Children’s agency in interactions: how children use language(s) and contribute to the language ecology in Swiss bilingual German-English daycare centres

ABSTRACT

Although Switzerland is a plurilingual country, most early education and care (ECEC) institutions are monolingual. Yet, new institutions have recently established English as a second language of instruction, addressing economically advantaged families. Despite the growing body of international research on language policy and practice in multilingual ECEC, only few have addressed such ‘privileged’ institutions, and the role children play in dealing with multiple languages. We investigate the language policies and practices in daycare centres with a bilingual language policy, and particularly the children’s agency in dealing with German, English, and other languages in interactions with each other, and with teachers. We draw on the concept of children’s agency and view children as actors who contribute to the construction of the social and cultural world in which they live together with adults. We ask how children use languages in daycare centres, how they contribute to the centres’ language practices, and how thereby different forms of agency manifest. We draw on data from a focused ethnography conducted in three daycare centres in German-speaking Switzerland. The results show that children’s multilingual agency is not only enabled and limited in ECEC settings, but also actively developed in concert with language learning by children themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s agency
• multilingualism
• early childhood education and care
• language policy
• language ecology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three daycare centers, namely the managers, teachers, children, and parents, for participation and support of our study, as well as to our master students and interns, Sarah Frenz, Lea Roos, Lea Schneider, Andrea Schweizer, and Michelle Willen, for their contributions to data collection and analysis. For valuable feedback on a former version of this paper, we owe special thanks to two anonymous colleagues who also contributed to this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sampling criteria: expected language use, size of centre/groups, accessibility.

2 Although (strong versions of) translanguaging theories tend to use linguistic repertoires and idiolects to do away with the idea of fixed linguistic entities, we employ the term language here to showcase the institutional diversity and complexity.

3 Some sequences from fieldnotes we use were already subject of analysis in a former publication which examined the use of children’s heritage languages in daycare centres (Becker & Knoll, 2021). For this contribution, we re-analysed these sequences based on the current research question.

4 We translated all the excerpts from our fieldnotes and transcripts into English (regular letters). Original language is displayed in direct speech: High German in CAPITALS, Swiss German dialect in italic.

5 Numbers in brackets indicate the age of the child in years.