Young Children’s Language in Context

Sheila Degotardi is Professor of early childhood education and the Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. Her research specialises in infant-toddler pedagogies, with a focus on language, social interactions and inter-personal relatedness. Shelley Stagg Peterson is Professor of literacy education in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (Canada). Her current project, Northern Oral language and Writing through Play (NOW Play), uses collaborative action research with teachers and early childhood educators to examine ways in which play and experiential learning can support young children’s language and literacy. Jiangbo Hu is Professor at Hangzhou College of Child Development and Education, Zhejiang Normal University (China), and an honorary research fellow at Macquarie School of Education, Macquarie University (Australia). Her research focuses on monolingual and bilingual children’s early language experiences across different cultural settings.

Introduction—Language in context: positioning young children’s language and literacy learning within place, community and culture 1. Mapping the literature on parent-child language across activity contexts: a scoping review 2. Language expansion in Chinese parent–child mealtime conversations: across different conversational types and initiators 3. ‘I’m a big boy, you’re a baby’. Negotiating labels, group boundaries and identities in an early childhood community of practice 4. Language as context: a case of early literacy practices in New Zealand and Sweden 5. When and why do early childhood educators reminisce with children about their past experiences? 6. Infant educators’ use of mental-state talk in Australia and China: a cross-cultural comparative study 7. Viewing young children’s drawing, talking, and writing through a ‘language as context’ lens: implications for literacy assessment