Tracing Science in the Early Childhood Classroom: The Historicity of Multi-resourced Discourse Practices in Multilingual Interaction

This chapter presents research conducted in early childhood classrooms in Luxembourg, a European country with a complex multilingual situation. A multi-layered corpus of classroom interactions, consisting of photos, video and audio recordings, was collected over a period of 12 months and then partially transcribed and annotated. Drawing from this corpus, this study sheds light on discourse practices of 4–8-year-old children and examines the co-construction of the children’s growing understandings of science in open collaborative inquiries. Arguing from a context-sensitive perspective, our research shows the learning of science as an interactional achievement in situ.