Researching a new teacher profile for multilingual early childhood education

Modern societies widely perceive multilingualism as an important tool for personal development (Council of Europe, 2019). Furthermore, international education reports highlight Early Childhood Education as a crucial factor in the holistic development of individuals and their academic success in later stages of education (Council of Europe, 2019; European Commission, 2011; UNESCO, 2016). In addition to the importance of plurilingualism and Early Childhood Education separately, there is a growing recognition of the need for a teacher profile specifically trained to work with multilingual students in preprimary education (Alstad, 2022). Despite this, there is limited research that explores the intersection of these two fields of study (Schwartz, 2022), particularly in relation to the training of Early Childhood educators (ECE) who work in multilingual settings due to natural or artificial linguistic diversity in the early years.

To address this gap, the LEyLA research project, founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union (Ref. PID2021-123055NB-I00), aims to define a teacher profile that is responsive to multilingualism in Early Childhood Education. In the Spanish context, teachers who have traditionally been responsible for teaching foreign languages in Early Childhood Education (Primary Education teachers specialized in LE) do not have specific training (Enever, 2015; Fleta, 2016; Flores and Corcoll, 2008; Rodríguez, 2004), including knowledge about the evolutionary development of children from 3 to 6, the most appropriate pedagogies and resources for these ages, or the organization of space and time in the preschool stage; at the same time, early childhood teachers do not have the appropriate linguistic or didactic knowledge (Ping, Vicente and Coyle, 2013) for the effective development of multilingualism. In some cases, depending on the Autonomous Communities (Andúgar, Cortina-Pérez and Tornel, 2019), the teachers responsible for this early introduction is the Early Childhood educator, with a specific language accreditation (not usually higher than B2). However, this teacher profile is not usually skilled with heritage languages encouragement, acquisition of the language of schooling or on how to introduce foreign languages.

Within this situation, and given the increasing linguistic complexity of preschools, where the language of instruction, heritage languages and foreign languages in the curriculum coexist (as well as the growing national and international expansion of very early learning, before the age of 6-7, of a foreign language, mainly English), a new teaching profile is needed with competences that encompass both the competences of early childhood education and those linked to the teaching of additional languages and foreign languages.

This paper presents the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the LEyLA project to develop a multilingual responsive framework of teacher competences. We will first analyse the theoretical research of the project, with an emphasis on the bibliometric analysis of the research area. Five different subdimensions have been analyzed in the academic literature: early language learning, plurilingualism, bilingual education, translanguaging, playbased learning. A bibliographic database of 5724 academic documents from the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. We will then outline the methodological framework to share with the audience our goals and procedures. We will finally describe the expected results.