Children's early literacy meaning-making: A qualitative study in crèches in Luxembourg

Literacy is generally understood as people’s ways of using signs, such as printed text or images.
Children’s early encounters with literacy are crucial for their development and educational
opportunities (Burchinal & Forestieri, 2011). An essential aspect of this learning is meaning-
making, which describes the process of communicating and constructing meaning of
experiences, practices, objects, or concepts. While literacy development has been broadly
studied, we have limited understanding of the related meaning-making
processes(Worthington & van Oers, 2017). With the rapid growth of the early childhood
education (ECE) sector, which is particularly recent in Luxembourg (Bollig, Honig, & Nienhaus,
2016), it is ever more important to study literacy practices of young children. However, there
is a lack of qualitative research on children’s early literacy practices, specifically in non-formal
and multilingual education settings.
In my PhD, I aim to address this gap. I conducted qualitative fieldwork in three crèches in
Luxembourg, using video recordings and fieldnotes, and focussing on nine children between
two and four years old. I observed a wide range of early literacy practices, that illustrate the
educators’ different pedagogical approaches and underlying understandings of literacy. These
do not only influence early literacy practices, but also the ways in which children interacted
and made meaning. My findings will help to promote researchers and practitioners
understanding of early literacy in non-formal education and, therefore, enrich both conceptual
and methodological knowledge and inform pedagogical practice.