Silences in growing up bi/multilingual in multicultural globalised societies : educators', families' and children's views of negotiating languages, identity and difference in childhood

In Australian educational contexts, there exist silences around bi/multilingual children's experiences of learning and using a minority language and identity negotiation. These silences mask our understandings of children's decreasing capacity to retain adequate levels of bilingual/multilingual proficiency due to the early exposure to dominant English-only early childhood and primary education. This is also shaped by global, political, social and economic factors in which English as a global language has a major impact on children's emerging identities, which are a 'work in progress', constantly negotiated, renegotiated and constructed within social and linguistic contexts.