Bilingualism and bilingual education in early childhood: validation of a scale on the beliefs of daycare educators and nursery school teachers

Abstract

The paper focuses on validation of a scale on beliefs about bilingualism and bilingual education in early childhood
developed through translation and adaptation of the Beliefs about Bilingualism Survey by Garrity et alii (2018;
2019) as part of the Project “Feeling English in the 0-3-6 age group”, which originated from an agreement
between the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Department of Education of the University of Bologna to enable
educational staff to introduce English in daycare and nursery school. Exploration of the factorial structure of the
scale – administered to a non-probabilistic sample of 850 daycare educators and nursery school teachers involved
in the project – revealed three factors characterized by good reliability indexes. The results that have emerged, to
be further investigated through additional confirmatory validation procedures, thus appear encouraging with respect
to the possibility of using the scale as a valid and reliable survey tool for measuring educators’ and teachers’
beliefs in connection with professional development paths and innovative educational practices related to the introduction
of English in the context of daycares and nurseries.