Teacher’s beliefs and flexible language strategies in a monolingual preschool classroom

Abstract

This study aims to examine teacher’s beliefs about Syrian children’s Turkish language learning and teacher’s language strategies in a monolingual preschool classroom located in a multilingual city, Siirt Turkey. This ethnographic study was conducted between October 2019 and January 2020 in a multilingual city. The data included fieldnotes kept during participant observations of children’s interactions and interviews with the teacher. The findings demonstrate that the teacher’s flexible strategy (translanguaging) enables the children to communicate in their home language and learn a second language in classroom activities. They also indicate that although the teacher has monolingual beliefs about children’s bilingual development, she provides children with a limited support of their home language use by enacting her agency in a monolingual setting. This study contributes to the discussion on the role of the teacher’s agency using flexible language strategies and the theoretical concept of translanguaging by showing that refugee children initiate it into classroom activities in a monolingual classroom.