The speech action of multilingual children in kindergarten

Multilingual children behave like adults with regard to their multilingualism: they use all the languages available to them as appropriate to the situation. Multilingual children behave in exactly the same way in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions, even if in Austria these tend to be ideologically monolingual institutions with the explicit mandate of promoting German. By communicating in all their languages in kindergarten, multilingual children act translingually in their interactions with their peers, the educational professionals and their parents or guardians. In general, there is little research on ECEC institutions, and in particular (socio-)linguistic studies on the speech action of multilingual children in kindergarten are largely lacking. So far, very little is known about how the speech actions of multilingual children actually take place, for example whether, and if so how, when, where, with whom and why they translanguage and what conditions must be in place (for example, certain situations/settings, certain addressees, certain places, certain times, certain reasons). It is also unknown how individual linguistic constellations of language usage can be described: For example, do the children primarily use German or primarily their first language, do they use both languages equally and how frequently or rarely do they change languages? It is also not yet known what children`s language change might depend on or how language commands affect (multilingual) children. The explorative-interpretative research project addresses these questions and explicitly chooses a child-centered focus. It aims to find out which factors have the strongest influence on children`s speech action in all the languages used. The central assumption here is that both institutional and structural conditions, but also the professionals and peers in the kindergarten as well as the parents/guardians play an important role. In this cross-sectional study, the speech actions of around 20 multilingual focus children in four kindergartens in Lower Austria are recorded on video and audio in everyday kindergarten life. In addition, professionals and parents are interviewed on the topics of the children`s speech action and multilingualism in kindergarten (and at home). For the first time, the children themselves will also be interviewed about their speech action in kindergarten and their perspective on multilingualism. The language proficiency of all focus children in German and their L1 is additionally assessed. The collected data will be correlated and analyzed (socio- )linguistically.