Investigating team beliefs on multilingualism and language education in early childhood education and care

ABSTRACT

Our paper presents the methodological approach of group discussions and documentary method to investigate team beliefs in Early Childhood Education and Care facilities. The research addresses the question of how team beliefs on multilingualism and language education are shaped. To reconstruct team beliefs, we used group discussions and the sociologically informed documentary method, which is a two-step content and discourse analysis. The data analysis gives insights into the teams’ conflicts, perceptions, and shared beliefs concerning the use of home languages in the facilities. This methodological approach offers a perspective that adds to the investigation of individual beliefs on multilingualism and language education by covering collective orientations in organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• team beliefs
• collective beliefs
• documentary method
• early childhood education and care

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 When using the term plurilingualism, we refer to individuals, whereas the term multilingualism is used to address institutional and societal multilingual forms (Lengyel, 2017b).

2 In section 7, quotes (words and phrases) taken directly from the verbal data are put in quotation marks. Given the scope of this paper, we can only quote full discussion passages to a limited extent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ‘Federal Ministry of Education and Research’, Germany under [grant number 01NV1804A].