ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a growing phenomenon in early childhood education (ECE) that has received insufficient pedagogical attention: how to close the gap between school entrants’ heterogeneous linguistic and cultural backgrounds and the language proficiency expectations of ECE literacy preparation curricula. It describes two story-retelling projects carried out with kindergarten children at Joyce Public School in northwest Toronto, Ontario as part of a collaborative action research project in an urban elementary school. ECE readies children for institutional learning, which continues to rely heavily on print literacy skills in the dominant language/s of society. Societal multilingualism, long a feature of major urban areas that have traditionally attracted migrants, is increasingly manifest in smaller, regional communities. The chapter argues that literacy pedagogy must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies. The learning community worked hand-in-glove toward a shared aim: to improve language and literacy learning for linguistically heterogeneous children socialized into digital practices.
