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In Norway, 92% of all children between 1 and 5 attend early childhood education and care (ECEC), and 18% of these children are minority language speakers. The Framework Plan for Content and Tasks of Kindergartens (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 24) states that ECEC staff shall 'help ensure that linguistic diversity becomes an enrichment for the entire group of children and encourage multilingual children to use their mother tongue while also actively promoting and developing the children's Norwegian/Sami language skills'. In this paper, we present a study of how home language (HL) support takes place within the context of Norwegian ECEC, focusing on the strategies used by the staff to promote HL use. After analysing 26 narratives from practice, we found that the most common strategies employed were initiating activities that encourage HL use, facilitating metalinguistic conversations and consulting/involving language experts. The strategies available depend on contextual factors, such as the number of children present and the languages spoken by both children and staff. The HL support strategies are discussed in light of the interplay between teachers' language ideologies, planned actions and spontaneous responses in situations where children's HLs are involved inspired by the theories in García, Johnson and Seltzer's study (2017).

In this article, we discuss how language policy for multilingualism in Norwegian early childhood education has changed during the last 30 years. Drawing on discourse analysis of central official policy documents from different time periods, we discuss the change towards a monolingual language policy. Our analysis shows controversies and inconsistencies in the policy. As we critically question this development, we also discuss the opportunities the current early childhood curriculum opens for supporting multilingual children and connect it to recent research on superdiversity and dynamic and flexible multilingualism.

With growing diversity in the population, higher education faces a new situation with increasing student diversity. In our paper, we will explore questions concerning the consequences student diversity has for higher-education institutions. Based on our experience from three different R&D projects, the differences in culture and academic literacy practices give culturally diverse students challenges that have often been ignored in academia. Some other studies also document that this group of students has a much higher risk of dropping out and underachieving than majority students (Andersen & Skaarer-Kreutz, 2007; Støren, 2009). In our paper, we are going to discuss the students' challenges and discourse of remediation that is often associated with their challenges and suggest how higher-education institutions can adjust their practices to be more oriented to intercultural communication. Intercultural communication as a dialogic approach may create dynamics in academic tutoring and lead to mutual change/transformation instead of a one-way adaptation of existing academic literacy norms. We argue that all teachers should be aware of cultural differences in literacy practices in the education systems and strive to adjust their teaching practices to the diversity in the classroom. This approach, we believe, can contribute to a better learning environment for all students, independently of their backgrounds.

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