.g., Sun et al. 2018). In addition, Singaporean parents are found to exert a strong influence on teachers’ instructional practices at the preschool level (e.g., Berthelsen et al. 2011; Ebbeck and Warrier 2008). For instance, preschools tend to put greater emphasis on academic components in the curriculum if parents express concerns about their children’s ability to meet the curricular demands when they enter primary school. Therefore, future research should explore ways to encourage parent involvement to support the development of both English and home language. In light of varied research internationally (e.g., Zuilkowski et al. 2019) that has shown a relation between socioeconomic status (SES) factors, such as parental education and income and literacy development in young children, an examination of how SES factors might moderate both parent involvement and children’s literacy also is likely to provide insight into how preschools with different SES groups can develop their literacy abilities.

Conclusions This chapter has evaluated issues surrounding language and literacy development of children in English and their mother tongues among preschoolers. Specifically, the major tenets have been outlined for both a bilingual educational framework and the Nurturing Early Learners framework for developing language and literacy in preschools. Further review of early and current research findings on preschoolers’ literacy outcomes shows how they are aligned or misaligned with the current

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educational frameworks. The examination reveals a number of critical issues that need to be addressed. Particularly, the implementation of the broader bilingual education model (which is more a policy than a curriculum or directive) is what needs to be reconsidered to adequately account for the interaction between languages of bilingual children. Furthermore, a significant challenge in the maintenance of mother tongues poses a danger of a shift towards a monolingual society, which holds great significance for the goals of the bilingual policy in the country. Additionally, this challenge also highlights the potential loss of heritage and culture associated with these mother tongues. Finally, some potential challenges are noted that might arise in the delivery of language and literacy instruction as a result of shifts in pedagogical ideology to favor the development of social competencies in preschool. In light of these critical issues, future research should be conducted to re-examine the bilingual education model, as well as to evaluate teacher training. This may ensure that instruction maintains a high quality across classrooms.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education ▶ Preparing Teachers for Early Language Education ▶ Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Linguistic Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Private Nurseries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . State Kindergartens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main Theoretical Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabic Diglossia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Child-at-Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Maid Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curricular Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bilingual Development in the Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multilingual Preschool Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Projects and Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translanguaging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Public Literacy Events and Children’s Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Government Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language-Based Community Playgroups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Issues and Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home Language and Literacy Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MSA Versus Home Dialect in Early Years Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teacher Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Limited Focus on the Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Critical Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future Research Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Arabic Diglossia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Optimal Conditions for Emergent Biliteracy Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technology in Early Language and Literacy Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 914 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 915 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 915

Abstract

This chapter examines early language education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a vibrant plurilingual context that has two dominant languages, Arabic and English. Arabic is the UAE’s official language, and speakers of Arabic include Emirati citizens who form a minority of the overall population, as well as expatriate residents from across the Arab world. However, English is used as the contemporary lingua franca, due to the superdiversity of the majority multinational expatriate population. Given the volume of global immigration to the UAE, other languages are widely spoken, including Farsi, Hindi, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Tagalog, and Urdu. For the national population, free, state-sponsored Arabic-medium kindergarten education is offered from 4 years of age, while both national and expatriate parents must pay for private prekindergarten education which is offered mostly in English. The focus of this chapter is primarily on early language education in nursery (birth to 4 years) and kindergarten (4 and 5 years) settings, with some reference to the early elementary years (6–8 years). Little research attention is paid to languages other than Arabic and English in early childhood education in the UAE. In light of recent moves to develop Arabic-English bilingualism and emergent biliteracy from an early age through the state education system, the chapter pays particular attention to issues and challenges surrounding early duallanguage education. In addition, some recent, although limited, developments in multilingual provision in the early years are discussed. Home language and literacy factors outside formal educational settings are also addressed. Although early childhood language education in the UAE is not yet well researched, key studies published in English are referenced, critical issues are addressed, and future development and research directions are outlined. Keywords

United Arab Emirates · Early language education · Arabic language teaching · English language teaching · Early bilingual teaching · Early biliteracy teaching

Introduction In order to contextualize early language education, this chapter begins with a brief profile of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which was established in 1971 when seven sheikhdoms in the Middle East’s Lower Gulf were united under a federal agreement. The seven emirates are, in alphabetical order: Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah, and Um Al Quwain. Of these, the most prominent emirates are the political capital, Abu Dhabi, and the economic capital,

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Dubai, which are also the most dynamic in terms of educational development. These two emirates are the primary focus of this chapter, although other emirates, most notably Sharjah and Ras al Khaimah, are also active in promoting education. The UAE’s national Ministry of Education (MoE)is headquartered in Dubai, from where its reach extends across the country, as state-provided education is mostly centralized. The Ministry oversees all state school education, including all kindergarten classes, whether housed in kindergarten-only schools or as part of multilevel schools. The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) oversees private education in schools in Dubai. In Abu Dhabi, the Education and Knowledge Department (ADEK) oversees nurseries and private schools in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. The UAE is one of the youngest nations in the Middle East, and remarkable economic, infrastructural, social, and educational progress has been achieved within a few decades. The population was less than a quarter of a million in the year before the foundation of the nation in 1971, but by 2020, it had increased to approximately ten million (Worldometers 2020), due to global economic immigration. Overall, expatriates on limited-term working visas comprise almost 90% of the resident population of the UAE. Rapid educational progress has been attained within that short time, from the initial stage of sparse educational provision which focused on memorization of the Koran, to the world’s highest concentration of private, international, and Englishmedium schools today (Warner and Burton 2017). The emirate of Abu Dhabi has focused in recent years on developing the quality of the state education sector in particular, whereas the emirate of Dubai has focused much effort on the development of the private education sector which has witnessed phenomenal growth in the past decade (KHDA 2018a). There are more than twice as many private schools as state schools in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi, state schools slightly outnumber private schools (Kippels and Ridge 2019). The distinction between state and private provision is an important factor of context which impacts upon any discussion of early language and literacy education in the UAE, as will become apparent throughout this chapter. In terms of national literacy development, 48% of adults in the UAE were illiterate in the 1970s; yet 40 years later, over 93% were literate (Crown Prince Court 2011), and by 2018 there was almost full literacy (Government.ae 2018a). Formerly a land of nomads, fishermen, and seafarers, there was little history of literacy in the pre-oil UAE (Taylor 2008). Within the Arab-speaking world in general where overall standards of literacy have been described as “shockingly low” (Myhill 2014, p. 200), the gains made by the UAE within a few decades are indeed impressive. Students in the UAE have achieved the highest scores among all the Arab countries in the international standardized reading test, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2016). Yet at the same time, the fact remains that the UAE still has to reach the international average in tests of student reading achievement. Germane to this situation is the fact that the early childhood education sector is not yet fully developed, relative to other educational sectors, and its importance for

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the future attainment of robust language and literacy standards is not yet fully realized. However, in response to the relative lack of attention to early childhood education in the past, one of the aims of the government’s national development agenda, UAE Vision 2021, is to increase investment in preschool education (UAE Cabinet n.d.). Metanalyses of international research confirm that successful literacy achievement at school has its foundation in effective early language and literacy practices in preschool settings, as well as within the home (Mitchell et al. 2008; Costa and Araújo 2018). It must be emphasized from the outset that research and policy on early childhood education and care in the UAE are in their infancy. Indeed, as Mehana (2018) points out in her overview of early childhood provision in the country, there is inadequate data on children and families in general. Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, a global survey of English-medium instruction in early childhood settings by Murphy and Evangelou (2016), for example, excludes the entire Arabian Gulf, even though English is in widespread use as the medium of communication and instruction in private early childhood settings in the UAE, and is taught as a second language and used as a co-medium of instruction in many state schools from kindergarten onward. Despite the lack of published research data – and it should be noted here that this chapter only references research studies and data published in English – and despite the lack of policy documents, but fueled by sources that influence government policy in the UAE such as the 2019 World Bank Report (World Bank 2019) which emphasizes the importance of early childhood education, there is increasing recognition of its importance in establishing foundational dispositions and skills for the future.

Structure of Early Childhood Education Early childhood is defined internationally as the period from birth to 8 years (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO n.d.], National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC n.d.]. Structurally, provision for early childhood education in the UAE extends through nursery (up to 4 years), kindergarten (4 and 5 years), and then early elementary school (Grade 1 begins at 6 years). Attendance is not compulsory in kindergarten or nursery, and becomes mandatory from Grade 1 onward (Government.ae 2018a). The role of nursery is described by the Ministry of Education as: a place designated to care for children and develop their capabilities, skills and dispositions. It will develop all aspects of the child, such as the physical, mental, cognitive, psychological, motor, social and emotional development. It receives children up to four years old (MoE 2018).

The role of kindergarten (KG) is defined as “preparing children to be successful in primary level or (Cycle 1) and beyond. KG students spend their time developing social, language, physical and academic skills” (MoE 2018). In this chapter, the primary focus is on the nursery and kindergarten sectors, with kindergarten being

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subdivided into two levels: KG1 (4 years) and KG2 (5 years). Unless specified otherwise, the term “preschool” is used in this chapter to refer to both nursery and kindergarten.

Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Linguistic Factors Due to the country’s unusual demographics, any discussion of early language and literacy education must be first prefaced by reference to the various segments of UAE society, and to the roles of Arabic, English, and other languages within the country’s economic, cultural, and social life. Arabic is the official language of the UAE, and recent policy pronouncements have repositioned Arabic as essential for national culture and identity (Cook 2019). National citizens (known as “Emiratis”) are native speakers of Arabic and are a small minority overall, comprising approximately 11% of the total resident population of 9.5 million (Global Median Insight 2020), but are the dominant class, politically and socioeconomically. Other speakers of Arabic include expatriates from across the Arab world, including Egyptians, Lebanese, and Jordanian, who together with Iranians are estimated to comprise 23% of the population (Badry 2015). The expatriate sector also includes a large population of linguistically diverse Asians, especially Indians who comprise a little over 27% of the whole population, as well as Pakistanis at almost 13% and Filipinos at over 5% (Global Median Insight 2020). When this Asian majority is coupled with millions of expatriate residents from every continent on the globe, it is estimated that 77% of the total resident population is non-Arabic speaking (Badry 2015). In such a linguistically superdiverse context, English is the country’s lingua franca, and it is positioned as a driver of national development and economic growth (Cook 2019).

Private Nurseries Turning now to an examination of the country’s provision for early childhood education, there were 497 nurseries in the UAE in 2014, with 35,552 children registered (Government.ae 2018b), of which only 39 – or less than 8% – were government-funded (Salem 2014). Despite a cabinet decision in 2006 that all government institutions with more than 50 female Emirati employees should offer childcare for employees in their headquarters, by 2014 only 10% of workplaces had complied (Salem 2014). Nursery services have been under the remit of the Ministry of Social Affairs (Bennett 2009); however, licensing of nurseries was taken over by the Ministry of Education in 2016, signaling a move toward greater recognition of the educative function of nurseries. Nevertheless, among the four areas outlined in the Ministry of Education’s (MoE 2018) compliance inspection manual for nurseries (organization and management, safety, services and care, buildings and resources), there is little mention of their developmental or educative function. However, newly published standards for nursery inspections by the local education authority in Abu

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Dhabi, ADEK (2019), include language and literacy development alongside the more functional aspects emphasized in the Ministry of Education’s inspection manual. In fact, in the UAE, early childhood education and early childhood care tend to be viewed as two separate concepts (Dillon 2019), despite international trends to merge the two (OECD 2014). As well as limited governmental provision for education at the nursery stage, there is also limited officially published information available. In fact, the country’s two key governmental documents on nursery education date back to 2009: the Bennett Report (Bennett 2009) for the Dubai Knowledge and Human Development Authority [KHDA], and the National Childcare Standards (Government of Dubai 2009). Thus, as Dillon noted in her overview of early childhood education in the UAE, published in 2019, there still was at that time no national curricular framework for prekindergarten education in the UAE. At nursery level, the vast majority of establishments are privately owned, feepaying establishments, and cater mostly for the children of the expatriate sector of the population, although many national children also attend private nurseries. The language of instruction is most usually English, with little provision for Arabic (Bennett 2009). The nursery workforce in Dubai, for example, is almost entirely (89%) non-national and non-Arabic speaking (Gandhi 2012). Diverse curricula from around the world are taught in preschool classes in private nurseries, and in nursery classes in private schools, and include British, Canadian, Australian, American, Filipino, French, German, Indian, Iran, Japanese, North American, Pakistani, and Russian curricula, as well as the increasingly influential International Baccalaureate (Government.ae 2019). Most of these international schools, however, use English as the medium of instruction. Later in this chapter, we will take a closer look at the types of early language curricula on offer in preschools in the UAE.

State Kindergartens Governmental provision for early childhood education is focused mainly on the state kindergarten sector. In 1968, the first public kindergarten in the UAE was established for Emirati nationals in Abu Dhabi, the capital city. Ten years later, there were over 1000 state-run kindergarten classrooms across the country (Coughlin et al. 2009). By 2018, there were 1, 693 state kindergarten classrooms (MoE 2019), catering primarily for Emirati children. State kindergarten is “designed to prepare children to be successful in Cycle 1 [Grades 1-4] and beyond” (ADEK n.d.). Thus, the kindergarten period is viewed primarily as preparing 4- and 5-year-old children for successful future academic achievement and is not yet recognized as an important stage in the child’s educational life per se. Although attendance is not compulsory, Emirati national participation rates in state kindergarten are very high, unlike nursery enrolment. Bennett (2009) reported that the UAE has one of the highest participation rates internationally, with over 90% of children enrolled. Originally, instruction was solely in Arabic (Gandhi 2012). In the capital of Abu Dhabi since 2010, however, there have been concerted efforts to

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build a bilingual (Arabic and English) national population, with kindergarten following a “bi-literate, bilingual approach” (ADEK n.d.). As such, language learning outcomes for state kindergartens for Emirati national include the ability to “distinguish between letters in Arabic and in English in terms of shape within the word,” and to “present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners through drawing and dictating in English and Arabic to depict an event, tell a story, or present an idea” (MoE 2014). These aims might suggest a goal of balanced bilingualism; however, as Bryam and Hu (2013) point out, balanced bilinguals are rare, and few bilinguals are equally proficient in both languages. Hence, a broader definition of bilingualism as “able to speak two (or more) languages, to some level of proficiency” (Bialystok 2001, p. 5) is appropriate to encompass the reality of differing levels of developmental proficiency in both languages.

Main Theoretical Concepts Two salient features of the UAE’s sociolinguistic and educational landscape that impact on early childhood language education are discussed in this section: Arabic diglossia, and the impact of the “child at home” approach to early childhood care and education. These two phenomena pertain to the Emirati national population in particular.

Arabic Diglossia When young Emirati children enter Arabic-medium state kindergarten, having already acquired spoken competence in the vernacular home dialect of Gulf Arabic, they face a major linguistic challenge. They must learn to comprehend, and later on, to read and write, not in their native variety of Arabic, but in modern standard Arabic, known as MSA. This is due to the phenomenon of Arabic diglossia, whereby the standard “high” form is used in formal and written settings, while nonstandard “low” forms are used by ordinary people for daily oral communication. Many scholars believe that diglossia causes poor acquisition of literacy skills among Arab learners (for example, Haeri 2009; Maamouri 1998), and that it places an additional language learning burden on Emirati school children (Al-Sharhan 2007). This linguistic situation is considered likely to contribute to low levels of first language literacy in the Arab world in general (Maamouri 1998) and may be an aggravating factor in the poor general attainment levels in schools. In Myhill’s analysis of the reasons for the low literacy rates in the Arab world (Myhill 2014), Arabic diglossia is identified as the primary cause of reading difficulties. For preschool children, one implication of diglossia is that they may face challenges in oral comprehension of storybooks during read-aloud sessions, as children’s books are mostly written in the modern standard form (MSA) which differs from their home dialect of Gulf Arabic. Bearing in mind that MSA is not the language of

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everyday speech, but a literary register that has to be learned in school, it may be difficult to engage a preschooler in a language register which is markedly different from the everyday language with which the child is familiar. Skillful teacher scaffolding of comprehension between children’s home dialect and the standard form in the storybooks is needed. Yet, as will be discussed later in this chapter, there are currently no formal teacher training courses in the UAE for teaching Arabic to young learners that would address such challenges. From a theoretical perspective, socioconstructivist and sociocultural paradigms of how languages are learned, building upon the work of Vygotsky (1978), emphasize the role of more knowledgeable others, particularly adult caregivers, in providing linguistic models which lead and shape the development of young children’s emergent language (Wells 1983; Lantolf and Thorne 2006). Therefore, the language models offered to young children in the home are of utmost importance. Within a context of diglossia with standard and nonstandard forms differing significantly, early exposure to standard forms is very important. However, a study by Carroll, Al Kahwaji, and Litz (2017) found that in Emirati homes, parents naturally and exclusively use local dialect, and there is very little exposure to standard Arabic, confirming similar findings reported by Tibi, Johsi, and McLeod (2013), and Tibi and McLeod (2014).

The Child-at-Home Allied to the earlier is the fact that the home is the first and arguably the most critical site for informal early language education. In the UAE, and for the Emirati national population in particular, most young children are kept at home before the age of 4 years, according to Bennett (2009) who reported that less than 5% of Emirati children attend nursery. This has been labeled as the child at home approach to early childhood care (Gandhi 2012; Baker 2015b). Factors contributing to the preference for keeping young children at home include relatively fewer job opportunities for females as opposed to males, prevalence of affordable domestic help in the home, extended family care network available to Emirati national citizens, and lack of subsidized, affordable, and early-childhood education and care.

The Maid Phenomenon Moreover, the prevalence of “maids,” the term commonly used in the UAE for female domestic workers who perform household duties and raise children in family homes in the UAE, both national and expatriate, is also pertinent to language development. According to Gandhi (2012), more than half of all children under the age of three in the Arabian Gulf are cared for by maids. Such domestic childcare offers a more affordable alternative to costly private early childhood care and education in a nursery. These female domestic workers often act as a primary caregiver, and by default, provide a daily language model. Explaining the

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phenomenon, Gandhi (2012, p.17) notes that “the child-at-home model is reinforced by the availability of low-paid, English speaking, female labor from Asian countries, notably from India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.” These English-speaking home helpers contribute to what has been described as a “nanny culture” where English is spoken daily during childcare in the homes of Arabic-speaking families (Hopkyns et al. 2018). However, as Tibi and McLeod (2014) note, most home helpers speak nonstandard forms of Arabic and English, neither of which is their primary language, and therefore, Emirati children in the UAE spend a lot of time exposed to nonstandard forms in both their first and second language. In a study of the linguistic effects of maids on early language development by Roumani (2005), it was concluded that children’s language development is hampered by the presence of such home helpers. In fact, it has been suggested that as a result “children . . . may lose their mother tongue (Arabic) and not acquire proficiency in any other language” (Taha-Thomure 2008, p. 190), a situation identified by Lambert (1975) as “subtractive bilingualism.” What have not yet been addressed in the research or in the popular discourse, however, are the possible benefits of exposure to diverse languages at an early age from domestic helpers in the home.

Major Contributions In this section, noteworthy areas where the UAE has experienced innovative developments in early language and literacy education are discussed. These are: the embracing of international curricula, the efforts to develop early bilingualism in Arabic and English, the efforts to promote higher standards in the learning and teaching of Arabic in the early years, and the emergence of interest in multilingual early childhood education.

Curricular Choice One notable feature of private early childhood education in the UAE, and a consequence of its globalized demographics, is the abundance of parental choice when it comes to selecting an appropriate school and curriculum for one’s child. The most commonly offered curriculum in the private preschool sector is the UK’s statutory national Early Years Foundation Stage [EYFS], which caters for children up to 5 years (UK Department of Education 2017). In fact, the majority of private schools in Dubai (37%) offer the UK national curriculum, according to the Dubai School Inspections Bureau (2019). The bureau publishes annual school-inspection reports on its website and ranks UK-curriculum schools as the highest-rated among all inspected private schools. The EYFS framework sets guidelines for the provision of a language-rich environment, and early literacy development is a central part of the framework, enabling preschool children “to link sounds and letters and to begin to read and write” (UK Department of Education 2017, p. 8).

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As a broad framework, the EYFS curriculum does not contain any detailed teaching strategies, however; nor does it offer teaching resources for teachers. In terms of assessment, while the standards require that there are opportunities for children to develop and use their home language in play and learning, it is stipulated that assessment must be conducted in English. Furthermore, in terms of provision for second language development, which is an important consideration in a multilingual context such as the UAE, it has been noted that the UK national curriculum is weak when it comes to additional language education (for example, Murphy and Evangelou 2016; McLelland 2018). Curricula from North America are followed in many preschool classrooms in the UAE, with 17% of inspected schools in Dubai adopting curricula from the USA (Dubai School Inspection Bureau 2019). One of these is the Creative Curriculum which is more highly structured and prescriptive than the EYFS, and includes detailed teaching instructions and resources. The Creative Curriculum must be purchased, however, unlike the EYFS framework which is free and publicly available to providers and parents. The preschool language learning outcomes in the Creative Curriculum include: following directions, using conventional grammar, engaging in conversations, and using social rules of language. Literacy outcomes include demonstration of phonological awareness, knowledge of the alphabet, knowledge of print, and writing to convey meaning (Creative Curriculum n.d., pp. 10–11). It should be noted that, like the EYFS curriculum, the Creative Curriculum has also been charged with assuming a monolingual (English language) norm, rather than embracing multilingualism (File et al. 2012). In addition to these imported mainstream curricular systems, global influences are also evident in the emergence of a number of private preschools using play-based approaches, including European models such as Reggio Emilia (Baker 2015a) and Montessori-inspired nurseries. There is also a “mix and match” approach adopted by many schools, with more than one curriculum option available within the same school. For example, the early years section of a large private school in Dubai states that it offers “a Reggio-inspired programme” (GEMS World Academy 2020) for very young children 2–3 years, and then switches to the early years component of the International Baccalaureate’s Primary Years’ Program (PYP) for 3–6-year olds. Turning to the state kindergarten sector which caters for the Emirati national population, in terms of curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood language education, it has been observed that in the Middle East, “ECE was historically based on the Quran and Islamic practices, reading, writing, poetry, rhetoric, mathematics and social studies” (Roopnarine et al. 2018, p. 5). In UAE state kindergartens, this literacy-heavy legacy may be discerned in a lingering emphasis on structured academic activities, including a strong focus on letter formation and word recognition, evident in the prevalence of workbooks in state kindergarten classrooms. In this regard, some years ago, kindergarten teachers in the UAE were reported to lack awareness of developmentally appropriate teaching practices (Al-Momani et al. 2008). However, a later study, after reforms had been implemented, found that they had begun to implement more developmentally appropriate practices in the early years (Al-Qaryouti et al. 2016). Where oral skills

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and free play are highlighted in preschool settings in many parts of the world, early writing and reading are more strongly emphasized in UAE state kindergartens. Regarding the pedagogical approach adopted in state kindergartens, Baker (2015b) reports on tensions for teachers operating within a curricular framework that ostensibly emphasizes play, yet sets some daunting academic performance outcomes. This is evident, for example, in the requirement for children to have acquired 100 sight words in Arabic by the end of the second year of kindergarten (5 years of age). Teachers’ concern about the lack of time for free play and the requirement for the formal teaching of letters was also highlighted earlier by Sowa and Vega (2009). Elsewhere, Baker (2014, p. 30) cites a kindergarten teacher who complains that: We are pressured with not enough time in the day to play. I don’t think we should be learning letters to the amount of time that we are. There is such an emphasis on rote memorization of letters, colors, shapes and numbers. It is very much a ‘drill and fill’ kind of day. There isn’t enough time for play in an academic curriculum.

In this regard, Mehana (2018, p. 94) concludes from her research on state kindergarten teachers that “a prevailing view was that teaching academic skills in a structured environment would help children prepare for Grade 1.” However, research elsewhere has found that free play time affords more opportunities for second language development of young learners than teacher-directed activities (Markova 2016; Schwartz and Deeb 2018). Despite the apparent academic emphasis, when von Suchodoletz et al. (2019) investigated teacher-child interactions in kindergartens in the UAE, they found that the classroom climate created by the teachers was generally warm and well-managed. However, when they looked at teacher-child early language interactions specifically focused on the development of child cognitive skills, they judged the teachers as limited in terms of the level of feedback and scaffolding offered.

Bilingual Development in the Early Years Until 2010, Arabic was the sole medium of instruction in state kindergartens and schools, and English had been taught as a foreign language for a few isolated class periods a week. (Gallagher 2011). Since then, the development of bilingualism and biliteracy in Arabic and English has become a goal of state education, following a paradigm shift in 2011 that saw the introduction of English as a medium of instruction alongside Arabic in Abu Dhabi (Gallagher 2016). As part of a rootand-branch reform of education (Matsumoto 2019), the New School Model launched by the former Abu Dhabi Education Council in 2010 included a reconceptualization of the medium of instruction in state schools from Arabic-only to Arabic-andEnglish. This was effective from the first year of kindergarten, and featured “a dual focus on the Arabic and English languages” (ADEC 2010). As part of systemic educational reform initiatives in Abu Dhabi, content and language integrated learning and teaching (CLIL) was introduced in state

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kindergartens (Dillon 2015). English became the language of teaching for mathematics and science, while Arabic remained the language of teaching for other topic areas, including social studies and Islamic education. Consequently, starting in 2010 until the Abu Dhabi Education Council was disbanded in 2017, coteaching for bilingualism was adopted in most state kindergarten classrooms in Abu Dhabi (Dillon et al. 2015; Dillon and Gallagher 2019). Indeed, coteaching for early bilingual and biliterate development was a notable feature of the state kindergarten landscape during the ADEC years (2010–2017). The country’s oil and gas-fueled economic prosperity at that time allowed for two full-time teachers in each kindergarten classroom: one Arabic-speaking, regionally trained teacher who taught Arabic language as well as social studies and Islamic studies; and one English-speaking, internationally trained teacher from overseas who taught English as well as mathematics and science. An investigation into coteaching in kindergarten during this period found that intercultural communication skills and an ethos of shared responsibility were necessary for successful coteaching in this context (Dillon and Gallagher 2019). With regard to effective teacher-child communication skills, one issue was that the English-speaking coteacher who did not speak the children’s native Arabic could struggle to make meaning clear to children and to parents. Effective home-school liaison is clearly a very important feature of early years education. Perhaps not surprisingly, challenges were reported for the overseas Anglophone teachers in liaising effectively with Arabic-speaking parents of kindergarten children (Stringer and Blaik-Hourani 2013; Baker 2017). Yet, as part of the efforts to promote literacy in Arabic in state kindergartens in Abu Dhabi, parental involvement is an important goal, with reading and writing journals listed as a key mechanism by which to involve them (ADEK 2018). Strategies for home-school mediation are needed, as well as professional development for teachers around culturally responsive teaching strategies. Implementation of the coteaching bilingual model was not smooth and was found to be inconsistent from school to school. The project was described as being “in a constant state of change and fluidity” (Dillon et al. 2015, p. 22). In 2017, it was discontinued in many schools following the disbandment of the local education council, ADEC. It was dubbed as “one of the most . . . controversial reforms in the region” by Al-Suwaidi (2017, p. 28) because of fears for the loss of Arabic due to the early adoption of English as the medium of instruction for mathematics and science (Gallagher 2016). Since 2017, bilingual teaching has continued in Abu Dhabi in a different form under the reunified national school system led by the Ministry of Education, and known as the UAE School Model (MoE 2017). This model currently sees two teachers working separately rather than collaboratively in state kindergarten classrooms in Abu Dhabi, one teacher for Arabic and subjects taught in Arabic (i.e., social studies and Islamic studies), and one teacher for English and subjects taught in English (i.e., mathematics and science). Moreover, the profile of the Englishmedium teacher is now, in most state kindergarten classes, a locally trained bilingual Emirati national rather than an internationally trained expatriate Anglophone.

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Multilingual Preschool Education As the burgeoning resident expatriate population becomes evermore linguistically diverse, and as the accumulated benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism begin to be more widely understood, the emergence of a small multilingual private preschool sector is also noteworthy, although limited in its scope. Several multilingual private nurseries have been established in Dubai (according to information published on the website uaenurseries.ae), including one called the Children’s Garden which offers options of French and German, as well as English as a first or second language, with Arabic as a third language. The Swiss International Scientific School offers either English with additional languages, or bilingual English-French, or English-German streams from prekindergarten onward. There are also nurseries which purport to adopt a rather eclectic approach: for example, The Yellow Brick Road establishment (accessed under “Islamic” curriculum on the uaenurseries.ae website) notes that its curriculum “is taught in English, Arabic and Mandarin,” while also embracing “the Reggio approach within the nursery curriculum of the UK Early Years Foundation stage.” Another example is The Green Grass Nursery which promotes itself as “the first multilingual preschool that provides (English, Arabic, French) education with Mandarin classes everyday.” It is difficult to ascertain the actual pedagogical approach to multilingual early education adopted by these private nurseries however, as there are no publiclyavailable inspection reports or policy documents or research studies to consult. The only available evidence is the espoused curriculum, as outlined on the nursery websites; however, the actual enacted curriculum remains unknown. Furthermore, although multilingual early years education is becoming more widely available for economically-dominant language groups, there is little or no provision of language education for less economically-strong immigrant population language groups. In the capital, Abu Dhabi, some state-funded, multilingual preschool education has been made available for Emirati nationals in recent years. Such schools offer elective multilingual education, rather than heritage language-based education, and mostly originate from oil-based, government-level international relationships with powerful trading partners. For example, young Emiratis are educated for free in a Japanese-medium kindergarten in the capital city which aims to have all children fluent in Japanese within 3 years. Also, a trilingual (Arabic, English, and Mandarin) state school that caters primarily for Arabicspeaking Emirati children has been thriving since 2006. Language teaching strategies in the kindergarten section of this school include the coteaching of stories and songs in each of these three languages within the same classroom, with children rotating between the English-speaking teacher, the Arabic-speaking teacher, and the Chinese-speaking teacher. Math and science topics are taught in English with Arabic support, facilitated under a coteaching model (Al-Suwaidi 2017).

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New Projects and Research In the following section, some notable new projects relating to early language and literacy are presented: first, a research project in the area of translanguaging; second, some public and government initiatives intended to promote early literacy in Arabic; and third, emerging community-based language playgroups.

Translanguaging One new niche line of inquiry that has potential for further investigation is the pedagogical use of translanguaging with young bilingual children in the UAE. Translanguaging is characterized as “the ways bilinguals draw on their full linguistic toolkits in order to process information, make meaning, and convey it to others” (Orelanna and Garcia 2014, p. 386). An investigation into the use of Arabic-English translanguaging within a children’s literature course for teacher candidates in Abu Dhabi focused on attitudes toward translingual books, which are a type of bilingual book where two or more languages are intentionally meshed within sentences and across sentences. Translingual books require the reader to draw upon more than one language to understand the story (Al-Bataineh and Gallagher 2018; Gallagher and Bataineh 2019). It was found that while bilingual kindergarten children received translingual picture storybooks with enthusiasm, Emirati teacher candidates were generally unsure about the merits of translanguaging in Arabic-English for young learners, believing that it threatens the development of their Arabic skills and undermines their linguistic identity.

Public Literacy Events and Children’s Literature Early language and literacy development are not confined to home or school alone. Important public events related to early childhood literacy development are the annual international book fairs, which are major para-educational public events in the UAE, and attract hundreds of exhibitors and many thousands of visitors. The Sharjah Book Fair, the fourth largest book fair in the world, has recently spawned a spin-off literary festival for children, Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, which attracted a quarter of a million visitors in 2018. These fairs have become popular evening outings for the whole family, and in the absence of public libraries, which are uncommon in the UAE, they are a place where books for younger as well as older children and adults are on display and available for purchase. Barza and von Suchodoletz (2016) have suggested that family literacy routines, such as reading bedtime stories, are not yet typically part of the Emirati national culture. A related study of Emirati parents’ attitudes to children’s reading found that they believed that the benefits of reading are linked to improving vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, and none of them mentioned reading for pleasure or for information (Carroll et al. 2017).

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The UAE has recently come to the fore in the regional book publishing industry, with a particular focus on the commissioning and production of high quality, engaging, and contemporary storybooks in Arabic for children. These include wordless picture story books which are especially suitable for younger children and are a new concept in the Arab world. Official support for organizations such as the Board on Books for Young People, for example, has enabled the publication of wordless books for young children and has spearheaded the development of awareness of the power of silent books across the Gulf (UAEBBY 2018). For very young children, such books are beneficial for the informal development of early book handling skills and concepts of print, and also for engendering a lifelong love of reading. It has been suggested that the lack of availability of quality children’s books in Arabic (due to factors such as regional political instability, poverty, and illiteracy, as cited by Dunges 2011), for example, has hindered the development of early literacy practices in Arabic. Now, however, the UAE has taken a leading role in redressing this deficit. A notable initiative is the lucrative Arabic children’s book award funded by the UAE’s state telecom firm, The Etisalat Award, which aims to “develop the children’s book industry in the UAE, to promote a reading culture among children and to build the capacities of practitioners in the field of reading promotion” (Etisalat Award n.d.). Such developments respond to calls for more storybooks in MSA, including books for very young learners (for example, Kirby and Capacci-Carbeaal 2014).

Other Government Initiatives Other official efforts to support emergent literacy include the commitment to providing a Knowledge Briefcase to each newborn Emirati child (Qasimi 2017; Jones 2017). This devolved from the designation of 2016 as the Year of Reading in the UAE during which multiple initiatives were launched to foster a culture of reading in the country, including The Arab Reading Challenge which was initiated and led by the UAE, and which reportedly involved 2.5 million children and 20,000 schools across the Arab region from Grade 1 (6 years) upward (Qasimi 2017). In addition, the UAE’s National Reading Strategy dedicated $30 million in funding to 30 national initiatives across various communities (Qasimi 2017), with the intention of laying the foundations of reading from early childhood. Such initiatives need to be complemented with parental outreach programs so that parents can learn to engage their children in appropriate language and literacy practices in the home; a point which is discussed further in the next section of this chapter. Indicative of a new interest in and support for family-based early childhood education and care, the Ministry of Education now offers suggestions on its website for informal, home-based, parent-led, and early years developmental activities across the socio-emotional, physical, cognitive, and linguistic domains (MoE 2020). Suggested activities are provided for each week of the year for different age groups within the range from birth to 4 years, and parents and caregivers are advised to

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select one activity in each domain and repeat it several times during the week. In the domain of language development, suggested activities include singing songs and chanting nonsense rhymes to develop awareness of rhyme and rhythm, and playing games such as “I Spy” to develop auditory discrimination.

Language-Based Community Playgroups The concept of immigrant community-based preschools is not common in the UAE, with the sector being dominated by for-profit English-medium nurseries and stateprovided Arabic-medium kindergartens. It is noteworthy in this regard that expatriate, male laborers comprise a large proportion of the UAE’s population, estimated at 34% in 2103 (GLLM 2015); however, their salaries are generally below the stipulated minimum required by law to enable them to sponsor their families to live with them in the UAE. As a result, the children of resident manual laborers are not educated in the UAE, but in their home countries, and this greatly reduces the potential pool of children of diverse linguistic backgrounds enrolled in early childhood education. On the other hand, although not common, some language-focused, community playgroups for young children have emerged on an informal, voluntary basis. Baby Arabia, for example, is an Arabic-speaking playgroup established by a mother who wanted her child to engage in play with other children in Arabic and was concerned that baby and toddler groups and preschools in Dubai are predominantly in English. Other examples of informal language-based playgroups for the children of expatriate families include a voluntary community playgroup for the Dutch-speaking community, a German-speaking group, a French-speaking group (Mamans de Dubai), a Russian-speaking group, and Irish language classes for children from the age of 4 years. Given the transitory nature of expatriate life, however, such groups may suddenly shrink – or even disband – when key members move on from the UAE. Moreover, it tends to be the more economically strong population groups who have the time and the means to create such voluntary language-based playgroups. In addition, these groups have not yet been researched, and little is known about their activities.

Critical Issues and Topics Salient critical issues and topics in early language education in the UAE are identified and analyzed in this section.

Home Language and Literacy Practices Language and literacy education begins in the home, and as noted earlier, it has been found that home literacy practices such as bedtime stories, read or told by parents,

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are not yet typically part of the Emirati national culture (Barza and von Suchodoletz 2016). Yet research from other contexts shows that family literacy routines, such as shared reading, are critical in developing positive dispositions toward reading, and there is a positive correlation between parental shared reading with children and their emergent literacy skills (Hall et al. 2018). This is especially important as the UAE seeks to improve the reading skills of its school-going population, as measured by the results of international tests such as PIRLS, the international test of reading taken toward the end of elementary school, which assesses the reading comprehension skills of students in their mother tongue. In its analysis of the findings from the 2016 PIRLS assessment in Dubai, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA 2018b) points out that early engagement with preliteracy tasks in the home is one of the most critical factors determining higher achievement in reading, as measured by PIRLS. These early language and literacy development activities include telling stories, singing songs, playing with alphabet toys, talking about activities, reading together, and reading signs and labels aloud. Emirati parents have reported that they lack culturally relevant books for their children – that is, books depicting culturally familiar characters and settings – and this has been identified as another barrier to emergent literacy development in Arabic (Barza and von Suchodoletz 2016). Parents also expressed a preference for children’s stories with a moral message, and in this regard it has been argued that language and literacy skills can also be transmitted to young learners through spiritual texts, such as the Koran (Lytra et al. 2016). In terms of awareness-raising about reading material and approaches to reading in the home, outreach programs are intended to inform parents and caregivers on child development topics, but these are limited. A notable initiative in this regard is the Positive Parenting series offered by the Early Childhood Education Center at Zayed University (ECLC n.d.) which includes sessions offering advice on reading for and with children at home. More parent and caregiver education to support early language development and emerging literacy is needed.

MSA Versus Home Dialect in Early Years Education Arabic language and pedagogy scholars, such as Ayari (1996), Abu-Rabia (2000), and Taha (2019), recommend early exposure to modern standard Arabic from kindergarten onward, to help young learners to begin to access the standard forms needed for later reading. Indeed, early exposure to standard forms has been found to have a positive impact on pupils’ later progress in learning to read in Arabic in the early grades (Kirby and Capacci-Carbeaal 2014). With regard to emergent literacy in Arabic, Al-Qaryouti et al. (2016) sought to determine kindergarten teachers’ self-reported evidence of supporting five core components in their teaching. These were identified as print awareness, phonological awareness, knowledge of books, knowledge of letters and words, and early writing ability. The study was located in four of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and involved 190 teacher participants from the UAE. (The countries of

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the GCC are, in alphabetical order, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.) They found that UAE-based kindergarten teachers reported greater evidence overall than teachers in neighboring countries for the presence in their classrooms of these five evidence-based elements of emergent literacy. However, while the authors report varying levels of evidence for the presence of each component, they found least evidence for attention to the development of early writing skills. This finding was also corroborated by Al-Suwaidi (2017) who found least attention was paid to writing in her ethnographic case study of emergent literacy in two kindergarten classes in Abu Dhabi where children were taught in Arabic, English, and Mandarin. However, there is a challenge for children’s emergent literacy education presented by Arabic diglossia, as noted earlier in this chapter. One possible solution to enabling young Emirati children’s gradual access to meaning in the standard form of Arabic used in school settings, which differs from children’s home dialect of Gulf Arabic, might lie in accepting the use of the vernacular form in the early stages of kindergarten as an interlanguage or bridging language for young children. A transitional or bridging from home to school approach to oral language development in preschool classrooms has been suggested by some researchers, including Carroll, Al-Kahwaji, and Litz (2017, p. 327), who argue that “it is in the best interest of those in the UAE to work to build the prestige of [local dialect] so that it can be used for elementary literacy instruction.” In support of this proposal is the fundamental notion that oral skills serve as the ground for literacy development, while also being important for the child’s ability to express meaning and communicate needs to teachers and peers at school, which in turn has an impact on the child’s emotional and social development. However, Carroll, Al- Kahwaji, and Litz acknowledge that their proposal is “extremely controversial” (2017, p. 327) and recognize that there are strong opposing views. In fact, many experts consider the use of the vernacular in early Arabic literacy teaching to be totally unacceptable. It is often argued that preschool children must be exposed to oral forms of MSA as soon as possible, as oral language provides the foundation from which literacy develops. However, as Saiegh-Haddad and Spolsky (2014, p. 232) point out, the use of oral MSA “sounds artificial,” because Arabic diglossia means that the standard form is typically reserved for the written word, especially in the context of teaching young learners. Moreover, it requires teachers who are proficient in the standard form, a “difficult, if not impossible” requirement (Saiegh-Haddad and Spolsky 2014, p. 232) in most UAE kindergarten school contexts. Ultimately, exposure to early reading programs which scaffold the introduction of standard forms through graded reading texts is offered as the only viable solution to the conundrum that diglossia poses for the development of early literacy in Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad and Spolsky 2014). Expert voices such as Saiegh-Haddad and Joshi (2014) offer three reasons why Gulf vernacular Arabic is not, and will not in their view, be acceptable as an interlanguage or bridging language in early literacy development. First, there are very few materials written in the vernacular or spoken dialect forms of Arabic. Second, there is community resistance to the notion of a written vernacular, as many

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people believe that the local dialect should be reserved for oral functions only, and not used for writing. Third, they point to a deeply ingrained language ideology that upholds the standard written form as both sacred and unifying, as the language of the Koran. Moreover, as Piller (2018) notes, the hegemony of other varieties of Arabic (Egyptian or Jordanian, for example) positions the Emirati dialect as a nonprestigious form of the language, and therefore not considered appropriate for use in educational contexts.

Teacher Quality Besides issues caused by the diglossic nature of the language, a further critical issue concerns the quality of the teaching of Arabic in the early years, whether as a first, second, or additional language. School inspection reports by the regulatory bodies for private education in the UAE (ADEK in Abu Dhabi and KHDA in Dubai) reveal that even the highest performing private schools, which typically include nursery/ kindergarten classes and are rated in governmental inspection reports as “outstanding” in almost every respect, are very commonly rated as “in need of improvement” when it comes to Arabic teaching (Taha 2019). This is not surprising, given that the sourcing of well-prepared teachers of Arabic remains a challenge in the UAE (Taha 2019), even though it is known that high quality teaching is the most important external determinant of student-learning outcomes (Barber and Mourshed 2007). In fact, at the time of writing, none of the federally-funded teacher education institutions in the UAE prepares teachers of Arabic for young learners. This means that teachers of Arabic are either nonnationals from across the Arab world, or nationals with a degree in Arabic or a related field, but with no preservice pedagogical training. However, it is not just pedagogical standards that need to be raised; teachers’ own personal proficiency in modern standard Arabic is also a concern. According to the Ministry of Education’s policy, kindergarten teachers should use MSA in the classroom. However, a longitudinal observational study of three kindergarten classrooms by Tibi, Joshi, and McLeod (2013) found that only one of the teachers actually used standard forms, although all of them recognized that they were required to do so.

Limited Focus on the Early Years It has been noted that the development of early childhood education has been slower than the development in other areas of education in the young UAE (Al-Momani et al. 2008). Moreover, most preschool classrooms are privately run, fee-paying establishments (Karaman 2011). In addition to the relative lack of provision for early years education, there has been limited published research in English into early childhood education (Al-Momani et al. 2008), and much of this limited research and policy have tended to focus on the state kindergarten sector, with little research and policy attention paid to the burgeoning private preschool sector. Furthermore, for

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language education in particular, the focus of much of the funding and the research in the Gulf is on issues surrounding the late acquisition of English, rather than issues in early second language acquisition, due to the dominance until recently of preuniversity intensive English-medium programs (Gallagher 2016). Actually, this situation is in line with language and literacy research globally which “has been a captive of Anglo-American concerns, overwhelmingly dominated by English” (Saiegh-Haddad and Joshi 2014, p. v).

Other Critical Issues Other critical issues, already referred to, include a strong focus on academic, structured literacy activities in state kindergartens, while there is minimal focus on developing children’s pragmatic and oral language skills development in bilingual/ multilingual classrooms. In addition, although coteaching for emergent bilingualism and biliteracy has largely ceased in many state kindergarten classrooms, there are pockets of coteaching including trilingual coteaching contexts which deserve much greater research attention. Moreover, the notion of elitism in early bilingual education (Gaarder, cited in Baker 1988) is worthy of investigation and discussion, with further research needed into the consequences of limiting attention to Arabic and English.

Future Research Directions In this section, three pertinent areas in early language and literacy education that are ripe for future research are identified. These are Arabic diglossia, introduced earlier in this chapter; bilingual education, and the use of educational technology in early language and literacy education.

The Impact of Arabic Diglossia Systematic studies are needed to understand better the impact of Arabic diglossia on early language and emergent literacy education. One possible line of research lies in comparative studies to investigate the use of the local dialect as a bridge or “interlanguage” toward emergent literacy in early years settings. Alongside this, research is needed into techniques for teacher scaffolding of children into standard forms of Arabic. Carroll et al. (2017), for example, suggest that teachers adopt scarrolding activies, such as slowing their rate of speech and incorporating more vocabulary-building and other sheltered approaches that build on the relationship between MSA and the colloquial forms. Against this, research is needed into the effects of full classroom immersion in MSA through, for example, a literature-rich approach.

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Underpinning this is the need for research into alternative approaches to teaching Arabic in the early years, so as to inform change in teacher practices. Badry (2015, p. 205) cites the 2104 Dubai private school inspections report in noting that “Approaches to teaching and learning in Arabic were too often repetitive and did not motivate or engage students.” Elsewhere, Taha (2019) points out that children are taught that one should not make a mistake when reading or writing in Arabic, and that invented spelling is an unacceptable practice. Yet in other language teaching contexts, invented spelling is recognized as an important developmental stage in writing. Another related issue that has been identified as a barrier for children learning Arabic is the positioning of accuracy as an end in itself, rather than a means to develop language proficiency (Papadopoulos et al. 2013).

Optimal Conditions for Emergent Biliteracy Education In addition, in view of the evidence of the benefits of bilingual education in the early years (Bialystok 2018), it is important to investigate the optimal conditions for emergent biliteracy development in a context where there is a wide degree of linguistic distance between the two target languages, Arabic and English. Although there is a growing body of published international research into the development of early biliteracy, it tends to be mostly conducted in contexts of Spanish-English biliteracy (August and Shanahan 2006; Escamilla et al. 2007). Indeed, a systematic review of published studies of dual language learning in early childhood by Hammer et al. (2014) showed that 45% of US-based studies focus on English and Spanish, languages which share the Roman alphabet, and follow left-to-right directionality. There are fewer published studies of early biliteracy development in languages where alphabets and directionality differ, such as Chinese and English (Yaden and Tsai 2012) (Zhang and Guo 2017). There are even fewer studies of Arabic-English biliteracy acquisition where linguistic distance also pertains, and these include studies by Saiegh-Haddad and Geva (2007) and in the UAE by Tibi, Joshi, and McLeod (2013). In one of the few observational studies of young children learning simultaneous Arabic and English biliteracy in a classroom in the UAE, Al-Suwaidi (2017) found that, while children were competent in the use of both Arabic and English, English was the dominant language in the two kindergarten classrooms where she conducted her observations, noting that “it is evident that an increasing number of students favour the use of English over Arabic” (Al-Suwaidi 2017, p. 177). She expresses concern at the reduced role for the children’s mother tongue, Arabic, and suggests that the child’s first language suffers as result of the dominance of the acquired language. She contends that the children’s apparent preference for English over Arabic is due to several factors, such as a more appealing pedagogy being used to teach English, the greater availability of digital teaching resources in English compared to Arabic, and the availability of more professional development opportunities for English teachers. Further research needs to be conducted to investigate if English is dominating over Arabic in other state kindergartens in the UAE. If so, Arabic curricula and

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teaching methods are in need of upgrading in order to ensure that children’s home language is promoted and well-developed, and for the country’s aim of balanced bilingualism and biliteracy in state kindergartens to be achieved.

Technology in Early Language and Literacy Development The building of a knowledge economy that is driven by science, technology, and innovation is at the center of the country’s strategic plan for the postoil era and is core to the plan for education 2017–2021 (UAE Government Portal). To support this aim, there have been several recent initiatives to promote the use of educational technology in state schools, including in kindergarten classrooms. (For an overview of these governmental initiatives in schools, see Dickson et al. 2019). However, the only English-language published investigation into the use of technology in early childhood education in the UAE that could be located is that of Al-Awidi and Ismail (2014) who investigated kindergarten teachers’ use of technology in teaching English as a second language. They found that teachers used technology for prereading activities, such as letter recognition and letter-sound correspondence. Despite the kindergarten teachers’ interest in educational technology, and their willingness to use it, however, teachers reported that they lacked sufficient hardware and software needed to do so to the extent expected (Al-Awidi and Ismail 2014). Acknowledging that children live in a technological world, the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC 2012) position statement on technology supports the use of interactive technology to promote effective learning and development from the age of 2 years, when used intentionally by early childhood educators within the frameworks of active-learning and developmentally appropriate practice. Such judicious use of interactive technology to support early language and early literacy development, in a context where increased investment in educational technology is a government target, is an area ripe for research.

Conclusions The UAE is poised for significant qualitative development of its early education provision in the coming years, as evidenced by the recent awakening of interest in the sector. In 2019, the Ministry of Education convened the country’s first early childhood development conference, organized in collaboration with the UAE’s Supreme Council of Motherhood and Childhood and the International Bureau of Education-UNESCO and UNICEF. Moreover, following the conference, the Ministry announced plans to host a global early childhood development conference in the future. Further evidence of future development lies in the Abu Dhabi-based Early Childhood Authority (ECA) which was established in 2019 with the aim of creating a high-quality early childhood development system, encompassing health and nutrition, child protection, family support, early care and education, and research. For early language education in particular, continued improvements in the teaching of

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Arabic are hoped for, improvements which will reverberate throughout children’s future education careers and beyond. Changes in the preparation of teachers of Arabic for young learners will help change pedagogy for future generations. An early childhood teacher preparation program offered by an English-medium federal university, Zayed University, will add Arabic teaching methods courses to its existing English teaching methods courses. This is consistent with the new requirements from the Ministry of Education for Bachelor of Education in Early Childhood Education programs and will equip teacher candidates with the skills needed to teach both Arabic and English effectively in early years classrooms. As shown in this chapter, the predominant model of language education in early childhood is one of private, fee-paying English medium education for very young learners in the UAE, regardless of their heritage language. Only the native Emirati population has access to free, Arabic-medium early childhood education, with English instruction included in the curriculum – but not before kindergarten, at the age of 4 years. Arabic-speaking expatriate families struggle to find Arabic-medium early childhood education. Moreover, for the majority expatriate population from diverse countries, heritage languages are not well catered for, and there are only a few community-based or parental initiatives aimed at supporting heritage languages. The future development of these and other facets of early language and literacy education will make the UAE a pocket of considerable interest for the future. However, early childhood education must first be recognized as an important developmental stage in and of itself, and not merely as a preparation for school. In addition, early language and literacy education need to be investigated systematically and the insights from this research used to inform policy and practice.

Cross-References ▶ Cognition and Young Learners’ Language Development ▶ Content and Language Integrated Learning in European Preschools ▶ Emergent Literacy Development in Early Language Education

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Correction to: Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile Rukmini Becerra-Lubies, Dayna Moya, and Simona Mayo

Correction to: Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile in M. Schwartz (ed.) Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_16 Owing to an oversight on the part of Springer, the title of this chapter was initially published with a spelling error. The correct presentation is given here. Indigenous Languages in Early Childhood Education in Chile.

The updated original version for this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_16 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6_37

C1

Index

A Abu Dhabi, 894, 895, 898, 903–906, 910 Academic achievement, 405–407, 409–411, 415, 419, 420 Academic confidentiality, 207 Academic language skills, 410 Academic readiness, 408, 409, 415 Academic research, 207 Accelerated Integrative Method, 98 Accuracy of meaning, 209 Action research, 241–242 Active agents, 156, 198 Additional language, 456 learning, 351, 354, 361 Additive bilingualism, 12, 408, 409, 420 and biliteracy, 348 Adult authority, 200 Affective response, 462 Affiliation, 210 After-school activities, 239 Age-appropriateness, 230, 248–249 Agency, 20, 241, 591 Agents, 295 Age of arrival, 436 Allophones, 732, 740, 742 in Canada, 362 exclusion of, 362 in Finland, 354, 361 inclusion of, 353, 362, 364–366 Alphabet, 852 knowledge, 119, 125 Ancestral forms, 310 Ancestral heritage, 733 Arabic diglossia, 899–900, 912–913 Arabic language teaching, 900, 901, 911, 913, 914 Assent, 203 Assessing children’s progress, 467

Assessment, 404, 406, 410, 411, 413, 415, 419 of multilingual children, 678–680 tools, 309, 467 Assimilationist policies, 553, 728 Association canadienne des professionnels de l’immersion, 362 Associative mediators, 654 Attention, 147 Australia early childhood education in, 706 educational sojourning, 715–716 language policy and planning (LPP), 702, 707, 708 macro planning, 711–712 micro planning, 712–714 multilingualism, 701 national language policies and initiatives, 703–705 supra-macro planning, 709–711 target language speakers, 714–715 White Australia Policy, 701, 703 Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 705, 719 Australian Early Years Learning Framework, 574 Authentic British cartoons, 245 Authentic listening, 199 Authentic multimodal materials, 465 Autism spectrum disorders (ASD), 672, 674, 680, 687 B Balanced bilingualism, 848 Balanced global perspective, 75 Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS), 61, 716 Beliefs, 527, 589–592, 596, 599

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Schwartz (ed.), Handbook of Early Language Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91662-6

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924 Besermyan, 827 Bicultural/bilingual immersion, 736 Bilingual approach, 684 Bilingual-bimodal intervention, 686 Bilingual children, 58, 63–70, 75, 76 language impairments in, 777–778 with SLI, 778 Bilingual classroom activities, 153 Bilingual development, 844, 903–904 Bilingual education, 121, 405–407, 419, 420, 730, 842, 845–852, 860, 861, 863 amount of exposure, 89 attrition, 87 closing of the gap, 92 cognitive abilities, 91 contradicting this theory, 91 external factors, 89 framework, 871 grammatical development, 84, 87, 89, 107, 108 implications of, 856 inconsistencies, 107 inconsistency of the results, 92 institutional support of home languages, 86 internal factors, 89 language development, 85 language support programs, 84, 93 by length of exposure, 88 lexical richness, 91 L2 grammar, 92 linguistic environment, 91 model, 887 morphological richness, 85 preschoolers, 86 psycholinguistic base of, 60–61 qualitative and quantitative sustainable input, 86 representative domains, 106 restructuring of the heritage language grammar, 87 saliency, 90 similarities and differences between the L1 and L2, 90 strategies, 854 target groups, 106 teacher agency, 853–854 trajectories of language acquisition, 88 transparency, 90 typically and/or atypically developing bilinguals, 85 vulnerable domains, 87, 107

Index Bilingual emergent writing, 134 Bilingualism, 34, 36, 40, 41, 45–48, 150, 152, 155, 160, 162, 290, 303, 305–310, 350, 360, 406, 408, 410, 414, 415, 417, 419–421, 514, 523–525, 529, 569, 704–706, 719, 842, 843, 848, 849, 854, 857–860, 863, 868 balanced, 848 child, 520 cognitive benefits of, 429, 524 consecutive, 523–525 definition of, 849 early childhood education and care partnership for, 574 levels of, 429 and multilingualism, 572–574 and plurilingualism, 517 in policy documents, 845–848 research, 431 simultaneous, 515 societal, 843 Swedish-Finnish, 530 Bilingual kindergarten, 731 Bilingual language learners, 63 Bilingual modality, 68–69 Bilingual policy, 872–874 Bilingual preschoolers, 126 Bilingual preschools education, 124 in modern Israel, 770–777 Bilingual programs, 59, 63, 64, 73–76 children’s breadth of vocabulary knowledge, 65–66 children’s depth of vocabulary knowledge, 66–67 instructional principles and strategies, 67–70 psycholinguistic base of vocabulary education, 61–63 young learners in, 70 Bilingual teacher (BT), 392, 393 Bilingual teaching, 904 Biliteracy, 348, 355, 415, 419–421, 903, 912–914 definition, 119 divergent/convergent scripts, 120 ecological model, 119 Breadth, 59, 76 of vocabulary knowledge, 65–66 Bressola, 273, 274

Index C Calandreta, 273 Canada, early childhood education Canadian Paediatric Society, 734–735 Early Learning and Development Framework, 734 HLE, 742–748 HL maintenance, 732–733 LAP, 748–749 Multilateral Early Learning and Child Care Framework, 734 in Ontario, 735–740 in Quebec, 740–742 Canadian Paediatric Society, 734–735 Cantonese-English speaking bilinguals, 132 Cantonese language, 132 Care for Newcomer Children (CNC), 751 Caregivers, 512, 519, 523, 525 Child agency, 15, 628 Child at home, 900 Child Care and Early Years Act (CCEYA), 738 Child-centred approach, 9 Child-centred curriculum, 859 Child-centred pedagogies, 469 Childminding Monitoring, Advisory and Support (CMAS), 751 Child protection principles, 202 Children and Youth Act of 2017, 793 Children code-switch, 526 Children’s bilingualism, 152 Children’s cognitive and language development digital environment, 42–44 neuroscience research, 40–42 Children’s Councils, 744 Children’s experimentation, 462 Children’s interactions, 152 Children’s interests, 461 Children’s learning, 157 Children’s literature, 459 Children’s rights, 206, 215 Chile, Indigenous language revitalization bilingualism, 305–307 consideration of communities, 298 curriculum and pedagogical resources, 299–300 early childhood and intercultural bilingual education, 293 family involvement, 298–299 indigenous language and culture educators, 307–308 inter-agency collaboration, 296–297

925 Kimeltuwe initiative, 300 Pocoyo in Mapudungun initiative, 300–302 political context, 290–291 sociolinguistic situation, 291–292 teacher education programs, 297–298 Walüng Chillkatuwe Mapudungun, 303 Chinese-English bilinguals, 128 Choral repetition, 236 Chuvash, 827 Classroom, 623 heterogeneity, 619 research, 232 Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), 129 Classroom domain CBLT, 622 classroom teaching methodology, 622 contextualising EFL, 621 continuity, 621 differentiated instruction, 621 education researchers, 621 learning EFL, 622 primary school teachers, 621 Classroom-related variables, 247 Coarse-grain skills, 131 Code-mixing, 209, 211 Code switches, 243 Code-switching, 154, 160, 843 Cognition and young learners’ language development digital environment, 42–44 environmental factors, 45–46 executive functions, 35–37 interindividual variability, 48 interrelational and developmental mechanisms, 46–47 intraindividual variability, 48 metalinguistic awareness, 38–40 neuroscience research, 40–42 role of instruction and social interaction, 47–48 theory of mind, 37–38 Cognitive ability, 413 Cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP), 61, 622, 716 Cognitive development, 735 Cognitive flexibility, 35, 36 Cognitive skills, 453 Coherence and continuity, 617 Coherent methodology, 101 Collaboration, 308

926 Collective agency, 662 Colonization, 729 Commercial nursery school, 740 Common denominator, 643 Common underlying proficiency (CUP) model, 60 Communication between preprimary and primary institutions, 630 Communication strategies, 452 Communicative activities, 150 Communicative competence, 146 Communicative repertoires, 162 Communicative strategies, 154 Community(ies), 298, 308 of practice, 144, 558 Community language(s), 179, 730 ideology, 550 schools, 713–714 Complementarity principle, 63 Complementary context, 531 Complex dynamic systems theory, see Complexity theory Complexity theory, 31, 33, 34 Comprehensible input, 458 Computer applications, 460 Conceptual knowledge, 122 Concrete operational period, 32 Confidentiality, 203 Constructivism, 464 Construct validity, 232 Content-based instruction/Content-based language teaching/Content and language integrated learning (CLIL), 14, 94, 388, 846, 903 adoption at preschool level, 479 buzzword in educational discourse, 477 child-led, spontaneous play environment, 486 culture, 487–488 in Cyprus, 489–490 differentiating, 480–481 diffusion at grassroots level, 480 dual focus, 476 and early language learning, 478–480 facilitating interaction in preschool level, 486 in Finland, 492 FL competence of teachers, 487 formal policy and national implementation, 482 grassroots adoption, 482 in Greek primary schools, 493 implementation, 480

Index implementation conditions, 494 integrating cognitive challenges, 485 integration process, 484 interaction and dialogic learning, 486 in Italy, 494–496 language progression, 483 lessons, planning and preparation of, 491 in Lithuania, 493–494 low exposure approaches, 488 major contributions, 488 modular/theme-based approach to, 494 origins of, 477–478 in other European countries, 483–492 pilot projects at preschool level, 479 preschool classes, 494 at preschool level and distinctive features, 480–482 preschool teacher, 481–482 professional development, 498 research at preschool level, 492 in Spain, 490–492, 496 teacher profile, 482 teachers’ experiences and practice, 493 teachers’, parents’ and children’s’ perspectives, 497 theoretical underpinnings of, 488 umbrella term, 477 very young learners, 479 Content-based language teaching (CBLT), 622 Content validity, 232 Context, 529 Context-embedded experience, 661 Context-sensitive approaches, 468 Contextual factors, 466 Contextualization, 231 Contextual leadership model, 173 Continuity, 223 Contributions of children, 309 Control groups, 233 Conventional writing, 128 Convergence and divergence, 363–365 Cooperation, 633 Correlational design, 230 Co-teaching, 904, 905, 912 Country-wide policies, 128 Creative Curriculum, 902 Creativity, 464 Credibility, 232, 250 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 171, 174 Critical languages policies, 294 Critical multicultural education, 571–572 Critical reflexivity, 205 Cross-cultural studies, 161

Index Cross-linguistic influence (CLI), 431, 676–678 Cross-linguistic support, 357 Cross-linguistic transfer, 362, 364, 365 4Cs Framework “communication,” 483–485 Cultural beliefs, 862 Cultural capital, 744 Cultural diversity, 354, 363, 524 Cultural expectations, 206 Cultural heritage, 10 Cultural imperialism, 753 Culturally relevant books, 909 Culturally relevant content, 69 Cultural understanding, 557 Culture, 196 Curricula coherence, 616 Curricular policy, 299 Curriculum and school domain bilingual preschool programme, 619 EFL learning, 619, 620 language programmes, 619 mixed-ability character, 620 primary curriculum, 619 transition measures, 620

D Daily practice, 298 Declarative content knowledge, 592 Declarative knowledge, 591, 594, 596, 597, 599, 600, 603, 606 Deficit model, 526 Deficit view of child language, 211 Dependability, 232 Depth, 59, 62, 74, 76 of vocabulary knowledge, 66–67 Developmental interdependence hypothesis, 121 Developmental language disorder (DLD), 675 bilingualism, 673 description, 672 intervention programs, 680 Developmentally appropriate pedagogy, 7 Developmentally appropriate practices, 902, 914 Developmental skills, 130 Dialogic reading, 129 Dictation subtests, 125 Didactic strategies, 647–656 Differentiated instruction, 621 Digital media, 161 Digital resources, 857 Digit Span task, 35

927 Dimensional Change Card Sort task, 35 Directorate for Quality Standards in Education (DQSE), 845 Discourse analysis, 231, 232, 246 Discourse analytical approaches, 174 Discursive genres, 158 Dissent, 203 Diverse children, 415 Diversity, 551, 860 in immersion student population, 353, 360, 364 Diwan, 272–273, 278, 280 Dominant language, 516, 730 Double-opportunity space, 148 Dual education programs, 160 Dual language education additive bilingualism, 408, 409 educational outcomes of children, 409–411 exposure to English/target language, 411–413 family involvement, 417–418 foundation of bilingualism, 408 home-school collaboration, 415 instructional design, 415 instructional practices, 417 leadership support, 415 linguistically balanced classrooms, 416 and national language policies, 405–408 positive instructional climate, 415 quality of instructional staff and professional training, 415 separate language blocks, 416 subtractive bilingualism, 409 Dual language intervention, 685 Dual language learners/learning (DLL), 69, 126, 404–417, 420 Dual-language preschools, 555 Dual language program(s), 66, 74, 736, 743 Dual literacy, 846 Dubai, 895, 898, 901, 902, 905, 908, 909 Dubai School Inspections Bureau, 901 Dynamic bilingualism, 749 Dyslexia, 36 E Early bilingual education, 290 in Israel (see Israeli early bilingual education) teacher agency, 853–854 Early bilingual programs and children’s breadth of vocabulary knowledge, 65–66

928 Early bilingual programs (cont.) and children’s depth of vocabulary knowledge, 66–67 instructional principles and strategies in, 67–70 Early biliteracy, 913 Early childcare setting, 734 Early Childhood Authority (ECA), 914 Early childhood centers, 289–290 Early childhood development, 737 Early childhood education (ECE), 70, 736 in Australia, 706 and dual language education (see Dual language education) and language education policies (see Language education policies and early childhood education) Early childhood education and care (ECEC), 4, 586 complexity of, 602 curriculum and syllabus, 603, 604 in-service ECEC teachers, 596, 600 language teacher educators, 605 level of education and status, 602 Luxembourgish system of, 793–795 preservice ECEC teachers and teacher education, 594, 596 professional qualifications and standards, 587, 588 psychological-pedagogical knowledge base vs. linguistic knowledge base, 593, 594 sociocultural and critical approaches and declarative knowledge, 592, 593 sociopolitical context of, 601 teacher education organizational structures, 588 teacher training vs. teaching education, 602, 603 Early childhood educators, 748 Early childhood institutions, 149 Early childhood teacher education, 586 Early childhood teacher preparation, 915 Early FL learning, 615 Early foreign language education, 660 Early foreign language (FL) education in preschools action research, 241–242 ethical challenges, 249–250 ethnographies, 246–247 experiemental studies, 233–235 future research, 250–253 homeschooling environment, 245–246

Index interviews to explore teacher cognition and practice, 243–244 interviews with children, 244–245 issues, 247–250 large-scale studies, 237–240 observation on teachers’ collaboration, 242–243 quasi-experimental studies, 235–237 research methodology, 230–233 small-scale studies, 237–240 Early immersion education in Canada, 349–350, 361–363 children with learning exceptionalities, 355–357 core features, 351–352 in Finland, 350–351, 359–361 future research, 365–366 issues, 363–365 learner diversity, 353–355 teacher training, 357 Early language awareness, 731 Early language education (ELE), 2–4, 6, 8–14, 16–21, 23, 289 in Australia (see Australia) caregivers, 14, 15 distinctive research domain, 2 diversity, 10 ecological approach, 5 FLP in, 563 general foundations, 7 human ecology theory, 5 interdisciplinary, 4 language teaching pedagogy, 5 policy makers, 3 settings, 559 in UAE (see United Arab Emirates (UAE), early language education) Early language education policy, see Language education policies and early childhood education Early language education, Singapore bilingual education framework, 871 bilingual framework ideology, 880 biliteracy, 880 communication skills, 874 cross-linguistic transfer, 872, 876, 885 different functions of English and the mother tongue, 872 english dominance, 877 english literacy development, 876 explicit instruction, 884 holistic education framework, 883 home literacy factors, 878

Index hybrid bilingual model, 872 incidental learning, 883 interaction between languages, 885 interdependence hypothesis, 870 language and literacy development, 886 language ideology, 871 language policy, 870 language shift, 877 linguistic, 875, 877 linguistic diversity, 870 maintaining mother tongues, 881 major hypotheses, 885 mother tongue, 874 mother tongue literacy development, 880 nature of instruction, 883 official languages, 871 orthographic overlap, 875 orthographic proximity hypothesis, 877 potential loss of cultures, 873 preschool education, 869 procedural knowledge, 875 socioemotional capabilities, 874 teacher-parent partnerships, 886 teacher preparation, 879 teachers’ knowledge, 884 teacher training, 879, 886 typological distance, 876 underlying common proficiency, 870 unequal language statuses, 881 Early Learning and Child Care Commission, 744 Early Learning and Development Framework, 734 Early Learning for Every Child Today (ELECT), 737 Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA), 705, 709, 710, 717 Early learning setting, 737 Early Mandarin Bilingual (EMB) program, 746 Early multilingual education, 798–801 Early Russian Education Estonia, 380 Language Immersion Program, 380 Latvia, 382 partial immersion, 381 total immersion, 381 Early second language acquisition, 912 Early years education (ECE) future research, 279–280 impact of regional language and educational policies, 275–276 language revitalization (see Language revitalization)

929 lingering effects of historical hegemony, 276–278 linguistic diversity, 278–279 role in language revitalization, 267–269 role of kindergardens in revitalization of Hebrew, 269–271 Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), 901, 902 Early years’ immersion and parents, 329–330 pedagogical strategies in, 330–332 quality provision for, 333–336 Early years learning, 737, 748, 749 Ebooks, 134, 135 écoles maternelles, 384 Ecological approach(es), 172, 182, 186, 534 Ecological/holistic approach, 458 Ecological nature, 196 Ecology of language, 645 Ecology of language learning, 309 Education Act in 1881, 792 Education Act of 1843, 792 Educational outcomes, 409–411 Educational partnership, 616 Educational partnerships of teachers, parents and children, 569–571 Australian Early Years Learning Framework, 574 bilingualism, multilingualism and social justice, 572–574 critical issues, 580 critical multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy, 571–572 early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism, 574 Ethiopian immigrant children, 576 future research, 580–581 instructional conversation, 578 IPP research, 575 Nordic research project, 576 Educational psychologists, 614 Educational routine, 154 Educational technology, 912, 914 Educational virtuosity, 591, 603 Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU), 178 Elicitation, 654 Emergent biliteracy, 118, 122 characteristics, 126 cross-sectional perspective, 125 literacy skills, 125 longitudinal perspective, 126 preschoolers, 125

930 Emergent literacy, 8, 119, 907, 909, 910, 912 environmental factors, 133 high-level skills, 131 individual factors, 133 issues, 135, 136 policies, 128, 129 skills, 119 technology, 134, 135 Emerging themes, 243, 244 Empowerment, 571, 574, 580 Enactment effect, 655 Endangered languages, 10, 661 Enets, Taymyr code-switching, 829 definition, 828 Karelian, 829 nomadic schools, 829 preschool, 829 English as a foreign language (EFL), 13, 451, 456, 461, 468 contexts, 466 contribution, 461 evaluation/assessment, 467, 468 issues, 466 media, 460 new projects, 463 online programmes, 462 policy, 455, 456 pre-primary education, 451–455 pre-school, 451 programmes, 451 quality of teachers, 466, 467 research, 468 teachers, 457 technology, 460 use, 464 very young age, 452 English as an additional language (EAL), 170, 178, 182, 428 English as a second language (ESL), 703, 704 English-Greek bilingual, 132 English-Hebrew bilingual preschools, 774–775 English language, 854 English language areas (ELAs), 242, 455, 486, 622 English language teaching, 904, 914 English literacy development, 876 English morphosyntactic tests, 131 English only principle, 241 English-only programs, 65, 66 English specialist, 242 Enrichment programs, 124 e-portfolio software, 579

Index Ethical dilemmas, 205, 207, 216 Ethical issues, 6 Ethical praxis, 196 Ethical radar, 203 Ethical symmetry, 197 Ethics of justice, 201 Ethnic communities, 23 Ethnic minorities, 22 Ethnic self-image, 737 Ethnocultural community schools, 742 Ethnographic method, 662 Ethnography, 231, 246–247 Ethnolinguistic diversity, 727 Ethos, 532 European CLIL programmes, 481 European language policy, 477 European policy framework, 275 Event-related potentials (ERPs), 41 Exclusionary practices, 354, 355, 362 Executive functions (EFs), 35–37, 42, 44, 45, 47 Expanded graded intergenerational disruption scale (EGIDS), 265 Expatriate, 897, 898, 900, 904, 905, 908, 915 Expectations, 630 Experience-based approaches, 598 Experience-based attitudes, 625 Experienced teachers, 243 Experimental design, 230 Explicit correction, 533 Explicit instruction, 443 Explicit request, 657 Explicit vocabulary teaching, 74 External control, 548 External language management for children, 558 schools as part, 561 settings, 557 External validity, 232 Extra-curricular opportunities, 247 F Facilitation effect, 133 Familiarisation, 211 Families, 210, 524, 531, 857 Family involvement, 299, 415, 417–418 Family language planning, 327, 333, 338 Family language policy (FLP), 16, 323, 378, 547, 731, 766, 767, 772, 779–781, 784 and components, 548–549 researchers, 551

Index Family language practices, 731 Family literacy, 856 Family literacy routines, 906, 909 Feedback strategies, 533 Field notes on observations, 242, 246 “50/50” model, 819 2016 Finnish ECE curriculum, 177 Finnish-speaking immigrant, 121 First language first approach, 766 First language first model, 556 First language first principle, 396 First language interference, 728 First language provision, 860 Flashcards, 462 Flexible language use, 22, 859 Focus-group interviews, 238 Foreign language (FL), 223, 481 advantage, 450 definition, 450 teaching, 94 Formal early education, professional development in, 801–802 Formal evaluative feedback, 627 Formal operational period, 32 Formative assessment, 467 Former Soviet Union (FSU), 374 Formulaic expressions, 155 France, balanced bilingualism bilingual children, 385 children, 384 50% of the time, 384 language policy, 384 Francophone community, 349 Francophones, 740 Free play, 153, 241 activities, 461 French Immersion, 349–350, 354, 356, 361–364, 727 Funds of knowledge, 554, 560 G Gaelscoileanna, 271 Gaeltacht, 211 See also Irish Gaeltacht schools, 321 Gatekeeper, 210 Generalization, 231 General symbolic principle, 123 German definition, 832 early learning centres, 832 as part of Primary Languages, 178

931 Germany bilingual preschool institutions, 385 collaboration with families, 386 input is regulated, 386 mixed-age or same-age groups, 385 multi-sided development, 385 organization of everyday life, 386 Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), 548 Grammar, 233, 430 Grammatical development, 7 Grassroots early language activities, 20 Grassroots initiative, 11 Greek-English bilinguals, 132 Grounded theory, 231 Gulf Arabic, 899, 910 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 909 H Hands-on experimentation, 464 Happylingual Approach, 549 Hearing impairment, 672, 674, 686 Hebrew-Arabic bilingual pre-schools, 770–771 Hebrew revival, 269–271 Hebrew-speaking monolinguals, 132 Heritage language education (HLE), 742 Alberta and British Columbia, 745–747 Atlantic Provinces, 747–748 challenge, 751 Manitoba, 743–744 professional development, 750–751 Saskatchewan, 744–745 Heritage languages (HLs), 12, 157, 318, 670, 727, 753, 764, 770, 772, 773, 775, 776, 779, 782, 783 advantages, 675–676 definition, 730 heritage language learners (HLLs), 318 heritage language speakers (HSs), 318 maintenance, 335, 731–733 private sector, HL programs in, 739–740 retention, 755 teaching, 335 value of treating, 687–689 Heterogeneous classes, 631 High-quality childhood education, 861 High-quality early years education, 323 Hispanic learners, 120 Home English Communication (HEC), 131 Home environment, 626 Home language, 546, 730 learning, 379

932 Home of the Karelian Language (HKL), 830 Home-related lexicon, 126 Home room teacher, 242 Homeschooling, 242 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), 456 Hornberger’s model, 120 HundrED.Org, 184 Hybrid bilingual model, 872 I Identity texts, 754 Ideology(ies), 765, 842, 844, 848–851, 853, 854, 862 Ikastola, 268, 271 Imagery, 212 Immersion, 11, 348 for all concept, 348, 364 bilingual education, 97 in Canada, 349–350, 361–363 classroom, 153 curriculum, 352, 360, 363, 365 in Finland, 350–351, 359–361 learner population, 352, 360, 362 program(s), 304, 348–351, 359–360, 362, 364 teachers attitudes, 354, 356, 357 kindergarten, 355, 362 language proficiency, 358, 359, 362, 365 profiles, 352, 366 qualified, 357, 361, 362, 365 shortage of, 358, 361, 365 special education, 355 Immersion teacher training, 353, 357–361, 363 availability of, 358, 361 candidates, 357, 362 programs, 357, 361, 362, 365 Immigrant children, 151 Immigrant language, 727 Implicit, 438 Inclusionary practices, 356, 362, 364 Inclusive strategies, 853 Inclusivity, 734 Indigenous children, 291 Indigenous communities, 288, 289, 292, 293, 296, 298, 299, 304, 308, 309, 311 Indigenous Language and Culture Educators, 297, 303, 304, 307–308 Indigenous languages, 11, 729 speakers, 311 Indigenous minorities, 124

Index Indigenous movements, 293 Indigenous organizations, 292 Individual differences, 67, 68, 663 Individualized support, 355 Individual learner differences, 622 Informal language-based playgroups, 908 Informed consent, 202 Inhibitory control, 35, 38 Innovative teaching approaches, 463, 464 Input in bilingual acquisition, 521–523 and interaction, 516, 534 and output, 519–520 Input-interaction-output hypothesis, 646 Input richness, 436 In-service ECEC teachers children’s emergent literacy, teachers’ role in, 598, 599 language choices, in multilingual settings, 596, 597 language learning activities, teachers’ perspectives on, 598 monolingual settings and multilingual/L2 development, 597, 598 professional development of, 599, 600 Inspection reports, 901, 905, 911 Instructional conversation, 578 Instructional practices, 414, 417, 419, 420 Integrated initial training, 624 Integrated pedagogy, 622 Integration of children’s linguistic and cultural repertoires, 353 Intellectual developmental disorder, 672, 673, 675, 684 Intentional teachers, 646 Interactional routines, 155 Inter-agency collaboration, 296–297 Intercultural Bilingual Education Program, 293 Intercultural communication, 818 Intercultural education, 293 Intercultural interaction, 159 Interdependence hypothesis, 60, 61 Intergenerational language transmission, 70 Intergenerational transmission, 267, 268, 274, 279, 709, 716, 720 Intergenerational work, 308 Interindividual variability, 48 Interlanguage, 910, 912 Internal control, 548 Internal validity, 232 International book fairs, 906 International curricula, 901 International languages, 730, 739

Index International parent–professional partnerships (IPP) research, 575 Intervention, 441 Intraindividual variability, 48 Irish, 319 intergenerational transmission, 318 Official Languages Act, 326 promoting literacy, 338 revitalizing Irish, 320 sociolinguistic context (see Irish-medium preschools (naíonraí)) 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language, 326 Irish-medium preschools (naíonraí), 318 Aistear curriculum framework, 327 Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta, 327 evaluation of outcomes from, 328 Gaeloideachas, 327 Israeli early bilingual education, 766 English-Hebrew bilingual preschools, 774–775 extra-curricular activities, 775–777 family, community and parents’ education, 779–780 first-language-first approach, 766 Hebrew-Arabic bilingual pre-schools, 770–771 Jewish kindergartens, history of, 767–770 language impairments, in bilingual children, 777–778 language separation models, 765 Russian-Hebrew preschools, 772–774 theoretical sociolinguistic research and educational practices, 778–779 two-way language programs, 765 J Journals, 208 K Karelian crafts, 831 definition, 829 interacting with families and society, 830 language nest, 830 observe, 831 Veps and Finnish, 829 Key-words stories, 465 Kindergarten (KG), 454, 905, 908, 909, 914, 915 centres, 845 definition, 896 state, 898–899, 902–904, 912

933 Knowledge about language, 589, 591–594, 600, 602, 603 Knowledge and beliefs of teachers, 606 Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), 895 Knowledge base, 589, 590, 592, 593, 599, 605, 606 in ECEC language teacher education, 603, 604 psychological-pedagogical knowledge base vs. linguistic knowledge base, 593, 594 Komi Republic language, 825 pedagogical airlift, 826 preschools, 825 Korean-English language, 127 Korean language, 127

L Language acquisition, 517 challenges to nativist perspective, 518 and development, 862 input and output, 519–520 nativist perspective, 517–518 role of input in bilingual acquisition, 521–523 simultaneous bilingual children, 520–521 usage-based theory, 518–519 Language alternation, 156 Language and communication, 569 Language and content learning, integration of, 483–484 Language aptitude, 633 Language area, 658 Language attitudes and ideologies, 200 Language awareness, 454, 590, 592, 731 Language background, 157 Language-based community playgroups, 908 Language beliefs, 731 Language choices, 596, 597 Language-conducive context(s), 149, 533, 658 Language-conducive pedagogy, 323–324, 330 Language-conducive strategies, 642, 645–646, 859 Language development, 407–410, 412–414, 416, 417, 419, 846 Language dominance, 22 Language education, 4 in early childhood centers, 289–290

934 Language education policies and early childhood education, 185 contextual leadership model, 173 critical discourse analysis, 174 discourse analytical approaches, 174 educational partnership, 173 nexus analysis, 174 in Northern Europe, 168–170, 174–177, 179–181 teacher agency, 172 in UK, 170–171, 177–179, 181–182 Language education policy(ies), 8, 21, 791, 795–796, 842 Language Education Policy Profile, 847 Language ideology(ies), 146, 156–160, 172, 209, 547, 600, 779, 842, 848, 850, 851, 854, 911 Language impairments, 777–778 Language learning, 144–146, 149, 150, 152–154, 156, 157, 159–162 ecologies, 149 Language maintenance, 730 Language management, 172, 547, 765, 767, 779, 781, 783 Language minority, 65, 123 Language mixing, 522 Language nests, 311 Language outcomes, 248 Language planning, 22, 171, 294, 295, 548, 549, 731 Language policy(ies), 146, 147, 149, 157, 765, 766, 768, 780, 781, 870 Language policy and planning (LPP), 172, 175, 180, 186, 702, 707, 708 Language Policy for the Early Years, 847, 850 The Language Policy for the Early Years, 849 The Language Policy in Education Committee, 847 Language practice(s), 171, 547, 765 Language proficiency, 38, 404–407, 410–416, 419–421 Language propagators, 270 Language qualifications, 605 Language revitalization, 10, 266 definition, 263 early years education in, 267–269 Hebrew revival, 269–271 indigenous languages, 270–271 minoritized languages in Europe, 271–273 Languages and codeswitching, 487 Language separation models, 765, 773, 854 Language shift, 23, 263, 269, 275, 279, 281, 730

Index Language shower approaches, 489 Language socialization, 6, 8 Language socialization and early language education, 145 children’s peer interactions and structuring of linguistic hierarchies, 158–161 dynamic and bidirectional character, 147–148 language ecologies, 152–156 language ideologies and local language practices, 156–158 methodological considerations, 149 peer language socialization and L2 learning, 148 second language use, 145–147 Language sovereignty, 741 Languages policies, 294, 295 Language substitution, 274, 278 Language-support practices, 645 Language support programs accuracy of grammatical forms, 97 Canadian context, 97, 98 a child-based, 94 CLIL, 94 culturally responsive, 99 different methodologies, 96 divergent outcomes, 96 educator-based support program, 94 effectiveness, 101 English immersion, 100 fluency, 97 functional bilinguals, 97 grammatical development, Europe, 94–96 language minorities, 98 majority language, 95 minority language survival, 95 predictor of reading competences, 99 preschool systems, 93 socio-economic status, 99 strong types, 93 two-way immersion, 100 USA context, 99, 101 weak forms of bilingual intervention, 93 Language suppression, 728 Language teacher education, 5 Language teaching policy, 617, 836 coherence and continuity, 618 continuity, 617 EFL teaching policy domain, 618 European documents, 617 FL learning, 618 policy documents, 619 Language transfer, 468

Index Language use, 209, 844, 852–853 Language use at home, 861 Latin script system, 130 Latvia government’s policy, 381 language situation, 383 Russian classes, 382 subgroup, 383 teachers, 384 Latvian-speaking preschools, 381 Learner diversity, 353–354, 360–361, 363 Learner motivation, 626 Learner needs, 631 Learner-related variables, 233 Learners’ agency, 147 Learners as bilinguals, 355 Learning exceptionalities, 353, 355–357, 360, 362, 364, 366 Learning Outcomes Framework, 851, 852 Learning phonological features, of L2, 495 Learning Spaces project, 577 Learning strategies, 627 Learning strategies in inclusive classrooms, 356 Letter-sound knowledge, 130 Letter-word identification, 125, 131 Level of French proficiency learners, 354 teachers, 357, 362 Leveraging code switching, 495 L2 experts, 659 Lifelong learning, 457 Linguicism, 753 Linguistic activist, 300 Linguistic agency, 158 Linguistically appropriate practice (LAP), 748–749 Linguistically superdiverse, 897 Linguistic anthropology, 145, 161 Linguistic assimilation, 731 Linguistic benefits, 452 Linguistic development, 7 Linguistic diversity, 354, 363 Linguistic gains, 468 Linguistic heterogeneity, 727 Linguistic identity, 734 Linguistic landscape, 161 Linguistic norms, 158, 160 Linguistic participation, 150 Linguistic planning, 293 Linguistic policy, 296 Linguistic proximity, 131, 132 Linguistic purism, 154 Linguistic revitalization, 729

935 Linguistic revitalization policies, 305 Linguistic self-confidence, 628 Listening comprehension, 461 Literacy, 846 acquisition, 118 enriched play, 129 skills, 125, 127 transmission, 548 L1 literacy skills, 354 Local communities, 295 Longitudinal studies, 441 Low exposure approaches, 488 L2 teaching, 362 Luxembourg early childhood education and care, 793–795 early language education policy, 795–796 formal early education, professional development in, 801–802 language situation in, 791–792 MuLiPEC, 802–804 non-formal early education, professional development in, 802 pilot study on multilingual education, 800–801 preschools, 799 professional development initiatives, 804–805 M Mainstream education system, 732 Mainstream language, 546 Maintenance programs, 124 Majority language, 349, 350, 364 Majority language norm, 159 Makerspace method, 463 Malta, early childhood education, 862 child-centred curriculum, 859 creation of story-apps and animated features, 857 curriculum and pedagogy, development of, 851 family literacy practices, 856 first language provision, 860 kindergarten centres, 845 language-conducive strategies, 859 language use, 852–853 multicultural education, 860 multilingual classrooms, 855–856 policy documents, bilingualism in, 845–848 professional development of educators, 861 strategies, 854 teacher agency, bilingual education, 853–854

936 Malta National Literacy Agency, 856 Malta National Literacy Strategy, 856 Maltese language, 854 Management strategies, 656 Manitoba, 743–744 Manitoba Public Schools Act, 743 Mapuche children, 291 Mapuche organizations and communities, 300–304 Maternal education, 436 Media, 460 devices, 857 Metacognitive skills, 120 Metalingual talk, 160 Metalinguistic awareness, 38–40, 118, 120, 130, 459 Metalinguistic skills, 120, 130 Methodologies, 310 Miami study, 65 Micro-level, 151 Middle East, 895, 902 Migrant languages, 817 Migration, 516 crisis, 176 Ministry of Education (MoE), 895 Minoritization, 262 Minority language(s), 208, 211, 295, 349, 350, 364 children, 176, 728, 732 immersion programs, 349, 350, 354, 364–366 rights, 728 speakers, 428 Mixed-methods approach, 634 Modern foreign languages (MFL), 177, 178 Modern standard Arabic (MSA), 899, 907, 909–911 Monolingual, 151 children, 58, 122, 514 ideologies, 157 language policy, 180 Monolingualism, 702 Mordovian Republic language circles, 826 lingua franca, 827 Moksha and Erzya, 826 Mordvinic languages, 826 Māori people, 205 Morphological awareness, 130 Morphosyntactic knowledge, 434 Mosaic approach, 212 Mother tongue, 727 Mother tongue instruction (MTI), 170, 171

Index Motivation, 147, 251, 453, 623, 663 Mudiad Meithrin, 272, 278 MuLiPEC, 804, 806, 807 professional development, aims and design of, 802–803 professional learning outcomes, 803–804 Multicultural activities, 455 Multicultural education, 860 Multiculturalism, 727 Multilateral Early Learning and Child Care Framework, 734 Multilingual and multicultural teaching and learning environment, 497 Multilingual awareness, 592, 593 Multilingual children, 175, 182, 183 Multilingual classrooms, 854–856 Multilingual Classrooms Questionnaire (MCQ), 855 Multilingual competences, 160 Multilingual early education, 905 Multilingual education policies, 728 Multilingual education, Russia approach, 820 bilingual education, 834 child-directed speech, 835 Chuvash, 27, 828 community activists, 835 compulsory, 816, 821 educational system, 814 endangered languages, 814, 818, 821, 829, 835 ethnic language, 836 ethnic mobilization, 815 ethnocultural component, 820, 822 ethnolinguistic vitality, 820 excursions, 827 extinct, 828 foreign language teaching, 821 hierarchy, 821 immigrant children, 818 indigenous languages, 815 intercultural education, 820 language awareness, 820 language ideologies, 820 language nest, 828 language planning, 820 language shift, 820 learning poems and songs by heart, 834 lingua franca, 822 linguistic diversity, 820 linguistic situation, 815 linguistic situation in Russia, 814 local languages, 833

Index maintenance or loss of minority languages, 815 means of communication, 817 migrants, 817 minority languages, 815, 816, 818, 822, 827 national languages, 816 national republics and regions, 816 polyethnic settings, 821 preschools, 816 prestige gradation, 821 principle, 820 reverse the language shift, 820 revitalization, 820 Siberia, 822, 823 side effects, 821 state language, 816 structured teaching, 818 submersion, 817 teaching foreign languages, 819 terminology differences, 833 trilingual setting, 819 Udmurt, 827 Multilingualism, 162, 183–185, 406, 514, 516, 526, 527, 529, 569, 572–574, 673, 675, 676, 689, 729, 739, 744, 746, 752, 754, 842, 855, 857 Multilingual kindergartens, 736 Multilingual norms, 156 Multilingual orientation, 361, 364 Multilingual pedagogies, 525, 797, 802, 804 Multilingual preschool education, 904–905 Multilingual programs, 850 Multiliteracies ideology, 754 Multiliteracies pedagogy, 463 Multimodal practices, 463 Multimodal strategies, 69 Multiparty conversation, 151 Multi-sensory experiences, 464 Multi-sensory learning, 240 N Naíonraí, see Irish-medium preschools (naíonraí) Name writing, 119 Naoinra, 661 N’apukat, 830 Narrative inquiries, 232 Narrative studies, 231 National Association for the Education of Young Children, 406 National Center for Educational Statistics, 404 National Curriculum Framework, 846, 849, 850, 858, 860

937 National languages, 277 National Language Strategy, 184 National Literacy Agency, 856 The National Literacy Strategy for All in Malta and Gozo, 846 National Minimum Curriculum, 849 National minorities, 124 National minority languages, 364 National Policy on Languages (NPL), 703–705 Native English speakers (NES), 405, 407, 408, 410–412, 416, 417 Native language speakers, 146 Naturalistic approach, 230 Neuroscience research, on children’s cognitive and language development, 40–42 Nexus analysis, 174, 179 Nivkh, 831 family nest, 831 master-apprentice program, 831 visual aids, 832 No Child Left Behind Act, 796 Non-alphabetic Chinese writing system, 132 Non-compulsory extracurricular activity, 455 Non-formal early education, professional development in, 802 Non-mainstream language education, 702–705 Non-native speakers, 234 Non-participant observations, 240 Nordic ECE model, 169, 175, 183 Nordic research project, 576 Northern Europe, ECE language education policy ethnic and linguistic diversity, 174 Finnish ECE, 169, 176 German ECE, 181 monolingual language policy, 180 Nordic ECE model, 169, 175 Norwegian ECE, 181 Swedish ECE, 169, 175, 180 Novel language, 642 Novice L2 learners, 659 Nurseries, 895, 896 Nursery groups, 456 Nursery rhymes, 459 Nurturing Early Learners framework, 873 O Observation, 467 checklist, 236 Office for National Statistics (ONS), 170 Official-and minority-language status, 350 Official bilingualism, 727

938 Official language educational policy, 175 Old minorities, 124 One person-one language, 772 One-way early total immersion, 348, 349, 351 Ongoing assent, 203 Online, 438 Ontario, early learning, 735–737 CCEYA, 738 ELECT framework, 737 Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years, 738 private sector, HL programs in, 739–740 public HL/IL programs, 738–739 OPOL, 522 Oral language, 127 Original language, 209 Output, 646 Overrepresentation of American studies, 73 P Paradigmatic knowledge, 59, 61, 67 Parental attitudes, 239 Parental domain, 624 age-appropriate language-conducive strategies, 625 EFL learning, 625 environment, 624 experience-based attitudes, 625 home environment, 626 Parental engagement, 659 Parental involvement, 904 Parental pressure, 238 Parent Child Coalitions, 744 Parents, 349, 350, 355, 405, 415, 418, 478 Parent-teacher collaboration, 737 Parent-teacher interaction, 547, 556 Parent-teacher partnerships, 550–551 Parent–teacher relationship, 616 Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 101 Pedagogical airlift, 826 Pedagogical framework, 738 Pedagogical model, 23 Pedagogical practice, 466 Peer collaboration, 464 Peer interaction, 148, 152, 153, 156–159, 659 Peer language learning, 659 Peer language socialization, 148 Peer learning, 824 Personality characteristics, 633 Phonemic awareness, 234 Phonological awareness (PA), 38, 39, 119, 132 Phonological knowledge, 122 Phonological memory, 119 Physical learning, 492

Index Piaget, Jean, 31–33 Picture books, 460, 465 Pilot projects at preschool level, 479 Planning, 35, 36, 308 Play, 458 Play-based approaches, 902 Play-based integrated curricula without subjectbased learning, 480 Playground rhymes, 459 Playgroups, 712–713 Plurilingualism, 514, 736 Policies, 404, 406–408, 420 Policy makers, 162 Politeness, 162 Polycultural education, 821 Positive attitudes, 453 Positive parenting, 909 Power relations, 209 Practical wisdom, 591, 603 Pragmatic skills, 148 Pre-biliteracy, 407 Preoperational period, 31 Preprimary and primary education, 618 Preprimary education, 614 children’s attention, 614 coherence, 616 early FL learning, 615 educational programmes, 614 education level, 614 emergent curriculum, 616 FL learning, 617 theoretical conceptualizations, 615 transition, 615 transition between educational levels, 615 young FL learners, 615 Pre-primary EFL, 451 Preschool CLIL learning structure, 491 Preschool curriculum, 451 Preschool groups, 456 Preschool language education, 713–714 Pre-school learners, 223 Preschool programs, 733 Preschools, 568, 577–578 Preservice ECEC teachers and teacher education, 594 conceptualizations of language and emergent literacy, 594 innovative course designs, 594, 596 Pre-service teachers, 243 Primary curriculum, 619 Primary education, 456 Primary Education Act of 2009, 792 Primary transition, 630

Index Print motivation, 133 Print referencing, 129 Print-rich environments, 240 Private, 897–898 Private sector, 454 Probilingual, 552 Procedural knowledge, 590, 591, 593, 594, 596, 599, 600, 603, 606, 875 Production of language, 443 Professional community of practice, 24 Professional development (PD), 588, 589, 592, 602, 606, 750–751, 861 accomplishments of, 804–805 in early multilingual education, 798–799 in formal early education, 801–802 in-service ECEC teachers, 599, 600 interventions in, 601 in non-formal early education, 802 qualitative and quantitative methods, 803 and teacher knowledge, 587 Professional development workshops, 745 Professional qualifications, 587 Programme d’enseignement des langues d’origine (PELO), 742 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 895, 909 Projects, 629 Pronunciation, 530 Prototypical immersion language learner, 352, 360, 364, 366 Prototypical immersion teacher, 352, 366 Psychometric approach, 230 Q Qualified immersion teachers, 358, 365 shortage of, 365 Qualitative designs, 231 Qualitative exploratory study, 243 Quality control, 232 Quality criteria, 242 Quality exposure, 461 Quality input, 457 Quantitative studies, 214, 230 Quasi-experimental design, 231 Quebec, 740 allophones and multilingual education, 742 Meeting Early Childhood Needs, 740–742 R Rapanui language, 304 Rapid automatic naming (RAN), 119 Rationalized CLIL model, 491

939 Receptive bilingual knowledge, 153 Receptive vocabulary, 58, 63, 65, 66, 71, 73, 233 Reflexive self-awareness, 200 Reflexivity, 805–806 Reforms in preschool education, 869 Reliability, 232 Repertoire, 535 Repetition drills, 236 Replicability, 232, 441 Reproducibility, 441 Research design, 231 Research framework, 631 Research methodology, 230 Resilience, 626 Revising Language Shift model, 731 Revitalization, 554 Revitalization of Indigenous languages, Chile, see Chile, Indigenous language revitalization Revitalized language, 21 Revival of the Hebrew language, 768, 780 Right of the child, 198 Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 818 Ritual repetition, 655 Role-plays, 240 Russian children’s achievements, 396 diasporic groups, 374 diasporic language, 374 early language teaching, 376, 377 educational material, 394 extra-curriculum activities, 378 first-language maintenance, 379 home language, 389 home language education, 377, 379, 381, 385 home-language learning, 379 home or heritage language, 377 ideologies, 395 input, 376 interactive ways of drawing, playing, instructing, and discussing, 393 introductory lessons in English, 389 lack of input, 394 the language of inter-national communication, 375 language policy, 377 language use, 379 medium of instruction, 375 minority education, 375 mother tongue, 393 multilingual preschools, 377

940 Russian (cont.) parents’ satisfaction, 395 pedagogical attitude, 395 RT, examples, 390, 392 Saturday or Sunday activities, 379 second language, 393 second-language acquisition, 379 speakers, 375 specially adjusted input, 393 subject, 375 transnational community, 375 United States, preschools, 388, 389 world language, 374 Russian-Hebrew preschools, 771–774 Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals, 132 Russian-speaking preschool, 381 S Sakha (Yakut), 822 Sandwiching, 243 Saskatchewan, 744–745 Saskatchewan Organization for Heritage Languages (SOHL), 744, 745 Scaffolding, 240, 460, 486 at the micro-level, 496 School English Communication (SEC), 131 School-family relationships, 280 Schooling, 526 School readiness, 620 School-specific policies, 128 School type, 852 Seaska, 273 Secondary school transition, 631 Second language, 145–148 Second language acquisition (SLA) theories, 248, 483 Second language research in early childhood education access to research participation, 204–205 child language learning, 211 children's role in, 198–199 confidentiality and anonymity, 203–204 consent, assent and dissent, 202–203 critical reflexivity, 205–206 cultural expectations about consent, 206 cultural values and norms, 206–207 data analysis and reporting, 213 ethical guidelines and regulations, 201–202 ethical praxis, 196 ethical symmetry, 197 future research, 214–215 language issues, 215

Index language of publication, 208–209 languages in fieldwork, 208 ongoing assent, 203 ownership of ideas, practices and academic discussion, 207–208 power relations, 209 relationship, 200–201 role of the adult in, 199–200 situated ethics, 196 sociocultural approach, 195–196 translation, 209 Selection criteria for immersion, 355, 360 Self-esteem, 732, 738 Self-motivation, 627 Semantic skills, 131 Semente, 274, 276, 279, 280 Semiotic mediation, 145 Semi-structured interviews, 239 Semitic language, 843 Sense of belonging, 738 Sensorimotor period, 31 Shared book reading, 68–70, 76 Simultaneous bilingualism, 735 Singapore, 872, 873, 875, 880, 884 Singapore educational system, 868 Single-subject design, 231 Sino-Tibetan language, 132 Situated ethics, 196 Social and linguistic environment, 157 Social-cognitive ability, 37 Social constructivist approach to learning, 482 Social context, 631 Social interaction, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 157 Socialization, 858 Social norms and values, 155 Societal bilingualism, 843 Societal dominant languages, 64 Societal language, 525 Societal values, 632 Society for the Advancement of International Languages, 745–746 Sociocultural approach, 195–196 Sociocultural context(s), 149, 161, 861 Socio-cultural theory, 246, 513, 518, 520 Socio-economic changes, 530 Socioeconomic status (SES), 36, 45, 48, 74–75, 119 Socio-emotional, 408–410, 413–415, 418–421 Sociolinguistic displacement, 291 Sociolinguistic interviews, 551 Sociolinguistic realities, 352 Sociolinguistic reasons, 350 Sociology of childhood, 195, 198

Index Socio-political environment, 349 Socio-political realities, 348, 352, 364, 366 Soft CLIL, 489–491 Soft data, 230 Songs, 454 Southern Alberta Heritage Language Association (SAHLA), 746–747 Spanish-English bilinguals, 125 Spanish-English speaking preschoolers, 130 Spanish-speaking children, 125 Special education teacher, 355 Special needs assessment for multilingual children with, 678–680 bilingual-bimodal intervention, 686 dual language intervention, 685 intervention for multilingual children with, 680–681 no double deficits for multilingual children with, 673–675 therapy effect in societal language on heritage language, 683–685 Specific knowledge, 122 Specific language impairment (SLI), 778 Specific symbolic principles, 123 Spolsky’s model, 172, 179 Stage theory, 32 Stakeholders, 238 Stories, 459 Story app, 857 Story-based method, 465 Storybook reading, 129 Storybooks, 236 Storytelling, 465 Strategic learning behaviours, 628 Stroop task, 35 Structural priming, 439 Structured communication, Finland clubs and playgroups, 390 foreign or a home language, 390 language maintenance and development, 390 teaching and maintenance, 389 translanguaging, 390 Structured interview, 245 Subtractive bilingualism, 99, 409 Survey design, 230 Sustainability, 806 Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe (SMiLE) project, 273 Swedish ECE curriculum, 175 Swedish immersion, 348, 350–351, 353–355, 360–361, 364

941 Syntactic awareness, 39, 40 Syntagmatic knowledge, 59, 67 Syntagmatic vocabulary, 67 Synthetic phonics, 495 Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach, 485 T Targeting pedagogies, 468 Target language, 469 Target language status, 352 Task characteristics, 437 Task impurity, 44 Tatar language, 823 Tatarstan, 823 additional lessons, 824 bilingual education, 824 bilingualism, 825 decorative and applied arts, 825 language, 823 Teachability of language, 590 Teacher(s), 623 awareness, 595, 623, 645 beliefs, 590, 595, 602 candidates' language proficiency, 363 cognition, 242, 590 competences, 223 education, 624 education programs, 297–298 instructional strategies, 645 management style, 628 mediated sociodramatic play, 657 preparation, 879 qualifications, 586, 587, 589, 600, 602, 606 training, 603 Teacher agency, 324, 645, 849 teacher beliefs, 324 Teacher-centered structural approach, 824 Teacher domain FL classroom, 623 language teaching, 624 motivation, 623 qualifications, 624 Teacher education, ECEC complexity of, 602 curriculum and syllabus, 603, 604 in-service ECEC teachers, 596, 600 level of education and status, 602 organizational structures, 588 political and social conditions, 589 preservice ECEC teachers and teacher education, 594, 596

942 Teacher education (cont.) psychological-pedagogical knowledge base vs. linguistic knowledge base, 593, 594 sociocultural and critical approaches and declarative knowledge, 592, 593 sociopolitical context of, 600, 601 teacher training vs. teaching education, 602, 603 Teacher educators, 591, 595, 601, 606 ECEC language, 605 Teacher knowledge, 589 declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and practical wisdom, 591 domains of, 590 knowledge, beliefs and assumptions about language, 590 and professional development, 587 Teaching, 307 methodology, 620 methods, 234 of non-linguistic subjects through foreign language, 477 Teaching-related data, 233 Technology, 460 Thematic units, 458 Theory of mind (ToM), 37–38, 44, 45, 47 Three-tier vocabulary model, 68 Threshold hypothesis, 121 Time constraints, 208 Total physical response (TPR), 235, 458 Tower of Hanoi, 35 Trainee CLIL teachers, 491 Transitional programs, 124 Transition measures, 620 Transition policy, 629 Transit to primary education, 468 Translanguaging, 119, 134, 154, 247, 384, 414, 487, 514, 526, 550, 766, 781, 782, 784, 797–799, 801, 803–805, 848, 906 Translation, 209 Translingual books, 906 Triangulation, 232, 233, 240 Trilingual, 529, 905, 912 Turkey language maintenance, 388 memo-schemes, 388 Russian-speaking minority, 387 tourist destinations, 387 Turn-taking, 151 21st century skills, 464 Two-way immersion model, 381 Two-way language programs, 765, 771

Index U UK, ECE language education policy critical analysis, 178 EAL, 170, 178, 182 Gaelic-medium programmes, 178 home language, 177, 179 Irish, 170 linguistic diversity, 170 MFL and migrants’ languages, in Scotland, 178 part-time childcare programmes, 171 Scottish Gaelic and Scots, 170 Welsh, 170, 179, 181 Ultimate task engagement, 461 Umurt, folklore-based materials, 827 United Arab Emirates (UAE), early language education, 911 Arabic diglossia, 899–900, 912–913 bilingual development, 903–904 child at home, 900 curricular choice, 901–903 demographic, socioeconomic and linguistic factors, 897 emergent biliteracy education, 913–914 government initiatives, 907–908 home language and literacy practices, 908–909 language-based community playgroups, 908 maid phenomenon, 900 MSA vs. home dialect, 909–911 multilingual preschool education, 905 private nurseries, 897–898 public literacy events and children’s literature, 906–907 state kindergartens, 898–899 structure of, 896–897 teacher quality, 911 technology, in early language and literacy development, 914 translanguaging, 906 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 195 United States (US), dual language education, see Dual language education Urban mapuche, 303 Usage-based theory, 513, 518–519 V Validated tests, 248 Validity, 232 Very young learners, 451–453, 456, 459, 460, 465, 466, 469 Victorian Early Childhood Language Program, 717, 718

Index

943

Visual methods, 212 Visual world paradigm, 439 Vocabulary, 430 breadth, 59, 65–66, 76 depth, 66–67, 74, 76, 433 knowledge, 48 size, 432 tests, 234 Vocabulary development, in early language education early bilingual programs and children’s breadth of vocabulary knowledge, 65–66 early bilingual programs and children’s depth of vocabulary knowledge, 66–67 instructional principles and strategies, in early bilingual programs, 67–70 Vocabulary education, psycholinguistic base of, 61–63 Voice of the child, 198 Voluntary-based, 561 Vygotsky, Lev S., 31–34

Word association model, 61, 62 Wordless books, 907 Word play, 459 Working memory, 35, 36, 46 Writing systems, 123

W Walking water, 464 Watching cartoons, 462 Whole-child approach, 453

Z Zone of proximal development (ZDP), 33 Zweisprachigkeit, 273

Y Young language learners (YLLs), 30, 31, 34, 45, 46, 49 Young learners’ domain autonomy, 626 child agency, 628 EFL learners’ voices, 628 formal evaluative feedback, 627 learner motivation, 626 learning strategies, 627 resilience, 626 self-confidence, 628 self-motivation, 627 transitional processes, 628 transition periods, 626 Young learners, in bilingual programs, 70