Creating Language Spaces that Prioritize Children’s Cultural and Linguistic Repertoires

• In Event: Early Childhood Education for a New Age: Centering Equity and Social Justice

Abstract

Young children, whose home and community life promote multilingual language proficiencies, reflect dynamic ways of languaging referred to as translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014). These dynamic languaging practices often include an alternation of language code not widely accepted in linguistically diverse academic settings and often considered a deficit to learning. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 2020) however, proposes that educators create language-rich environments that focus on the diversity and complexity of language in children’s communities as they cultivate children’s bilingual identities (p. 22).
Studies that explore emergent bilingual children’s flexible use of language tend to focus on students’ languaging practices during content area lessons or segments of the instructional day in relation to specific bilingual education models (Esquinca, Araujo, de la Piedra, 2014; Sayer, 2013). Little is known, however, about languaging that occurs within the context of play in early childhood environments (Axelrod, 2017; Neumann, 2015). This study analyzes the purpose of emergent bilingual Latino children’s languaging practices within culturally relevant learning activities, including socio dramatic play. This inquiry represents a fragment of a larger project that focuses on the implementation of developmentally appropriate practices at a Head Start center located along the Texas/Mexico border in South Texas.

Author

• Iliana Alanis, The University of Texas - San Antonio