Young learner agency: Footing and heteroglossia in bilingual Swedish-Chinese children’s heritage language learning

This study explores how young bilingual (Swedish-Chinese) children (ages 3–5) exercise their agency in heritage language learning. The study draws on a multimodal interactional approach to video-ethnographic data from classroom interactions at a Chinese weekend school in Sweden, and the analysis combines Goffman’s concept of footing with Bakhtin’s approach to heteroglossia and multivoicedness. Particular focus is on how the children use reported speech, along with code-switching and embodied actions, to incorporate voices of absent parties (family members) in classroom discourse in order to assert epistemic and moral authority while strengthening peer alignments. Such multivocal, multilingual, and multimodal practices imply shifts in footing and participation frameworks from teacher-led to child-oriented. Simultaneously, the children’s heteroglossic practices orient to monolingual norms of Chinese as the preferred classroom language. The findings contribute to an understanding of young children’s collective agency in transforming heritage language learning situations into dialogically co-constructed heteroglossic practices.