ABSTRACT
Young children make sense of their experiences through talk but it is their talk with adults that generally extends their understanding of that experience. This chapter aims to clarify the place of language in children’s learning before moving on to how this fits into the context of the multi-cultural nursery. In order to be a good learning environment, the nursery classroom has to be representative of the social world of children and support their ways of making sense of their world. The pendulum of educational thinking swings between the model of child-centred ‘discovery’ learning and the model of didactic imposition of facts by teacher on child. For a group to feel cultural identity the members will share ownership of cultural features that define and characterise the group. The view of the wider society as to whether such cultural features are seen as positive or negative will influence the way in which the group itself views these features.
