Young Children’s Language Treasures and their Potential to Understand Pupils’ Emergent Literacy Practices in Diverse Classrooms

In culturally diverse early childhood education and care (ECEC) classrooms, educators and pupils navigate various aspects of culture, including different languages. Multilingual pupils often experience a larger difference between emergent literacy practices at home and at school than their monolingual peers (e.g. Aghallaj et al., 2020). In order to support pupils’ emergent literacy skills in diverse classrooms, ECEC educators need to expand their knowledge on the different ways and languages in which texts are used in pupils’ home environment. Gaining more insight into these home practices is essential for educators to adopt an asset-based pedagogy in which school practices are more related to pupils’ different experiences and practices (López, 2023). This study explores the potential of the Language Treasures Activity to help educators better understand how they can design ECEC settings aligning with pupils’ diverse home practices. In this activity, pupils brought artefacts from their homes to discuss these with the teacher and/or their peers at school. Video-recordings of these interactions were combined with a semi-structured interview with two parents to understand whether the activity could represent pupils’ literacy practices. Analyses of the artefacts revealed a diversity of objects and languages that played a role in pupils’ literacy environment at home. The interactions about the artefacts shed more light on the variety of pupils’ literacy practices at home. The home literacy practices described by the parents were largely in line with their children’s artefacts, indicating that the Language Treasures Activity may support ECEC educators to gain more insight into pupils’ home practices. Among other things, parents expressed a need for school materials to be used at home. In contrast to recent literature, they did not express a need for the school to implement their home literacy practices.