What prompts early childhood professionals to proffer advice to multilingual families? Investigating the association between language policy and perceived self-efficacy

Abstract

Early childhood professionals can act as catalysts in encouraging home language maintenance in multilingual families. However, there is a dearth of research on whether these professionals advise parents to speak their home language(s) to their offspring, and furthermore, little is known about what prompts professionals to proffer language advice. To respond to these queries, we relied on two theoretical frameworks: Spolsky's language policy model and Bandura's perceived self-efficacy theory. We gathered data from professionals (N = 305) employed at infant welfare clinics in Belgium and examined whether a high sense of multilingual confidence (i.e., a form of perceived self-efficacy), together with positive multilingual beliefs and multilingual practices, would induce professionals to offer multilingual advice (i.e., a form of language management). Our logistic regression results revealed that multilingual practices and multilingual confidence were positively associated with multilingual advice. Additionally, multilingual training was found to be strongly related to advice-giving. Multilingual beliefs, however, were only connected with multilingual advice when they were considered without the inclusion of multilingual confidence, as multilingual beliefs seemed to operate via multilingual confidence. We therefore suggest an enrichment of Spolsky's model by taking into account multilingual confidence when investigating individuals' language policy dynamics.

Home language use with children, dialogue with multilingual parents and professional development in ECEC

“…The finding that the multilingual background of the early childhood professionals is not associated with an increased engagement in terms of entering into dialogue with multilingual parents is also consistent with those of Van Oss et al (2021), who found that the multilingual background of professionals from infant welfare clinics was not a significant factor regarding the advice offered to multilingual parents. These observations are somewhat surprising, given the many studies indicating that shared (linguistic) experiences can foster stronger relationships (e.g., De Gioia, 2009;Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2014).…”