Young children capitalising on their entire language repertoire for language learning at school

ABSTRACT

While translanguaging has been well researched in bilingual settings with older pupils and has been found to contribute to cognitive and personal development, there is little research on translanguaging of young multilinguals. In trilingual Luxembourg, at school, children learn Luxembourgish aged 4, German aged 6 and French aged 7, with the majority not speaking Luxembourgish on school entry. The number of languages to be learned may leave teachers little space to capitalise on home languages and encourage translanguaging. Drawing on qualitative methods, this paper contextualises and examines the practice and purposes of translanguaging of nursery and primary school children who speak a language other than Luxembourgish at home, while they collaboratively produce oral texts on the iPad app iTEO. The data stem from a longitudinal study using a multi-method approach. The findings indicate that the children made use of their multilingual repertoire in order to communicate, construct knowledge and mark their multilingual identity. Translanguaging was a frequent and legitimate practice in both classes although the older children drew less on home languages other than Luxembourgish. The children’s ability to translanguage and their opportunities for doing so were influenced by the multilingual learning environment, the curriculum and the language learning tasks.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• translanguaging
• Luxembourg
• nursery
• primary school
• ipad app iTEO

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank the teachers and pupils as well as the research-assistant Ms Di Letitia for their participation in this research project. I am also grateful to my colleagues Gérard Gretsch and Asunción Bes for their insightful comments. My specials thanks go to Ofelia García and Jean Conteh and the anonymous reviewers and Durk Gorter for commenting on the various drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Université du Luxembourg under Grant PUL R-AGR-0222 and the Ministère de l'Education nationale, de l'Enfance et de la Jeunesse (http://www.men.public.lu/home/index.html).