Varied meanings of multilingualism: ECEC personnel's perceptions of multilingualism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58955/jecer.147593Keywords:
KOAVA, multilingualism, co-operation between families and ECEC, growth environmentsAbstract
This article aims to deepen the understanding of how Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) personnel teams describe multilingualism in the home and daycare environments and in the context of the connections between these growing environments. Additionally, it seeks to illustrate what meanings ECEC personnel teams give to multilingualism. In the article, the connection between early childhood education and homes is understood according to Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory as a systemic structure where different growth environments meet each other, either closely linked or at through an individual moving between growth environments. The article is part of the Language-Aware Learning Environment Evaluation (KOAVA) study, which investigates language-aware and multilingual pedagogy in Finnish early childhood education groups using the KieliPeda (in English LangPeda) tool for data collection. The research data used in the article are textual KieliPeda data collected from staff teams in 81 kindergartens, which were analysed using a multi-stage content analysis. The research material for the article consists of textual data collected from the staff teams of 81 ECEC groups in daycare centres and a multi-stage qualitative content analysis was conducted. As a result, the data shows an overall positive and interested attitude towards different language and cultural groups and multilingualism. The results also indicate that awareness of children's growing environments and related multilingualism is often superficial and mainly related to observations of the child in early childhood education and further inferences derived from these observations, rather than to conscious and genuine connections between the growing environments or the languages the children know and the language of instruction in the kindergarten. At the same time, the meanings given to multilingualism are varied, and there are intersecting interpretations of multilingualism as a characteristic of the individual, as a condition of the community, as a temporal interlude or as an emergent property. Thus, in this study, supporting multilingualism appears to be somewhat of a tension, and the personnel do not necessarily have the means to support families' multilingualism. Further, the study suggests that a systemic approach may be an effective tool for identifying the meanings given to multilingualism by ECEC personnel in different child growing environments.
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