Applied linguist and qualified teacher Dr Carly Steele discusses how educators in early childhood education can bring children’s languages into the classroom through play-based approaches.
Children possess a right to play. This is recognised internationally in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and supported by the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia.
Yet, increasingly, play-based approaches to learning are being pushed out of early years classrooms in favour of explicit and didactic approaches, much to the dismay and concern of early childhood educators and researchers.
Play-based learning has many benefits that are comprehensively described in the research literature, including:
- Play supports social, emotional and cognitive development.
- Play promotes oral language development as well as literacy development, eg. reading, writing and viewing.
- Play improves linguistic comprehension, vocabulary learning and oral narrative competence (i.e. the ability to generate stories).
From this list it is clear that play-based learning and language and literacy development are mutually supportive.
What does this mean for Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse population, and how can play-based learning support those with diverse language backgrounds other than English?
This is a question that I have had the privilege of exploring with a research collective spanning four Western Australian universities: Grace Oakley (UWA), Christine Robinson (ECU), Toni Dobinson and Sender Dovchin (Curtin) and Wendy Cumming-Potvin (Murdoch).
Like play, children have a right to speak their own languages, and a right to education in their own languages that is recognised internationally by the United Nations.
In early childhood education settings, educators are looking for ways to be more culturally and linguistically inclusive in their learning and teaching approaches.
Translanguaging pedagogies are one approach that is being advocated globally.
Translanguaging recognises that multilingual learners will use their languages and mean-making resources together, in a fluid way, to aid and promote communication.
Translanguaging pedagogies build on this natural predisposition for the planned and deliberate use of children’s multilingual repertoires in classroom contexts to support learning.
Translanguaging pedagogies can be implemented through play-based learning approaches. However, as found in a systematic review we conducted, these two pedagogies are rarely used together to promote learning in culturally and linguistically inclusive ways.
We have, therefore, proposed a new framework: Playworld Translanguaging that combines these two approaches. Playworlds is one contemporary model of play-based learning. In our recent conceptual paper, we describe the shared characteristic of Playworlds and Translanguaging Pedagogies, they are:
- Rights-based and inclusive
- Socioculturally oriented
- Designed spaces
- Flexible and responsive
- Multimodal
In 2024, we were able to trial our approach in a multi-age early years classroom with children aged 5 to 7 years old from language backgrounds other than English. Teachers and children participated in a series of three playworlds based on well-known children’s books, as well as three stories that were written and illustrated by an educator at the school to reflect the cultural knowledges and languages of the children in the class. The educators involved in the project described this approach as being transformative, highlighting children’s high levels of engagement with the playworlds and the learning associated with it.
For us, it shows that it is possible to effectively implement evidence-based pedagogies that uphold the rights of children, namely the right to speak their language and the right to play in the classroom. Playworld translanguaging is one approach can enhance language learning and literacy development, conceptual understanding, and problem solving skills, while also supporting the identity formation, personal agency, and wellbeing of culturally and linguistically diverse young children.
About the author
Dr Carly Steele is an applied linguist and a fully qualified teacher with over 12 years’ experience in diverse educational contexts across Australia including urban cities, and rural and remote communities. She holds the position of Senior Lecturer and Master of Education Course Coordinator at Curtin University, Perth. Dr Steele engages in participatory action research in collaboration with classroom teachers and her research aims to promote culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and assessment practices.
