Translation activities in bilingual early childhood education: Children's perspectives and teachers' scaffolding

In the present study we investigate empirically how six to seven-year-old children with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics of a children's song from Finnish to English, analyzing how translation is collaboratively constituted by the participants. The study is informed by translanguaging theory and a sociocultural perspective on learning. The results show that the children respond to the challenge to translate through talking about how something is done instead of what a word means, and by attending to sound (making sense through a similar sounding word). It is also shown how the teachers scaffold the children who take on the task by introducing synonyms and antonyms, and using meta-markers. The importance of the differentiated set of practices engaged in by the participants for their development of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness is discussed.