Children's multilingual agency through translanguaging practices

My doctoral thesis focuses on eight children’s multilingual practices in the four institutions participating in the MuLiPEC research project, more precisely on their (trans)languaging and agency in interaction with peers and practitioners. Guided by a sociocultural perspective on language learning and child agency and inspired by the methodology of linguistic ethnography, I drew on multidimensional qualitative research methods to understand the relationship between multilingual pedagogies, language learning, translanguaging and child agency. The data resulted in 65 days of participant observations (including fieldnotes and discussions), 473 video-recordings and 16 semi-structured interviews with the practitioners. The findings show that the children engaged in translanguaging practices for various purposes (e.g. communication, meaning making) and showed an agentive behaviour that went beyond active participation (e.g. influencing adults’ language practices). I argue that the practitioners’ multilingual practices and other sociocultural factors enabled the children’s agency and flexible language use.