What
A healthy start to life offers the foundation for children's long term wellbeing and subsequent learning. Robust evidence exists to demonstrate that the first years of life are a critical period for children, in particular in terms of the development of language and literacy capabilities. To help young children to survive and thrive in the increasingly complex linguistic and technological environment in the 21st century requires new knowledge and practices.
Why
Preparing young children—both those who belong to the dominant linguistic group and newcomers—to thrive and compete in the globalised and digitalised world is a shared ambition amongst multinational communities. One of the central elements of this preparation is that of multiliteracies—the ability to read and write in two or more languages using a combination of communication modes (verbal, visual or auditory) across various technological and media platforms.The central concept of the project is to develop an innovative digital research methodology for understanding the sociocultural contexts involved in the development of early multiliteracies, including digital literacy as well as multilingual literacy, by integrating data collection processes into the daily digital literacy practices of young children and their caretakers (parents or teachers).
How
The project aims
To design and test a digital methodology that 1) embeds data collection processes into the established routines of a child’s digital experiences without the intrusive presence of the researcher or extra tasks for caretakers (e.g. dairy keeping); 2) facilitates extensive and detailed data collection, and subsequently provides a comprehensive and faithful image of the complex literacy practices of young children;
To actualise the digital methodology through the development of a mobile application or app for data collection, which is informed by and brings together cutting edge theories in early childhood documentation, multimodality and multiliteracies, and early bi/multilingualism;
To deploy this new methodology to explore the social-cultural process of Danish-English bi-literacy development in the early years, for both children who speak Danish as L1 and English as a foreign language, and children who are Danish-English bilinguals (including simultaneous bilinguals and English/Danish as a second language).