Language at preschool in Europe: Early years professionals in the spotlight

Over the past few decades early years education throughout Europe has experienced many changes due to higher numbers of children attending centres for early childhood education and care (ECEC), a growing linguistic and cultural diversity in society and a shift from care to education with the focus on preparing children for entry to primary school. These changes have brought with them an expectation from policy makers, researchers and parents for better ECEC. Language support for children is often named as one of the key aspects of high-quality childcare because of its importance in successful entry to and progression within the future educational career of a child. However, rather little is known about how early years professionals meet the linguistic demands of twenty-first century multilingual Europe. The present special issue tries to fill this gap by giving a platform to five European investigations into language at preschool in Europe with a focus on early years educators’ competences, knowledge, skills, beliefs and needs. This introductory article aims to prepare the reader for the contributions that follow in this special issue. We first describe current policy and practice of language support in European ECEC with regard to children’s and educators’ needs. Then, we review all the contributions and provide a summary focusing on the diversity as well as the commonalities of the five investigations, before formulating an outlook for future work.