“Say ‘What happened?’ in Hebrew. He does not speak Arabic!” Early language awareness as expressed in verbal and nonverbal interactions in the preschool bilingual classroom

Abstract

The aim of this longitudinal ethnographic study was to explore how children's verbal and nonverbal behavior reflects their language awareness at a bilingual Arabic–Hebrew-speaking preschool in Israel. We adopted the perspective that children's L2 acquisition is situated within the social events and interactional practices of the classroom community. We took a close look at six bilingual 3-year-old children—three L1 Arabic-speaking children and three L1 Hebrew-speaking children. To enhance the credibility of our study, we triangulated the collected observations of the children's talk via teachers and parents’ testimonies. The analysis revealed that children applied diverse verbal and nonverbal mediating cues to solve their interlocutors’ communicative troubles. Their pragmatic awareness of the interlocutors’ communicative troubles was encouraged by a unique classroom context where the teachers stimulated children's language mediation and peers’ backup. The study is beneficial for language teachers’ understanding of how they can support children's language awareness.