engleski

Multilingual Kindergarten Practices in a Monolingual vs. Multilingual Setting.

As a member country of the European Union, the Republic of Croatia actively promotes the objective of the EU’s language policy that all European citizens should be multilingual (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/displayFtu.html? ftuId=FTU_3.6.6.html). Therefore, a foreign language has been a compulsory school subject from Grade 1 of primary school since 2005. Given the fact that 95% of Croatian inhabitants are the native speakers of the Croatian language (www.dzs.hr), the role of educational system in development of multilingualism is crucial. Most studies that investigated the role of the educational system in development of multilingualism in Croatia dealt with early foreign language learning (Mihaljevic Djigunovic 2012, 2015, 2016), the maintenance of the minority language (Cvikic, Aladrovic Slovacek & Turza Bogdan 2013) or the acquisition of Croatian as L2 (Jelaska & Cvikic 2012, Turza Bogdan & Ciglar 2013, Cvikic 2014), all by children of school age. There is lack of studies on the role of kindergarten in supporting and promoting multilingualism in Croatia, despite the fact that out of 1715 kindergartens in Croatia, 552 offer early foreign language learning (www.mzos.hr). This paper investigates linguistic believes, attitudes and educational practice of kindergarten teachers in two different settings in the same country - a monolingual and a multilingual one. In a previous study on multilingualism in kindergartens in Croatia, Cvikic and Turza Bogdan (2016) concluded that in general kindergarten teachers have a positive attitude towards multilingualism. This paper investigates the role that a setting (monolingual vs. multilingual) might have to pre-school teacher’s educational practice for supporting multilingualism. The participants of the survey (N=165) were kindergarten teachers working in a monolingual or a multilingual setting. Their educational practice as well as believes on multilingualism were investigated by an online questionnaire. A quantitative analysis will be conducted and the findings will be discussed in the context of required changes in pre-school teacher education.

preschool teacher education, vertical and horizontal multllinguism

nije evidentirano