Young children capitalising on their entire language repertoire for language learning at school

Abstract

While translanguaging has been well researched in bilingual settings with older pupils and has been found to contribute to cognitive and personal development, there is little research on translanguaging of young multilinguals. In trilingual Luxembourg, at school, children learn Luxembourgish aged 4, German aged 6 and French aged 7, with the majority not speaking Luxembourgish on school entry. The number of languages to be learned may leave teachers little space to capitalise on home languages and encourage translanguaging. Drawing on qualitative methods, this paper contextualises and examines the practice and purposes of translanguaging of nursery and primary school children who speak a language other than Luxembourgish at home, while they collaboratively produce oral texts on the iPad app iTEO. The data stem from a longitudinal study using a multi-method approach. The findings indicate that the children made use of their multilingual repertoire in order to communicate, construct knowledge and mark their multilingual identity. Translanguaging was a frequent and legitimate practice in both classes although the older children drew less on home languages other than Luxembourgish. The children's ability to translanguage and their opportunities for doing so were influenced by the multilingual learning environment, the curriculum and the language learning tasks.

Translingual Discursive Spaces in Language and Arts Lessons

“…While extensive research has been carried out on translanguaging involving two or three (often official) languages, research on translanguaging involving multiple languages, including the home languages, is relatively rare [10,15]. Due to its diverse linguistic landscape, the educational context in Luxembourg is particularly suitable to explore this type of translanguaging.…”

“…Conversely, recent studies [10] show that in some Luxembourgish preschool classes as well as in some Year 1 and Year 2 classes, teachers have begun to encourage the deployment of the students' full linguistic repertoires, including their home languages to some extent. Despite the implementation of a flexible multilingual pedagogy in these classes, Kirsch [10] has found that the children's language practices differ significantly in terms of the languages involved. Whereas kindergarteners are deploying all the features of their repertoires while engaging in translanguaging practices, the primary school children in Years 1 and 2 only rarely use their home languages and flexibly move between Luxembourgish and one of the target languages.…”

Grappling with translanguaging for teaching and assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts: teacher perspectives from Oaxaca, Mexico

“…Teachers have the ability to be language policy makers (Johnson 2013;Menken and García 2010), although contextual constraints greatly limit what they can achieve. In her work with younger learners in Luxembourg, Kirsch (2018) has pointed to the importance of teachers developing a multilingual learning environment to support learning tasks and curriculum that allow students to engage in translanguaging as part of their learning process. In the United States, Allard (2017) illustrated how translanguaging practices performed by teachers and students in the classroom were viewed in relation to other institutional or contextual structures.…”

The Effect of Professional Development on Multilingual Education in Early Childhood in Luxembourg

“…Neumann (2015) describes the language situation as one of "linguistic superdiversity", whereby the choice of language depends on the interlocutor, the situation and the private or public domain. "Translanguaging" is an everyday reality (Kirsch, 2017).…”