Exploring Written Systems in Early Childhood Education

The increasing presence of immigrant children in Italian classrooms is one of the teacher’s major didactic challenges. Teacher’s awareness of the importance of a genuine cultural and linguistic integration and of the necessity to improve language competences in every child, confers a particular significance to experiences in plurilinguistic contexts. How can teachers manage language diversities as an educational and cognitive advantage for both Italian speaking pupils and not? Does the presence of immigrant children in the classroom context obstruct or favour language learning for the whole group? This study provides a positive reply concerning the plurilinguistic environment as an invaluable source for improving development potentialities between 3/6 years old and also searches didactic approaches that can allow teachers to enhance language learning. The data here presented has been collected during a teacher training-research on early literacy acquisition that took place in the city of Turin. Throughout the training process kindergarten teachers were asked to show a collection of foreign languages texts to the children. The analysis of the collected material points out that the ways and strategies by which children approach foreign languages texts are not different from those adopted when dealing with mother-tongue texts. In both cases their understanding is supported by the graphic context (illustrations) in order to predict the potential content of the text (by narrating/inventing stories and naming objects) and by the exploration of the quantitative (numbers of lines, segments and words) and qualitative properties (types of graphemes, correspondence between phoneme and grapheme) of the printings. In addition, children’s analysis of the different written systems not only seams to encourage their metalinguistic abilities on Italian written language, but also enables a better quality of social and cultural integration.