0000000001143557
AUTHOR
Mila Schwartz
Twenty-first-century preschool bilingual education: facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts
Early childhood is a critical period in a child’s intensive social, emotional, linguistic and cognitive development, and preschool serves as the first transitional step from home to the wider socia...
Two languages in the air : a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish–Swedish and Russian–Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic–Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We found that in each context the teachers reported modifications to an initial bilingual education model over time: from a strict separation of languages, to flexible b…
Two languages in the air: a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
This book article was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi:10.1080/13670050.2016.1184615 Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts), and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We fou…