The translanguaging transition of EAL children : home to nursery

The aim of this study is to analysis how an English as an Additional Language (EAL) children engage with their home environment and language, to supports their transition into nursery. This study will explore EAL children's translanduaging (Garcia & Li Wei, 2014) space and how it is lived, by recruiting the parent as co-researcher, to document the home language practice and the child's individual language repertoires, in daily contact. Furthermore, qualitative ethnographic fieldwork will be conducted in the nursery classroom, to examine EAL children's transformative capacity, in a post-human space (Martin-Bylund, 2018) when using available resources to construct meaning. The intended duration of this study is three years. I anticipate the first year will be focused on the children's home space, before they start nursery. With the parent as co-researcher, this study will begin to document the home language practice and the children's language repertoires. By collecting audio and film data. In the second year, a participatory approach will be utilised when in the nursery. It will examine the child's creative utilisation of multi-lingual and multi-modal resources to push boundaries when communicating. Continues ethnographic analysis and writing will be conducted during the first two years. The project will be completed in the third year, with the intention to articulating the EAL child/learner as a creative/critical competent individual and build on existing and growing literature on translanguaging and the EAL child.