Language policies and practices in early childhood education: perspectives across European migration societies. Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

This paper will introduce the subject of language policies and practices in early childhood education across European migration societies and formulate theoretical and methodological questions. It links perspectives from applied linguistics, most explicitly sociolinguistics, and educational research on language (education) policies and practices, thus contributing to the growing body of research on language in early childhood education. Building on this broad literature review as well as on recent socio-political developments, this introduction will identify key avenues for research in this field, and argue for three essential principles: the need of a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between language policies and language practices within early childhood education; the adoption of a perspective that considers interrelations and interactions between all actors involved (i.e. children, teachers/educators, parents, policymakers, etc.); and the commitment to a critical perspective that asks questions of power, social difference and inequality. Finally, the introduction will present the contributions to the special issue and point out how they approach the identified avenues and principles for research on language policies and practices in early childhood education.

KEYWORDS:

• Language education policies
• language practices
• early childhood education
• ethnography
• migration

1. Introduction

This special issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism presents research on the relations between language policies and practices in institutions of early childhood education (ECE) in European migration societies and reflects an increased interest in multilingualism at this stage of educational trajectories. ECE institutions are oftentimes the first institutional site in a child’s educational trajectory and also the first site where children receive language education. Such sites often being characterised by competing normative attitudes towards language practices and language learning and teaching, an examination of how societal and political expectations and prescriptions are reflected in institutional policies and practices is of crucial importance for a better understanding of the societal relevance of language in migration societies. By juxtaposing research conducted in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland, the special issue highlights how language policies in ECE institutions in different national and regional contexts are negotiated by relevant actors (e. g. educational professionals, policymakers, parents) and how they connect to language and educational practices – within ECE, ECE teacher education and the family. The aims of the special issue are, firstly, to uncover the different national and regional language ideologies (Mar-Molinero & Stevenson, 2006) that inform language policies in ECE in different contexts and to relate these to one another. Secondly, the contributions analyse interactions between professionals, parents and children in order to reconstruct which actors use which linguistic resources with whom and in which contexts, and examine which expectations, prescriptions, norms and attributions underlie these interactions. Thirdly, some papers have a specific focus on reconstructing how educational professionals engage with social hierarchisations of language(s) and with societal power relations in their professional and reflexive practices. As such, this special issue aims to contribute to an ongoing conversation on the discrimination and exclusion of minoritised children.

In this introduction, we contextualise the special issue by focusing on the underlying theoretical concepts at the intersection of sociolinguistics and educational theory, and their methodological consequences and by giving an overview of the contributions in this issue.

2. Theoretical perspectives on language education policies and practices in migration societies

Early Childhood Education in Europe has experienced several changes during the past years: First, in the wake of the PISA results, ECE has been accorded a high degree of relevance in terms of later school and educational success (Diehm & Magyar-Haas, 2011), and the focus of ECE institutions has shifted from care to education in the view of preparing children for primary school (Kamerman, 2000). Second, the share of children who have family languages differing from the nationally or regionally dominant ones has increased (Michel & Kuiken, 2014), which contributes to a heightened relevance of multilingualism and language education in ECE. These changes have led to new language policies which often focus on the assessment of language levels (Kelle, 2015; Machold, 2015) and on language support for linguistically minoritised children (Aguiar et al., 2020), sometimes also including home language support (Tkachenko et al., 2021). The professionalisation of teachers in language education has also been of central importance in this context (Kämpfe et al., 2021).

Aiming to understand these developments in their broader sociopolitical context, this special issue is inspired by the theoretical perspective of migration pedagogy (Mecheril, 2018). This perspective conceptualises migration as a phenomenon of discourses, and thus as a phenomenon of hegemonic power relations. Therefore, the analytical focus of migration pedagogy is not on migrants, but on education as a site where ‘natio-racial-culturally’ (Mecheril, 2018, p. 129) or ‘natio-racio-lingually’ (Thoma, 2018, p. 14) coded orders of belonging are (re)produced or contested and transformed. Another influential strand of research are studies on raciolinguistic ideologies which analyse how racialised learners’ linguistic practices are framed ‘as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness’ (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 149). Both perspectives focus on all actors involved in educational processes and institutions – children, teachers, parents, social workers, etc. – regardless of their belonging. Moreover, their de-essentializing and deconstructionist perspectives require researchers to also critically reflect on their own positioning. For research focusing on language practices, policies and ideologies, this entails that researchers reflexively integrate their own language practices and connected social positionings into their analysis (Johnson, 2013; Platzgummer, 2021).

Compatibly with a perspective of European societies as migration societies, we draw on approaches that conceive of multilingualism as the interplay of linguistic resources, practices and ideologies (Androutsopoulos, 2018). We see language as a resource that is distributed in unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces, whereby the values attached to different linguistic resources are socially constructed under specific sociohistorical conditions (Heller, 2007). In the context of migration, this unequal distribution is particularly relevant because people have different educational opportunities based on their actual or presumed linguistic practices.

The focus that this special issue places on language policies and practices reflects a continued interest in understanding how these two notions relate in situated contexts, as well as in how they can be related to one another theoretically and methodologically (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012; Johnson, 2013). While there is no consensus yet as to how language policies should be conceptualised (Hornberger et al., 2018), such conceptualisations commonly either refer to language practices as an object that policies aim to regulate, e.g. in Johnson’s (2013, p. 9) definition of language policy as ‘a policy mechanism that impacts the structure, function, use, or acquisition of language’, or they argue for seeing language practices themselves as policies, as in Spolsky’s (2009) conceptualisation of language policies as practices, beliefs and management. Consequently, language policies in such conceptualisations cannot be adequately studied without a focus on language practices.

This insight is largely indebted to a tradition of ethnographic studies that have repeatedly shown that language policies expressed in legislation or institutional documents (often termed de iure policies) and actual language and language education practices often do not match (Asker & Martin-Jones, 2013; Jaffe, 1999; Leone-Pizzighella, 2022; Schnitzer, 2015). Most research conducted in this vein has focused on primary or secondary schooling, with few exceptions examining relations between language policies and practices in ECE settings (Anzures Tapia, 2020; Panagiotopoulou & Krompák, 2014; Zettl, 2019). For this reason, producing a more nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between language policies and language practices within early childhood education, especially in the light of the increasing relevance for educational trajectories attributed to ECE, emerges as a highly relevant avenue for research.

Similarly, these studies have pointed to the fact that language education policies cannot be understood as mere top-down prescriptions, but rather as ‘a multilayered construct, wherein essential LPP [Language Planning and Policy] components – agents, levels, and processes of LPP – permeate and interact with each other in multiple and complex ways’ (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996, p. 419). It thus seems crucial to trace how language policies are negotiated across hierarchically ordered institutional levels, as well as how policy actors across those levels adopt different stances towards language policies, ‘conforming to, skilfully navigating or openly contesting policy prescriptions’ (Saxena & Martin-Jones, 2013, p. 285). Policy actors, in this context, can be politicians, administrators, head teachers and teachers but also non-institutional actors such as the students or children as well as their parents or guardians (Ball et al., 2012).

More recent language policy research has taken this perspective on board and provided especially rich insights on teachers as policy actors, e.g. in an edited volume by Menken & García (2010), and as language policy arbiters, defined as ‘individuals who have a disproportionate amount of impact on language policy and educational programs’ (Johnson & Johnson, 2015, p. 222). Less research has focused on children (Anzures Tapia, 2020; Bergroth & Palviainen, 2017), and even fewer studies have considered the ways in which parents, too, can function as policy actors in relation to their children’s education (Chaparro, 2020). A way forward for research on language policies and practices in ECE, to which the papers in this special issue are contributing, thus needs to redress this imbalance as well as aim at studying how language policies and practices are shaped in interaction between these different types of social actors.

Language policy research has shown that language policies have to be interpreted in their broader sociopolitical context (Ricento, 2000). There are a number of approaches which focus on power and language planning: Tollefson (1991) analysed how language policy is used to construct and perpetuate distinctions among social groups and to protect the positions of those in power. Research in postcolonial language policy has shown how changes in language education policy and in the language of instruction, which often are implemented after major political changes, can have a major impact on power balances in society (Makoni et al., 2006; Samuelson & Freedman, 2010) which are already highly complex against the background of specific historical contexts and linguistic oppression. Research on neoliberalism and language policies has revealed how language integration policies turn away from the welfare state and construct labour and language as a key to migrants’ integration (Allan & McElhinny, 2017; Flubacher, 2021; Heinemann, 2017).

3. Ethnography as a framework to studying language policies and practices

As we showed in the previous sections, we see language as a socially and institutionally situated practice through which powerful relationships between different individuals and groups are (re)produced, negotiated, shifted or irritated. Since these situated practices can best be understood by observing them, the papers in this special issue largely orient to ethnography as their methodological framework (Copland & Creese, 2015; Heller, 2006). Ethnographic approaches allow for studying social practices as they unfold and consider how they are embedded within a wider socio-political context. Ethnographic research also has a considerable history in the field of language planning and policy, with early work on language policy enactments in specific local settings beginning in the late 1980s and taking off in the early 2000s (Hornberger et al., 2018). As Johnson (2013, p. 145) notes, such approaches to language policy research aim to understand not policies per se, but how social actors engage with policy processes. In this vein, ethnography makes it possible ‘to capture the specific local ways in which language policies and new forms of language education are made and remade […] in the daily routines of educational life’ (Martin-Jones, 2011, p. 232).

Within this broad orientation to ethnography, the contributions in this special issue draw on different kinds of data and methodological approaches to look at language policies and practices in their respective field sites. While most papers base their analyses on fieldnotes and audio or video recordings generated via the staple ethnographic method of participant observation (Heller et al., 2018), others have additionally integrated feedback sessions (Kirsch & Bergeron-Morin, 2023, this issue), guided interviews (Panagiotopoulou & Uçan, 2023, this issue) and group discussions with participants (Thoma & Platzgummer, 2023, this issue) as well as photographs (Sollid et al., 2023, this issue) and policy texts (Thoma & Platzgummer, 2023, this issue; Zettl, 2023, this issue) into their research design. Analytical approaches, in turn, range from Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to different approaches to the analysis of communicative interactions.

4. Overview of the contributions

The contributions assembled in this special issue present findings from research projects conducted in different contexts across six European countries. They also comprise different field sites, such as different kinds of ECE institutions, a teacher education building, and families with children in ECE. The order in which they appear in the issue thereby loosely reflects the papers’ focus in terms of types of social actors in ECE, beginning with contributions that are focused more on the children, continuing with ones centred mainly on teachers and teacher education, and ending with ones that include or zoom in on parents’ perspectives.

In her paper, Rickert (2023) addresses multilingual practices in a linguistically diverse kindergarten group in Germany and examines shifting language ideological assemblages in the children’s and teachers’ interactions. Based on a three-month ethnography, she shows how both children and teachers situationally draw on or elicit linguistic resources from languages other than German for different interactional and educational purposes. They thereby co-create language ideological assemblages in which such resources have the affordance to position a child as a knowledgeable subject or, on the teachers’ end, to reinforce educational messages – which however seems to be possible only with English. At the same time, German remains the dominant language in the kindergarten; teachers orient to its relevance for the children’s educational trajectories, and children, too, at times draw on ideologies of German monolingualism in their responses to other children’s language practices.

Drawing on a focused ethnography of three German-English daycare centres in Switzerland, Knoll and Becker (2023) investigate how children employ different linguistic resources and thereby contribute to shaping the institutions’ language ecologies, as well as the forms of agency constructed for children in these contexts. The authors show that children expertly adjust their language practices to their teachers and peers, shuttling between Swiss German, Standard German and English and taking up opportunities to develop their linguistic repertoires as well as their agency in this manner. At the same time, children’s agency also seems to be restricted when it comes to language practices involving other languages, which were rarely actively encouraged and in one centre even discouraged. The authors call for more research examining children’s agency from a multilingual perspective and taking linguistic hierarchies into account.

Thoma and Platzgummer (2023) investigate how preschool teachers in the autonomous, officially trilingual Italian province of South Tyrol interpret and appropriate institutional language education policies. Based on two ethnographic projects in German-language preschools, they investigate how teachers navigate the tensions that arise between a monolingually ‘German’ conceptualisation of the institution and the linguistic repertoires of the children who attend it alongside the dominance of Italian in the community surrounding the preschool. They show that both the language policies of the institution and their interpretations by the teachers are ambiguous and sometimes stand in conflict with pedagogical goals, leading to conflicting demands. The paper shows how teachers draw on policy texts, pedagogical values, language ideologies as well as on their own professional experience to position themselves reflexively in these fields of tension.

Using a nexus analytical perspective, Sollid et al. (2023) examine how linguistic and cultural diversity are represented in the semiotic landscape of a teacher education building in Norway, arguing that this material environment contributes to constructing the institution’s identity. They show that in the official and permanent semiotic landscape, Sámi identities, regional rootedness and the institution’s history are emphasised, while Kven identities and transnational diversity are erased. The authors identify this erasure as reproducing in a fractally recursive manner the hierarchisation between Norwegian and Sámi identities also between Sámi and Kven and transnational identities. Moreover, the artwork that most explicitly and critically addresses the institution’s own historical role in Sámi and Kven assimilation is not on display, which constructs an ambivalent position of the institution in this regard. The authors also point to a striking absence of children and their lifeworlds that contrasts with the building’s purpose of educating school and ECE teachers.

Zettl’s (2023) contribution is based on an ethnography in an ECE institution in a highly multilingual city district in Germany and focuses on the teachers’, children’s and researcher’s practices in relation to children’s home languages. Taking a discursive approach towards language education policies, Zettl reconstructs two contradictory policies co-existing in the ECE institution: a German-only policy versus a policy of valuing and integrating children’s home languages. Turkish being the most common home language of the children, these policies become visible to the ethnographer via co-existing practices of teachers forbidding and valuing Turkish. Based on a series of interactions with a specific child whose home language is actually not Turkish, Zettl shows how Turkish emerged as a desirable resource in this context insofar as the child co-constructed a Turkish-speaking identity for herself in interaction with both the teachers as well as with her as an ethnographer. Zettl concludes by arguing that practices of monolingualisation, but also practices of valuing home languages had the side effect that migration languages receive a marked status, while German remains the norm – already by virtue of the teachers not speaking or understanding the former.

Analysing guided interviews with the parents of two refugee families from Afghanistan in Germany, Panagiotopoulou and Uçan (2023) explore how these parents negotiate family and early childhood language practices in the light of the monolingual language policies of the ECE institutions currently attended by their youngest children. The authors’ analyses reveal that the parents are aware of the importance of German skills and their function as selection criteria in their children’s education. They argue that these parents accept the monolingual orientation of ECE institutions and partly accept deficit-oriented attributions from educators, expecting the ECE institutions in return to ensure their children’s learning of German. In everyday life, the families continue promoting their multilingualism and integrate elements from different languages (Farsi, German, English) into their familylect. Moreover, this research also contained an educational element by involving teacher students with their linguistic resources in the research activities, thereby promoting a critical engagement with institutional language policies on their part.

Kirsch and Bergeron-Morin (2023) examine literacy activities in multiple languages in two Luxembourgish daycare centres, focusing on instances in which educators, also jointly with parents, engage children in story-reading or story-telling activities. Framing their study in the context of a new multilingual education programme requiring educators’ collaboration with parents, the authors show how this policy change engendered different practices in the two daycare centres. In particular joint literacy practices with parents differed strongly: in one centre, such activities were restricted to parents accompanying library visits and only reading to individual children when these approached them, whereas in the other centre, parents contributed more regularly to story-readings or -tellings involving children’s home languages and parents and educators jointly engaged the children in conversations around these stories. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that further guidance and training for educators is required in order for the multilingual programme to be implemented successfully.

In the last contribution, Krompák (2023) identifies connections between the individual papers and highlights the common themes emerging from the special issue. Her commentary offers a comprehensive perspective on the theoretical, methodological and empirical implications derived from the papers with a special focus on agengy. Developing a model of agency in ECE she sketches avenues for future research for the study of language policies and practices in early childhood education.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the authors in this special issue for their papers and the inspiring discussions throughout this joint endeavour that started with two symposia at ECER in 2021. We express our special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their time and commitment, and their constructive comments and feedback, as well as to the editors-in-chief of the International Journal of Multilingualism for their assistance and support throughout this process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.