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Parental Plurilingual Capital in a Monolingual Context: Investigating Strengths to Support Young Children in Early Childhood Settings

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Abstract

Parents who are plurilingual have a portfolio of assets they can use to support the language development of their children. This portfolio of assets is positioned as a strength that parents bring into their partnership with early childhood educators. However, not all parents who are plurilingual have the same assets in their language portfolios. Our study, using case studies of parents who have multiple languages and a desire to raise their children with more than one language, demonstrates that previous parental experiences with multiple languages, and intra-familial support for multiple languages combine to impact on parental language strengths and the expectations parents have of early childhood professionals. To build effective partnerships with parents, early childhood professionals need to understand the assets in parental language portfolios.

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  1. Bilingualism in the bush: Reconceptualising ‘speech community’ in immigrant family language maintenance in regional Australia. Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2014–2016, DP140100443.

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Acknowledgments

The funding was provided by Australian Research Council (Grant No. DP140100443).

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Correspondence to Margaret Sims.

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Paper submitted to Early Childhood Education Journal 20 July 2016.

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Sims, M., Ellis, E.M. & Knox, V. Parental Plurilingual Capital in a Monolingual Context: Investigating Strengths to Support Young Children in Early Childhood Settings. Early Childhood Educ J 45, 777–787 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-016-0826-6

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