Translanguaging stance of preschool teachers working with multilingual children in Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

In today’s linguistically and culturally diverse schools, it is important that teachers use inclusive pedagogies, such as translanguaging. This pedagogy assumes that teachers have positive attitudes towards children’s home languages and cultures (translanguaging stance), which we explored in our study with 40 preschool teachers in Luxembourg. The teachers participated in the professional development course on translanguaging over six months. To identify teachers’ stance before and after the course, they completed questionnaires and participated in focus groups, and after completing the course, teacher–child interactions in the classroom were videotaped and analysed. Empirical findings of the questionnaires demonstrate that teachers’ attitudes towards children’s multilingualism and home languages increased significantly after participating in the course. In the focus groups, the majority of teachers expressed a mild translanguaging stance, meaning that they were afraid that the inclusion of children’s home languages will hinder children’s development of the school language, Luxembourgish. Finally, in the videotaped observations, the foci teachers demonstrated their positive stance in one activity and a negative stance in another. Following the study's multi-method approach, we conclude that teachers’ attitudes were ambivalent and paradoxical, which depicts a rather realistic picture of preschool teachers’ attitudes in Luxembourg.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging stance
• preschool teachers
• Luxembourg
• multi-method

Acknowledgements

The project TRANSLA was supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) (FNR C18-SC-12637907-TRANSLA-Aleksic). We thank Ofelia García for the help with the video analyses and Lisa Trierweiler for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Fund: [Grant Number FNR C18-SC-12637907-TRANSLA-Aleksic].