Multilingual language minority parents’ perspectives on their relationships with caregivers regarding the multilingual upbringing of the child: a large-scale exploration within childcare facilities in Flanders

Teacher perceptions of parent collaboration in multi-ethnic ECEC settings

“…International studies have indicated that even though ECEC professionals expressed positive attitudes towards parent collaboration and cultural diversity, they reported less support for promoting multilingualism, which might not correspond with the language beliefs of many multilingual families (Slot et al, 2018;Aghallaj et al, 2020;Norheim and Moser, 2020). Similarly, van der Wildt et al (2023) found that multilingual parents perceived the relationship with ECEC staff as promising but responded less favourably about issues regarding children's multilingualism. For instance, few parents reported having received or requested language advice or discussed any linguistic upbringing with ECEC staff.…”

“…However, Choi et al (2021) reported that communication with DLLs and their families is a major challenge for teachers and that there is a need for systematic training for teachers working with the growing population and diversity of DLLs and families. In addition, ECEC teachers have tended to hold the development of social-emotional skills as being of primary importance for DLLs (Jacoby and Lesaux, 2019), while communication between parents and teachers regarding DLLs' language development has been uncommon (van der Wildt et al, 2023). Still, there are indications of a need for parental support regarding dual language development.…”