‘Talk about my name’: exploring the translanguaging potential of artifacts within multilingual parents’ early literacy practices with their children

In early childhood policy and curriculum discourses, migrant and multilingual parents’ literacy practices with their children have often been marginalised and othered. Such othering rejects the value of culturally and materially embedded communicative practices present in homes and communities. Countering this is the development in scholarship of a heteroglossic perspective, involving practices such as translanguaging and artifactual literacies. This perspective illuminates how the blurring of the boundaries between languages and modes enables more culturally responsive spaces for creating new meanings and understandings of identity and literacies. Applying an artifactual literacies approach, this research explored migrant and multilingual parents’ early literacy practices with their children and the emergence of such new meanings in the context of early literacies. In the process of sharing their home literacy practices, parents engaged in translanguaging and through interacting with artifacts made use of their full communicative repertoire to convey linguistic and cultural knowledges. The analysis of findings sought to understand how parents drew on artifactual, linguistic and cultural knowledge to communicate about their early literacy practices. Bringing together these multiple resources into semiotic assemblages provides insights into how literacies are experienced and identities are constructed in early childhood by parents and children in heteroglossic contexts.