Teacher agency and language mediation in two Maltese preschool bilingual classrooms

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the limited research on teacher agency in early bilingual development and education. Through classroom observations and interviews, we examined the differential degrees of agency of two preschool teachers in Malta as they mediated languages in their bilingual classrooms. The teachers’ background and language beliefs, the sociolinguistic context (national and local), as well as the school language policies influenced their classroom agentive roles. A call is made for adaptive pedagogies and flexible bilingual strategies which meet the language and affective needs of preschool children in a more equitable manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• Maltese preschools
• teacher agency
• language policy
• language mediation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two teachers and their classes in Malta who generously participated in our study. We thank also Rositsa Petrova of the Centre for Literacy, University of Malta who supported the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.