Designing Open Access Platforms for Multilingual Language Awareness in Early Childhood Education
Abstract
Linguistic diversity is important in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), yet pedagogically appropriate and adaptable materials to foster multilingual language awareness remain scarce. Practices often stay implicitly monolingual, leaving educators with limited support for systematically managing linguistic diversity in everyday settings. This paper addresses this gap by proposing an open access web platform at the center of a platform that supports multilingual early childhood language awareness through multimodal storytelling and complementary resources. Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, the platform provides an individually paced multilingual story environment and serves as repository for educational material, enabling educators to reduce cognitive load for children and foster early language awareness. Following an echeloned Design Science Research (eDSR) approach, we iteratively derived design requirements, implemented a functional prototype, and conducted a preliminary evaluation with parents, educators, multilingual ECEC researchers, and software experts. The evaluation suggests that the platform is perceived as useful and usable, while highlighting improvement needs around role-specific entry points and interface refinements. This study is interdisciplinary in nature, integrating contributions from information systems, computer science and language education, and it contributes initial design principles for multilingual ECEC platforms and highlights directions for future implementation in real-world educational settings.
Keywords
Early Childhood Education and Care; ECEC; Educational Technology; Design Science Research; DSR