"My name is L-I-A" - A case study of a young child's meaning-making in multiliteracy events

While research has demonstrated the importance of early literacy for children’s language development and educational success, little is known about how young children make meaning in multiliteracy events. From a sociocultural perspective, meaning is co-constructed by participants in interactions and relies heavily on the cultural and situational context. Luxembourg, where more than two-thirds of preschool children do not speak Luxembourgish at home, represents a unique research context to study emergent multilingual’s learning environments. Within the research project COMPARE (www.compare.uni.lu), my PhD study explores the meaning-making processes of two-to-four-year-olds in three day-care centres in Luxembourg. I observed literacy practices over nine months and analysed the qualitative data (video-recorded observations, fieldnotes, and thick descriptions) thematically. In this paper, I will present the case of a young emergent multilingual girl from a Dutch-speaking family and how she makes sense of her multiliteracy experiences at the day-care. In the chosen setting, practitioners offer multilingual and multimodal print-experiences and adopt a socio-constructivist pedagogy. The young girl’s meaning-making seems to be influenced by her motivation to know more about print, and therefore, she sees multiliteracy activities as valuable and significant learning opportunities. Understanding that young children’s meaning-making is related to individual and contextual factors implies the need for more differentiation and reflection of educational practices. Furthermore, researching multiliteracies in early childhood education can help to further the conceptualization of young children’s meaning-making.