Emergent Multilingual Children's Agency within Translanguaging Practices with Peers and Practitioners in Formal and Non-formal Early Childhood Education Settings in Luxembourg

In our increasingly globalised, heterogenous and varied societies, scholars have called for multilingual pedagogies that build on this diversity as a resource and promote flexible language practices to facilitate children’s participation and language appropriation or learning. Nevertheless, the existing literature on young children’s own capacities to act in light of these innovative and inclusive pedagogies remains scarce, particularly in multilingual contexts involving more than two named languages. This thesis presents a longitudinal qualitative study of young emergent multilingual children’s agency within translanguaging practices when appropriating new language features in early childhood education in multilingual Luxembourg. Guided by a sociocultural framework and a translanguaging lens, the study investigates the ways in which emergent multilingual children engage in translanguaging practices and thereby practise different forms of agency in interaction with peers and practitioners. The data stems from eight focal children, aged three to five, in two formal and two non-formal early childhood education settings. The qualitative data was collected over eleven months in 2016 and 2017, combining observations, fieldnotes, and video-recordings, as well as informal discussions and semi-structured interviews with the practitioners. The data analysis consisted of analysing recurring patterns and differences in the children’s deployment of their entire semiotic repertoires, conducting a micro-analysis of the children’s interactions with peers and practitioners as well as triangulating the data and the methods. The results revealed that the focal children were particularly active when appropriating new language features and shaped the language practices of their peers and the practitioners. The children thereby practised agency on two levels. Firstly, they did not passively reproduce the practices and languaging of the adults, but instead creatively transformed and implemented the practitioners’ (trans)languaging activities, practices and interaction patterns in their peer culture. Secondly, they showed language-based agentic behaviour on a continuum from participatory to controlling behaviour, during interactions with both their peers and the practitioners. While the participatory agency consisted of showing creative language-based agentic behaviour under the control of the practitioners, the controlling agency went beyond mere participation and related to children taking choices in language use and actively shaping the language use of their peers and the practitioners. These findings may be particularly relevant to understanding the language practices and agency of young emergent multilingual children when they encounter new languages in early childhood education – in particular, as the children’s languaging and agency depended on the pedagogy and the practitioners’ language-supportive strategies. One important outcome of the study is the provision of recommendations for practitioners and policymakers wishing to capitalise on children’s rich and varied semiotic resources. The study is moreover of interest to researchers and students in the fields of early childhood education, language learning and multilingual education.