Developing bilingual pedagogy in early childhood education and care: Analysis of teacher interaction

The aim of this study is to investigate two kindergarten teachers’ bilingual pedagogy by scrutinizing their bilingual interactions during typical ECEC activities.We focus on the teachers’bilingual language use andits contextualisation. The study is based on an experimental programme under development and, thus, has the character of a case study. The data consist of audio recordings (28 h) of the teachers’ interactions witha group of five-year-old children and were collected on five occasions over one academic year. The results show that Finnish was used in a variety of recurring situations—teacher-led activities, everyday routines,and playtime—especially through concrete topicsand contextualization, allowingthe teachers to create diverse affordances for children’s language learning and invitingthe children to participate without explicitly signalling language switches. The results further illustrate a change over time in the teachers’ language choices when introducing new content and discussing it later, as well as certainindividual differences in the teachers’language use.These insights into bilingual interactions in practice can benefit teachers at different levels of this programme and in similar contexts, as well as contributing to a deeper research-based understanding of bilingual pedagogy in ECEC.