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Dr Josephine Milton and Dr Josephine Deguara presented a paper entitled “Multilingualism in the Early Years: Pre-service teachers’ experiences of linguistic diversity” at the 4th International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education (ICMME4), which was held at the University of Malta, Malta. Other members of the Early Childhood and Primary (ECPE) Research Group, Dr Rosienne Camilleri and Dr Charmaine Bonello were also involved in the study.

Aware of the rapidly changing local linguistic scenario, where in the last fifteen years, state schools saw an increase of 700% of international students (MEDE, 2019), with an average of 22.65% of children in states being non-Maltese, a small exploratory study was conducted to provide insights into the experiences and perceptions of pre-service early years’ educators Maltese multilingual kindergarten settings. Data was collected from pre-service teachers who follow the BA ECEC course. Findings from the study indicate that while pre-service educators appreciate the benefits of multilingual classrooms including the learning of different languages and cultures by children, they claim that the success of such experiences lies within the responsibility of the classroom educator, who currently is not provided with enough support. They also show concerns that Maltese and non-Maltese children might experience learning loss and might feel left out in very multilingual classrooms. The study calls for immediate priority to be given to this unprecedented level of linguistic diversity in Maltese schools, more training and support to both pre-service and in-service teachers, and investment in linguistic mediators and translators while providing families and children with more extensive induction programmes.