Poster #125 - Teacher Perspectives on Multilingual Children’s Peer Interactions in Dutch Early Childhood Education and Care

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Many children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) nowadays are multilingual. There are some indications that these children might not always experience rich and frequent peer interactions, while these are important for language, social, and cognitive development (Coplan & Arbeau, 2009; De Haan, 2015; Washington-Nortey et al., 2020). Therefore, we aimed to shed more light on multilingual children’s peer interactions in ECEC. Our research question was: to what extent do young children’s language proficiency and background impact their peer interactions, according to ECEC teachers in the Netherlands? ECEC teachers in the Netherlands who had experience working with multilingual children (0-4 years old) participated in a detailed survey (n=217) and in-depth interviews (n=13). The survey and interview targeted teachers’ ideas about peer interactions generally, as well as peer interactions in relation to children's language proficiency and language background.

A few teachers (4%) thought that language proficiency and background do not influence peer interactions in ECEC in any way, for example because of children’s young age, and their supposed blindness to social differences. However, the other teachers indicated that language proficiency and background do sometimes impact peer relations. They noted that these effects depended on children’s age, personality, how new they were to the group, as well as group composition and pedagogical climate. A considerable number of teachers said that children with a low daycare language proficiency generally have more difficulty connecting with peers (36%), have simpler peer interactions (59%) and simpler peer play (38%) than children with higher daycare language proficiency. Almost half (47%) of the teachers who currently had multilingual children in their group had witnessed that children got excluded by accident because they did not understand the language their peers spoke in, and a few teachers (14%) also believed that this happened on purpose (Figures 1 and 2). Regarding interaction partners, more than 75% of the teachers indicated that children could be more likely to interact with peers with the same home language background or similar language proficiency, also speaking their home language together at times. Half of the teachers, however, reported that the ECEC policy was to encourage children to use the ECEC language instead. We are currently conducting further analyses (e.g. exploratory factor analysis) on these data.

The results suggest that multilingual children do not always experience social inclusion and high-quality peer play, while these are important for their wellbeing and development (Coplan & Arbeau, 2009; Halle et al., 2014; Washington-Nortey et al., 2020). Practically, this study indicates that it is important that teachers pay attention to and promote multilingual children’s social inclusion and peer play. Theoretically, the teacher perspectives in this study suggest that various factors might influence the effect of multilingualism on peer interactions, such as age, sociability, and peer group composition. However, these results should be cautiously interpreted, as they are based on teacher reports. We are therefore also conducting a social network study, based on observation, to understand which factors influence multilingual children’s social inclusion in ECEC, and how these might interact.

Authors

• Anne-Mieke M.M. Thieme, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
  Presenting Author

• Sible Andringa, University of Amsterdam

• Josje Verhagen, University of Amsterdam

• Folkert Kuiken, University of Amsterdam