Newly arrived migrant children may face language challenges in both school and out-of-school contexts. Little is known about how to support these children’s science participation, particularly in out-of-school contexts such as museums. In a project with the oldest science, art and history museum of the Netherlands, we designed a language-oriented approach for museum guides to support the participation of newcomer children in guided museum visits. The design consisted of a combination of second language scaffolding, multimodal scaffolding and translanguaging strategies. In this study, we investigated how two museum guides enacted, and reflected on, the different language strategies throughout nine school group visits of newcomer children to the museum. The data includes a transcript and observation notes from the museum visits, and interviews with the museum guides. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we found that the museum guides mostly engaged in Dutch language scaffolding and multimodal scaffolding (e.g., reformulating, slowing down speech rate, pointing, gesturing) and found them to be natural ways to support children's understanding and expression in Dutch. Translanguaging strategies, which involved welcoming and using children’s home languages, were perceived as the most challenging, and their potential remained largely untapped. We foreground recommendations for research and practice on how museum guides can use language-oriented strategies to support newcomer children.
Chisari et al. (Tue,) studied this question.