Exploring Stakeholders’ Perspectives of Young Children’s Multilingual Literacy

Abstract

This chapter presents findings from our interviews with influential stakeholders who have been actively involved in the development of Fiji’s and the Pacific’s early childhood education and care policies, curricula and/or programs. These interview findings highlight key considerations and complexities inherent in our study’s focus on building community capacity for fostering preschool children’s multilingual literacy in their home and community settings. We explore stakeholders’ perspectives according to the focus of each of our research questions in turn: preschool children’s literacy development contexts; enablers and constraints that impact preschool children’s literacy learning; local resources and strategies for fostering preschool children’s literacy in their home languages and English; and effective strategies for developing local community capacity to support preschool children’s literacy development in their home languages and English. The chapter closes with a discussion of implications for developing community capacity for fostering young children’s literacy, a matter core to the aims and focus of our study.