Language practices and participation in early childhood: Linguistic ethnographic perspectives from Denmark and Spain

PANEL:Language practices and participation in early childhood: Linguistic ethnographic perspectives from Denmark and Spain Organisers: Line Møller Daugaard, Rianne Helena Slingerland, David Poveda & Nieves Galera This panel focuses on language practices and participation in early childhood. The panel combines insights from Spain and Denmark and from family as well as institutional settings in order to shed light on small children’s language practices in a linguistic ethnographic perspective. The panel consists of three individual papers and an open discussion following the papers. In the opening paper "Babies’ multimodal participation in affective practices at home in four Spanish contemporary families", Nieves Galera focuses on family language practices and describes the interactional patterns used by babies and caregivers in Spanish families. The following two papers present linguistic ethnographic analyses of everyday language practices in two different institutional settings in Denmark. Danish early childhood institutions are either nurseries targeted at 0-2 year old children, kindergarten catering for 3-5 year old children or integrated daycare institutions covering the entire age range. In the second paper "Afternoon snacktime languaging in the nursery", Line Møller Daugaard focuses on 0-2 year old toddlers in a nursery setting and explores a routine situation in the nursery, namely the afternoon snacktime, which is presented as a privileged social and communicative space for toddler languaging. In the third paper "Kindergarten as a place for languaging", Rianne Helena Slingerland focuses on a specific place in the kindergarten, namely the cloakroom, and through investigation of language practices in the cloakroom explores the local ‘doing’ of kindergarten language in peer talk. The three papers are followed by an open discussion in which the audience is warmly invited to participate. The audience is invited to draw parallels to both family and institutional early childhood settings in their national contexts and to engage in joint reflection on the potentials as well as limitations of linguistic ethnographic knowledge production in early childhood research.