This paper explores preschool children's (aged 5:6) language development in nursery and at home. The study examines how children learn a new language in nursery and practise their learning at home. The data in this study is drawn from a long ethnographic research, which included two stages of data collection. I used participant observation, audio…

This study considered the songs currently in use in Gaelic groups for 0-3 year olds in Scotland, whilst investigating how practitioners use them in the groups. In this article, I argue that Gaelic Early Years practitioners insufficiently understand the potential of song in relation to Gaelic language acquisition with young children and their…

This paper reports a study that used a quantitative method to explore literacy planning in Chinese kindergartener families as well as the influences of socioeconomic status (SES) on it. The conceptual framework of family language policy (FLP), which consists of three components--language ideology, language management, and language practice, was…

Against the backdrop of rapidly growing attention to FL learners' emotions, the present study investigated learners' classroom emotions (anxiety, boredom, and enjoyment), literacy outcomes (reading and writing proficiency), and a largely neglected factor in FL emotions research to date -- maternal education as a proxy for socio-economic status.…

Early childhood professionals can act as catalysts in encouraging home language maintenance in multilingual families. However, there is a dearth of research on whether these professionals advise parents to speak their home language(s) to their offspring, and furthermore, little is known about what prompts professionals to proffer language advice.…

This study adopts a sociocultural approach to examine the language socialisation of a lower age novice-newcomer recently arrived in a Finnish open day care centre. A mixed method approach combining ethnographic analysis and quantitative analysis has been used to analyse video-recordings. The results suggest that when educators recognise language…

The present study aimed to develop and validate a questionnaire assessing parents' beliefs about, and attitudes toward, supporting young children's English as a second/foreign language development -- Parent English Language Belief and Attitude Questionnaire (PELBA-Q). The PELBA-Q was piloted with 173 parents of kindergarten-aged children and…

Understanding the multilingual language context of deaf children's lives provides an essential knowledge base from which to develop the early support of children and families. Current models of early support tend to draw on Euro-Western understandings of the multilingual lives of families of deaf children and assume an established infrastructure…

Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and…

This study explored the family language policy, bilingual parenting profiles, and the predictors among Chinese parents in Singapore. Altogether 175 parents of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (aged 2;6-5;6) were sampled and surveyed. The research results indicated that: (1) a majority of the parents (93.7%) believed in early bilingualism but…

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) indicates that education for global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity should be embedded at all levels of curricula. In this paper, we share findings from an analysis of curriculum documents in Victoria, Australia and Québec, Canada that identified learning related to this…

English is undoubtedly an important language for educational and socio-economic mobility in numerous countries including Malaysia. Regardless of its importance, studies to document English language acquisition among Malaysian children acquiring English in the local context remain scarce. This normative data is imperative for syllabus-designers,…

Limited research to date has addressed the language socialisation of transnational children during global movement with their parents. The aim of this study was to explore the complexity of language socialisation for a transnational child experiencing a multilingual environment both at home and in preschool. This transnational English- and…

Although calls for responding to migration-related diversity in education are not novel, few studies have examined linguistic and affective outcomes of diversity-sensitive approaches for vocabulary teaching. This article reports on an intervention study in which beginner English-foreign-language learners (N = 51, M[subscript age] = 8.67 years)…

The aim of the current study is to expand our understanding of cross-linguistic transfer (CLT) to new languages and settings under-represented in the research literature. Empirical evidence of CLT is almost exclusively demonstrated in studies examining European and Asian languages in high-income countries. Literacy data were collected from 3561…