Abstract
García and Flores state that new pedagogies must respond to the complex bilingualism of students and to the heterogeneous classes of the 21st century. The main goal of this chapter is to describe the theoretical foundations of a new approach to bilingualism and interculturality in Early Childhood Education (ECE) called “the PETaL approach”, whose acronym stands for “Play, Education, Toys, and Languages”. PETaL is an approach and not a methodology in that it is a flexible model of bilingual implementation that adapts its key methodological principles to the particular context in which it is developed. Moreover, it is an approach that entails intercultural education as a constitutive axis of accommodation and plasticity, which are sine qua non conditions of it. The PETaL approach is framed in the European space, which offers a suitable international and socio-educational context where it has begun to be experimented and which has already attached itself to incipient research.
TopTheoretical Background
The theoretical construct that lies at the base of the PETaL approach is composed of a structured set of concepts which, coming from different theories (e.g. CLIL, bilingual education and intercultural education), have nurtured this 21st century approach. Its objective is to foster the learning of second languages among ECE students through the construction of the intercultural communicative competence, which constitutes its central axis. Therefore, languages and culture are structural to this model.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Approach: Theories about the nature of language and language learning that serve as the source of practices and principles in language learning (Richards and Rodgers, 2002, p. 20).
Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD): It is a prestigious, integrated, international study programme, jointly delivered by an international consortium of higher education institutions (HEIs) and, where relevant, other partners with specific expertise and interest in the study programme (EACEA, n.d., paragraph 1).
Knowledge: It is an abstract concept. Humans acquire knowledge about things by generalizing from particular samples, which are actualized through the senses (adapted from Widdowson, 2004, p. 549).
Attitudes: Attitudes characterize the disposition of the individual to understand and accept diversity in a specific cultural context.
Intercultural Competence: It is the ability to interact effectively with people from cultures that we recognize as being different from our own (Guilherme, 2004, p. 297).
Skills: It is the activity of encoding and deciphering signals as physically manifested in a particular medium (adapted from Widdowson, 2004, p. 550).
Behavior: Things people say and do (adapted from Storti, 2009, p. 275).