Developing multiliteracies in early years education in Luxembourg

Preliteracy skills are strong predictors of literacy development (e.g. Skibbe et al., 2011) and, therefore, parents and early childhood educators should engage children in literacy activities such as sharing books from an early age. These activities develop children’s oral language skills (Sénéchal and LeFevre 2002) and familiarise them with script. Multiliteracies emphasize diversity and multimodality and refer in our case also to literacies in multiple languages. In trilingual Luxembourg, a multilingual education programme was implemented in early childhood education in 2017 requiring practitioners to develop skills in Luxembourgish and French and value home languages. The need to develop (multi)literacy activities is now pressing. Our project on collaboration with parents and multiliteracy in early childhood education (2020 – 2023) examines, among other, the educators’ attitudes to multiliteracy and (multi)literacy practices in day-care centres in Luxembourg. This paper will draw on the findings of group interviews and questionnaires completed prior to a professional development course in February 2020. The findings will focus on attitudes, the educators’ and the children’s engagement in (multi)literacy activities as well as the type and frequency of such activities. These findings are important as attitudes can affect the type and frequency of multiliteracy activities (Liu et al., 2018). The project hopes to contribute to the development of multiliteracies. Liu, C., Georgiou, G. K., & Manolitsis, G. (2018). Modeling the relationships of parents’ expectations, family’s SES, and home literacy environment with emergent literacy skills and word reading in Chinese. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 43(2), 1–10. Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five[quotrightB?]