Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Working with super-diversity in Strasbourg pre-schools: Strengthening the role of teaching support staff

Working with super-diversity in Strasbourg pre-schools: Strengthening the role of teaching... <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In 2009 Strasbourg Council issued a call for tenders for an in-service training course aimed at nursery school assistants working in the city to enable them to better “communicate with non-French speaking children”. A small team of teachers and researchers from the University of Strasbourg responded to this call, firmly believing in the pivotal role played by nursery assistants in children’s language development given their close daily contact with children and their families. In this article we firstly situate Strasbourg pre-schools within the local and national context, referring to French ministerial policy documents and statistics which reflect the extent and nature of super-diversity in the region. Secondly, we describe, analyse and evaluate the content, approach and impact of this innovative course referring to qualitative data collected from course participants. Findings suggest that nursery school assistants, when empowered with knowledge about language and guided in their exploration of approaches which support language development, can help early learners to bridge the gap between home and school. A deeper appreciation of the complexities of plurilingual repertoire and multiple identity construction appear to reinforce confidence to meet the challenges of super-diversity at pre-school and strengthen nursery assistants in their role as caring professionals.</jats:p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png European Journal of Applied Linguistics de Gruyter

Working with super-diversity in Strasbourg pre-schools: Strengthening the role of teaching support staff

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/working-with-super-diversity-in-strasbourg-pre-schools-strengthening-WBxUs83z9h

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by the
ISSN
2192-9521
eISSN
2192-953X
DOI
10.1515/eujal-2014-0004
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In 2009 Strasbourg Council issued a call for tenders for an in-service training course aimed at nursery school assistants working in the city to enable them to better “communicate with non-French speaking children”. A small team of teachers and researchers from the University of Strasbourg responded to this call, firmly believing in the pivotal role played by nursery assistants in children’s language development given their close daily contact with children and their families. In this article we firstly situate Strasbourg pre-schools within the local and national context, referring to French ministerial policy documents and statistics which reflect the extent and nature of super-diversity in the region. Secondly, we describe, analyse and evaluate the content, approach and impact of this innovative course referring to qualitative data collected from course participants. Findings suggest that nursery school assistants, when empowered with knowledge about language and guided in their exploration of approaches which support language development, can help early learners to bridge the gap between home and school. A deeper appreciation of the complexities of plurilingual repertoire and multiple identity construction appear to reinforce confidence to meet the challenges of super-diversity at pre-school and strengthen nursery assistants in their role as caring professionals.</jats:p>

Journal

European Journal of Applied Linguisticsde Gruyter

Published: Apr 1, 2014

References