Search results for "childhood bilingualism"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Twenty-first-century preschool bilingual education: facing advantages and challenges in cross-cultural contexts
2016
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
2020
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…
Two languages in the air : a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
2016
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…
The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling : collaboration between bilingual families and ped…
2016
Educational partnerships occur at the intersection of early childhood education and care (ECEC), families, and the surrounding community, and have been shown to play a significant role in student success rates in education. There is, however, a gap in research on the role and potential of ‘partnership’ in the case of bilingual families with children enrolled in monolingual minority language ECEC. This study aimed to fill this void by examining parental and practitioner discourses on partnership and on obligations, desires, abilities, and competencies involved in acting on a bilingual childhood in the context of monolingual minority ECEC. Parents in nine Finnish–Swedish bilingual families an…