TRANSLANGUAGING IN PRESCHOOL CONTEXTS. PROMOTING THE RIGHT TO LEARNING FOR ALL CHILDREN THROUGH LANGUAGES AND THE HUNDRED LANGUAGES.

Classrooms today are superdiverse in a number of interwoven ways from migration journeys, minorities, gender identities and special rights, to cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Although the presence of different cultures and languages enriches classroom life with possibilities, it also brings complexities and questions to education practices: what language(s) to use for schooling, how this language can be acquired, how to empower and affirm the right of all children to deploy their full linguistic repertoire giving strength both to their learning and their identities. This work will focus on the topic of translanguaging, a pedagogy that seems promising in offering chances regarding children’s rights and their learnings through the deployment in classroom experiences of their different languages and linguistic repertoires as it values not just the language of schooling, but all languages – and modalities – used by children. This approach will be observed in a preschool context where children are empowered through the theory of the hundred languages – developed in the Reggio Emilia Approach – in their processes of meaning-making and research through their expressive languages. This will allow to observe how plurilingual and multimodal preschool contexts support and empower the acknowledgement, the awareness and the value of all children’s languages.