Enhancing heritage and additional language learning in the preschool years: longitudinal implementation of the Little Multilingual Minds program

Abstract

Little Multilingual Minds (LMM) partners with universities, communities, and early childhood centers to offer a language exposure program for heritage language (HL) and additional language (AL) speakers in a naturalistic, play-based environment. This paper reports on two program implementations conducted in a Spanish-English bilingual preschool in Sydney, Australia. Implementation 1 focused on HL Spanish children (n = 11; Mage = 4.24) for HL maintenance over 8 months, while Implementation 2 included both HL and AL children (n = 27; Mage = 2.93) with a new cohort over 1 year. Both implementations were quantitatively evaluated in three key areas: HL Spanish linguistic proficiency (vocabulary, ..