Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Linguistically Diverse Learners: Learning, Assessment, and Classroom Environment

Abstract

This study focuses on video recorded conversations between early childhood educators and multilingual children in which the educators use translanguaging. Nine female educators and a total of 117 children participated. The range of children’s ages was 33 to 65 months. There were 65 English-only speakers and 52 multilingual learners. Twenty-seven hours of video recordings were collected and analyzed. From the video data, clips were identified when educators employed translanguaging. These clips were transcribed and a microanalysis was completed to better understand the communicative actions of the participants and to examine how translanguaging impacted (a) the engagement of the multilingual learners, (b) the types of responses the children gave, and (d) the opportunities for their linguistic and cognitive development.

Author

• Elizabeth Brook Chapman de Sousa, University of Hawaii