Rethinking Pedagogy for Heritage Language Maintenance in Early Childhood Settings: The Power of Play

Abstract

The chapter is a reflective discussion of an educator who has made efforts to incorporate heritage language practice in child play in the real-world everyday setting of early childhood education. This combination between heritage language and child play has hardly been explored before in the relevant discourse. As children in Australia possess diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, their heritage language (HL) should be cherished as a way of respect for their cultural diversity and identity. Despite this, as much of the current discourse indicates, many children risk losing their HL especially when they study in the mainstream English-spoken education context. This issue deserves scholarly attention from the early childhood level. Although a large body of literature has investigated this area, most of it tends to focus on family settings or school–family collaboration, with much less devoted to the early childhood context as relating to educators’ pedagogy or from an educator’s perspective. In response to this gap in the field, the chapter explores the author’s reflective experiences, as an early childhood educator, with how she has learned to foster children’s heritage language practice.