A professional development course in translanguaging: Challenges and opportunities

In Luxembourg, the new law in 2017 has declared multilingual early education mandatory. Not only that teachers need to help children develop their Luxembourgish, but also they need to familiarize them with French and value their home languages. In order to support preschool teachers in this endeavour, our project aims to: (1) offer a professional development (PD) course in translanguaging, (2) involve children’s families to reinforce home-school collaboration, and (3) foster children’s cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional engagement in the classroom. We use a panoply of measures to reach our aims: focus groups and teacher questionnaires (aim 1), parent questionnaires and interviews (aim 2), a test in early literacy and numeracy in school and home languages, teacher assessment of children’s socio-emotional development and video observations with children (aim 3). Translanguaging, the main topic of our 22 hour PD course (June – December 2019), is the use of a full linguistic repertoire to make meaning (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). In eight sessions, we explore multilingual ecology, parental involvement, and oracy and early literacy. We will present preliminary findings of the focus groups with teachers and tests in early literacy and numeracy in children’s home and school languages. Challenges and opportunities that emerged during the course will be explored as well.