Making bilingual early childhood education work
Victoria Benz
This presentation focuses on the ways in which the ideological environment of Australia’s monolingual mindset and the global hegemony of English influence and shape the construction and presentation of a bilingual childcare centre in Sydney. Employing sociolinguistic ethnography, the goals of this session are to explore the challenges faced by a non-profit organisation offering bilingual education and to examine how these are influenced by linguistic ideologies and practices intrinsically tied to power and capital relations. Lastly, it closes with a discussion on how to make a bilingual programme relevant under these conditions.

Victoria Benz is a cotutelle PhD candidate at Macquarie University and Hamburg University. Her research explores the language attitudes, ideologies and practices in institutions of bilingual early childhood education in Sydney.