Multilanguaging as a teaching practice in mainstream early childhood education

This paper presents a small-scale study to illustrate the characteristics of multilanguaging as a teaching practice in early education in Sweden, where participants may not share language(s). The study addresses challenges in contextualising pedagogical translanguaging, with the goal of implementing and evolving a teaching approach for language awareness and concept formation in children. The teachers, coached by a researcher, design and conduct teaching activities that promote this approach. Video-documented teaching activities with focus on their characteristics and multilanguaging shifts are analysed. Multilanguaging as a teaching practice is shown to be responsive to children’s multilingualism and/or their multilingual responses, regardless of the teachers’ language proficiency, age of the children and the activity form and content. The shifts characterised by relating concepts facilitate language awareness in children. Those ones characterised by negotiation and evolvement, facilitate language and content formation. The results imply that various multilanguaging shifts are supportive of children’s language learning.