Based on an analysis of three literacy events in nursery schools, this article focuses on how literacy forms part of children's social practices and co-creates the language environment in the nursery and how place, affect and materiality play a key role in children's multimodal and embodied meaning-making around literacy. The analysis is based on…

Each year, Turkish public schools welcome many children who have little to no Turkish language skills. This study has been conducted with the purpose of unearthing the challenges that preschool education teachers are likely to experience while teaching children with low Turkish language capabilities. Twenty preschool education teachers, who worked…

Iceland has seen rapidly changing demographics in recent years as a result of growing immigration to the country. This is reflected in the education system where children speak altogether around 100 languages. This qualitative research aims at exploring the language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families and their cooperation with…

This paper analyses the motivations behind the implementation of bilingual education in the Dutch preschool system and relates this to the status of Dutch in the Dutch educational system. Based on the analysis of policy documents and questionnaires filled in by parents and teachers, this study reveals two different underlying ideologies that the…

This paper explores the dynamic and situated nature of language education policy in an Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centre through the lens of researcher-child relationality. Drawing on data from 4.5 months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a pre-school in the Netherlands, one extended play situation that emerged between me as a…

This paper analyses how teachers and toddlers enact participation frames in bidialectal early education in Limburg, the Netherlands. Teachers' language choice is often context-bound as they use the national language, Dutch, for instruction and the regional language, Limburgish, for playful or social-emotional situations with individual children.…

The current study quantitatively applies Spolsky's triangular framework of language policy, including beliefs, practices, and management, to the family domain by investigating language policy in multilingual families in Belgium's Flemish Community. Firstly, we examine whether the three components in fact call for an independent description and…

Purpose: This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children's acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters. Method: Participants were 437 typically developing children aged 2;6-7;11 (years;months) acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were…

In today's linguistically and culturally diverse schools, it is important that teachers use inclusive pedagogies, such as translanguaging. This pedagogy assumes that teachers have positive attitudes towards children's home languages and cultures (translanguaging stance), which we explored in our study with 40 preschool teachers in Luxembourg. The…

This regional dossier aims to provide concise descriptions and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Lithuanian is a Baltic language that belongs to the Indo-European family. Most of the Lithuanian-speaking minority in Poland is confined to three municipalities near the Polish-Lithuanian border.…

Interpretation in cross-language qualitative research presents a range of methodological and ethical challenges. Among these are the interpreters' influence on data generation and interview power dynamics. Having translators review and/or produce an independent translation of recorded interview material for comparative purposes is regarded as one…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. West Frisian, commonly referred to as Frisian (Frisian: Frysk), is a western Germanic, autochthonous minority and official language spoken in Friesland (Frisian: Fryslân), one of the…

There is a consensus that home languages are the foundation on which to develop additional languages and that collaboration between homes and institutions of early childhood education and care (ECEC) can contribute to the development of children's language and literacy skills. Nevertheless, educators seem rarely to draw on multiple languages in…

This research focused on the structure for teaching as a component of the education systems of South Africa and India. India and South Africa form part of the BRICS grouping, and BRICS have set out certain development goals about quality education. This qualitative interpretive study utilised relevant documents from India and South Africa that…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Latgalian is a Baltic regional language originating in the region of Latgale (Latgalian: Latgola) in Eastern Latvia. It is mostly spoken in Latgale, but also in families and small communities of people…