ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1604196
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of Literacy and Schooling in Heritage Language Maintenance and GrowthView all 6 articles
Enhancing heritage and additional language learning in the preschool years: longitudinal implementation of the Little Multilingual Minds program
Provisionally accepted
- 1The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia
- 2School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
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Little Multilingual Minds (LMM) partners with universities, communities, and early childhood centres to offer a language exposure program for heritage language (HL) and additional language (AL) speakers in a naturalistic, play-based environment. This paper reports on two program implementations conducted in a Spanish-English bilingual preschool in Sydney, Australia. Implementation 1 focused on HL Spanish children (n= 11; Mage = 4.24) for HL maintenance over six months, while Implementation 2 included both HL and AL children (n=27; Mage=2.93) with a new cohort over one year. Both implementations were quantitatively evaluated in three key areas: HL Spanish linguistic proficiency (vocabulary, listening, speaking, literacy/numeracy), alignment with educational principles (disposition, interaction, interest), and task-related precursors of school readiness (attention, cooperation, engagement), using Bayesian modelling for reliable statistical testing. Results from Implementation 1 showed significant improvements in HL children's linguistic skills from the first to the last assessment, effectively strengthening HL Spanish proficiency while preventing a shift toward English. In Implementation 2, despite challenges, the program was successfully adapted to accommodate both HL and AL children in the same session, yielding encouraging outcomes for both groups.We discuss these findings in terms of their implications for successful HL maintenance and AL learning within preschool classes with mixed language backgrounds.
Keywords: early childhood education, Multilingualism, heritage languages, additional languages, play-based language exposure, content and language integrated learning
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Escudero, Pino Escobar, Diskin-Holdaway and Hajek. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paola Escudero, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia
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