Home literacy environment of multilingual preschool children

What is it about?

What parents do or do not do at home in literacy activities is important for children’s literacy development, which is a foundation for their school success. Our study with nearly 600 multilingual parents in Luxembourg showed that children’s early literacy skills were influenced by how many books they had at home, whether parents were interested readers themselves, whether they were involved with children in literacy activities, had moments of well-being with them while reading, but also the actual children’s choices and actions for literacy activities. In this study, we offer a new definition for multilingual children, which we find to be best defined as “background knowledge”. To engage with a written or oral text, multilingual children have to bring themselves into the text, and that act consists of filling it with their background knowledge, such as their experiences, their cultural practices, their knowledge systems, and also all their language practices (O. Garcia).

Featured Image

Photo by Ismail Salad Osman Hajji dirir on Unsplash

Photo by Ismail Salad Osman Hajji dirir on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Literacy is important for children's brain development and school success, but also for their emotional and social skills, and bonding with the caregivers. When a multilingual child engages with a text, it is not only about understanding the code of what is written to find the meaning, but it is more about what cultural experiences, knowledge systems, and multilingual language practices, this child brings to engage with the new text. If researchers start to identify and study literacy as 'background knowledge' for multilingual children, we would avoid a long tradition of seeing literacy dichotomously, as code- and meaning-related skills. Multilingual children will be given more opportunities to show their multiple cultural and linguistic resources when engaging with texts. We hope that this novel definition of literacy will provoke new directions of research for a growing population of multilingual children.

Perspectives

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It has been a great pleasure to write this paper with my co-author and to thoroughly discuss it with the reviewers and scholars in the field. This thought-provoking collaboration manifested in a new definition of literacy for multilingual children, which I hope will change how researchers study it in the future.

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