Early Childhood Care and Education for Bilingual Children and the Road to Multilingualism

This chapter discusses the knowledge base to provide high-quality early education to bilingual children. It also discusses developmental and contextual considerations when designing instruction for young bilingual children. The chapter describes the research-based instructional strategies and language of instruction approaches for the education of young bilingual children. Through linguistic interactions within their family, community, and early childhood care and education settings, children acquire knowledge, learn behaviors, and develop a worldview that will contribute to forming their identity, a sense of belonging and being. There is the view that the bilingualism and multilingualism refer to two distinct phenomena, with bilingualism referring to the acquisition of two languages and multilingualism referring to the acquisition of three or more languages. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the current knowledge base for early education practice and policy, and future research directions to better understand how to support bilingual children and their families appropriately.