Young children as actors of institutional language policies and practices in day care centres

Kevin Simoes Lourêiro,Sascha Neumann

doi:10.1515/eujal-2020-0008

Abstract

AbstractAs children’s agency in influencing institutional language practices is often not carefully reflected in early childhood education curricula, the objective of this paper is to offer meaningful insights about how institutional language policies are both reproduced and transformed by children’s everyday use of language. For this purpose, we will combine conceptual resources from social theory, sociolinguistics and childhood studies in order to analyse children’s linguistic behaviour by applying a structure-agency perspective as a relational approach. Drawing on data from ethnographic field research within institutional day care centres in Luxembourg, our findings demonstrate that the status of children as actors in institutional language practices is strongly connected to institutional policies as a structural condition. However, this does not mean that children just enact these language policies, because they are actors of both maintaining, underminingandalternating them. In this respect, especially the translanguaging of children and caregivers plays a crucial role in the Luxembourgish context as it allows to build a bridge between the official institutional language policy and the individual linguistic repertoires. Considering the goal of establishing a plurilingual environment in early childhood education which now is paramount to the educational language policy of the Luxembourgish government, this article suggests that translanguaging practices should be considered as one of the key starting points to create a plurilingual ecology in and through everyday practice in the day care centres.

Highlights

Luxembourg can be described as both a super-diverse and a multilingual society
The analysis was based on the following questions: In how far do children appear as actors in the sequences, how do they exert influence on the ongoing situation? How is this linked to the language use of children and how is their language use linked to the institutional language policy of the centre? Not least: How do caregivers react or reflect upon the language use of the children and how does this result in a restricted or an extended form of childrens agency?
In examining language practices in a multilingual day care environment, we focus on both interactions between children and practitioners, as well as among peers

Summary

Introduction

Luxembourg can be described as both a super-diverse and a multilingual society. Historically, multilingualism in Luxembourg emerged from a triglossic national language ecology which diversified further in the slipstream of different migration waves since the end of the 19th century (MENJE 2018a: 109). This is reflected by the large use of translingual communication practices applied by speakers drawing on different linguistic repertoires simultaneously, flexibly and strategically in processes of making sense and meaning (Kirsch and Aleksić 2018; Neumann 2015). Research is focused on language practices initiated or guided by the adults in these institutions, while the multi- or translingual conversation strategies applied by children themselves are often overlooked (Brandenberg et al 2017) In this line, drawing on the study by Glupczynski Spencer et al (2011) on linguistic diversity in early childhood, we encounter a structure-agency divide claiming that policy as a macro-level agent plays a crucial role regarding the programmatic shift in ECEC, the actual change within the field is mutually determined by micro-level agents such as early years practitioners and children; though the impact – of the latter – is often not acknowledged. By analysing children’s contribution in the constitution of language practices, this paper focuses on children’s agency in reproducing or counteracting established structures, and on their influence in modifying or directing practiced institutional language policies (see Boyd and Huss 2017; Jaspers and Verschueren 2011)

The research context

Children’s agency in shaping language environments

Young children transforming institutional language policies

Findings

Final discussion