An Exploratory Investigation into the Communicative Practices of Young Children in a Super-Diverse, Early Years Setting

In recent years, super-diversity has become an important lens through which researchers can understand the impacts of the increasingly heterogeneous nature of immigration. In the field of education, a vast body of research explores bilingual settings, but few studies have been conducted with super-diverse participants. The aim of this thesis is, therefore, to investigate the communicative practices of young children in a super-diverse, Early Years, setting. Drawing on Rogoff’s interpretation of sociocultural theory, a year-long ethnographic study with thirty children, aged four to six, was conducted. Data collection began when the class started the final term of their Early Years Foundation Stage and continued until the Easter holidays of Year One. The study aimed to promote children’s rights and participation by using data from the observations to co-create cartoons with the participants - a technique that yielded opportunities for collaborative interpretation of the data. Ethnographic data was combined with language portraits by the children and semi-structured interviews with their parents to provide an in depth, qualitative, portrayal of the children’s communicative practices in the setting. The process of data analysis was inductive, drawing on elements of grounded theory and thematic analysis. The results demonstrate that the children’s communicative practices were complex, drawing on funds of knowledge, multimodal and multilingual repertoires. The children often created a third space that fused knowledge and experiences from their home and school activities. A significant finding was that the complex, creative characteristics of the children’s communication and third space creation reduced as they progressed through Year One, where they had to take on an increasingly homogenised role in line with the expectations of formal schooling. The findings are important as they reveal how children navigate being at the nexus between increasing diversity of communities on the one hand, and the increasing standardisation of educational settings on the other.