The Finnish Reading Centre asked daycare centres about their experiences, challenges and needs in a multilingual operating environment. The very large number of responses – from 370 daycare centres around Finland – indicates that daycare professionals are clearly willing to express their needs and ideas to support multilingual literacy at daycare centres.

Finland is becoming an increasingly multicultural and multilingual place to live. In the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, almost one-quarter of children under the age of 7 are of non-Finnish origin. The demographic change has taken place over a relatively short period of time and has brought with it many new needs. We at the Reading Centre are very interested in how equal opportunities for good literacy and reading are ensured in a diversifying Finland and what kind of help can be offered for that. For this purpose, we launched the Multilingual Literacy project and a survey for daycare centres.

The central message of the survey responses was that the resources of daycare centres are not sufficient to support the home language of all children; cooperation with homes and more staff are needed. With regard to the reading skills of multilingual children, both learning Finnish and supporting the home language are strongly highlighted: supporting the home language is seen as challenging and cannot be achieved by daycare centres alone, but parents should be made more active in it.

As regards support for the Finnish language and literacy, the challenges include individual differences within age groups in terms of language skills and the lack of peaceful spaces enabling small group work. Where support for learning Finnish is concerned, playing, games and nursery rhymes are important, but many daycare centres do not have the time and resources to support children’s linguistic development individually, especially if daily life is already challenging (other challenges faced by children, staff shortage, etc.).

Based on the survey for daycare centres, there is a clear need for material that helps the daycare centre staff to guide parents to support their children’s literacy at home. In addition, there is a need for material for parents that they can use at home and that provides them with the necessary information about the importance of reading, literacy and their home language.

There is a shortage of books at daycare centres, both in Finnish and in the children’s home languages. Bilingual books and digital materials are scarce or too expensive to use. Professionals need support, time and tools to focus on reading. Daycare centres use a lot of digital solutions and make use of foreign-language children’s books available through libraries. However, the fact that the daycare centre employees cannot read them is often seen as a challenge.

In connection with the survey, daycare centres were asked about their cooperation with libraries. The responses indicated that library cooperation in support of reading for multilingual children mainly includes lending and ordering books in different languages and giving book tips. Storytimes in different languages are also popular, although they have been partly discontinued due to the pandemic. Cooperation with libraries could be more systematic in terms of supporting multilingual reading, and the respondents also wished that libraries would become more active in informing and involving parents. It would be good if parents knew more about foreign-language books offered by libraries and could borrow books and read them at home.

At the start of the Multilingual Literacy project, it seemed that many parties were doing a good job without knowing about each other and the needs of the target group were not necessarily known. Therefore, our project aims to find out what the needs of multilingual families are in supporting children’s literacy and what policies are already in place to maintain and strengthen their mother tongue and literacy skills. The Finnish Reading Centre has produced educational material in 19 languages on the importance of one’s own mother tongue and reading to children, and maternity and child health clinics have distributed reading gifts in Somali, Arabic, Russian and Estonian in addition to Finnish and Swedish. These materials are also used in this project.

The basic idea of the Multilingual Literacy project is that supporting language awareness and skills at the earliest possible stage supports the development of reading and writing skills and all learning. Based on the background work, it is clear that a prerequisite for good literacy skills is knowing and appreciating one’s own mother tongue. However, the theme is so broad that it is necessary to restrict it by age group, region and language. The project focuses on early childhood education in three cities – Vantaa, Turku and Kotka – and three languages: Somali, Arabic and Russian.

The idea of investigating the situation especially among the target group, i.e. professionals operating in a multilingual environment and multilingual families, already emerged three years ago, but the pandemic undermined the original plan to meet the target group. Therefore, we decided to investigate the situation by organising a survey for daycare centres, libraries and multilingual families and communities in cooperation with the research company Innolink. The survey examines the needs and opportunities of daycare centres and libraries to support children’s home language but also Finnish literacy. Multilingual families provide information about their needs and test the use of the Reading Centre’s multilingual materials and books.

Based on the responses of the daycare centres, it can be concluded that, overall, support for multilingual reading is seen as an important theme despite being challenging, and the respondents regard supporting both the Finnish language and the home language as central to children’s literacy and language skills.

Daycare centres, libraries and families must not be left alone on this issue!

The author Ilmi Villacís is the Director of the Finnish Reading Centre.