Exploring children's language-based agency as a gateway to understanding early bilingual development and education

Abstract

The study aimed to take a zoom on differences between young children in the way they express their language-based agency in learning languages in a preschool bilingual classroom. Because agency is a sociocultural and contextually embedded phenomenon and children enact it through interaction with proximal and distant environmental systems, we aspired to understand how these differences are related to ecological factors such as the child’s linguistic background and history, personal characteristics, family language policy and wider socio-linguistic context. We applied a multiple case study with classroom ethnography as its main methodological framework and conducted 25 observations during one school year. Our focus was on how five 4–5-year-old children, two Hebrew (L1)-speaking children, two Arabic (L1)-speaking children, and one English-Spanish speaking girl express their agency through dialogical conversations with the researchers. Insights from both teachers and parents about children's language-based agency and agentic behaviour were collected. We found that differences between the children in how their language-based agency has been expressed were related to individual characteristics and linguistic experiences as well as to their families’ and communities’ language policies. We view the main contribution of this study as conceptualising ecological factors related to child agency enactment in early language education.