A professional development course in translanguaging: Teachers’ beliefs and attitudes

In multilingual Luxembourg there are almost 65% of 4 year-old children who do not speak Luxembourgish, of which 28% speak Portuguese (MENJE, 2018). The new law declared multilingual early education mandatory in 2017 with the focus on developing Luxembourgish, familiarizing children with French and valuing their home languages. Thus, our project aimed to: (1) offer a professional development (PD) course in translanguaging pedagogy for preschool teachers, (2) involve children's families to strengthen home-school collaboration, and (3) foster children's cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional engagement in the classroom. We employed mixed methods. With teachers we used focus groups, questionnaires, and language portraits, with parents, questionnaires and interviews, and, with children test in early literacy and numeracy in school and home language as well as video observations. The main topic of our 18-hour course (June – December 2019) was translanguaging pedagogy divided into 7 sessions with the focus on multilingual ecology, home-school collaboration, multilingual brain, and multilingual oracy and literacy. We worked with 4 groups of 38 preschool teachers, of which two groups represented two entire schools. The focus of the current presentation are the results from teacher questionnaires and focus groups, delivered before and after the professional development course. The analysis of teacher questionnaires showed that there was a significant increase in positive attitudes towards children's home languages and multilingualism in general and a significant decrease in focus on Luxembourgish only, after the course. In addition, the results from the focus groups indicated that most of the teachers realized that the inclusion of children's home languages and cultures are important for their linguistic and socio-emotional development. However, the monolingual stance towards Luxembourgish for most of the teachers remained quite firm.

References: Ministry of National Education, Childhood and Youth [MENJE]. (2018). Key numbers of the national education: statistics and indicators – School year 2016-2017. Retrieved from http://www.men.public.lu/fr/actualites/publications/themes-transversaux/statistiques-analyses/chiffres-cles/index.html