The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling : collaboration between bilingual families and pedagogical practitioners
Bergroth, M., & Palviainen, Å. (2016). The early childhood education and care partnership for bilingualism in minority language schooling : collaboration between bilingual families and pedagogical practitioners. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(6), 649-667. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1184614
Date
2016Copyright
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is a final draft version of an article whose final and definitive form has been published by Taylor & Francis. Published in this repository with the kind permission of the publisher.
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 and six pedagogical practitioners at three Swedish-medium minority language ECEC units in Finland were interviewed. We applied ethnographic discourse analysis – nexus analysis – on the interview data and found that the family languages (Finnish and Swedish) did not seem to be given equal importance; Swedish, the minority language in Finland and the language of the ECEC, was foregrounded at the expense of Finnish. The study suggests that partnership is a useful concept and a tool to understand the possibilities and challenges involved in promoting bilingualism in ECEC, especially in the context of a minority language ECEC.
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RoutledgeISSN Search the Publication Forum
1367-0050Keywords
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https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/25720773
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Research Council of FinlandFunding program(s)
Academy Project, AoFAdditional information about funding
The research described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Academy of Finland, Research Council for Culture and Society [grant number 266850].Related items
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