Through Crayons and Play, Preschoolers Reveal How They Really Learn a Second Language

Ask a five-year-old why some children speak one language and others speak another, and you may get an answer more philosophically sophisticated than most adults expect. A new mini-ethnographic study by Mila Schwartz of Oranim Academic College of Education in Israel, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, set out to capture exactly those answers—not through formal interviews or standardized tests, but through something far closer to the natural habitat of young children: play and art. By inviting six preschoolers to draw, create, and talk while they played, the study offers a rare window into how the youngest language learners perceive the multilingual worlds they inhabit, and how actively they think about the project of learning a second language.

The children at the heart of the study were five years old, living in a mixed-population city in Israel where different ethnolinguistic communities meet daily in classrooms, playgrounds, and streets. All six spoke Arabic or Russian as their first language and were learning Hebrew as a second language, both inside the preschool classroom and beyond it. That setting is scientifically valuable because it is not a laboratory simulation of multilingualism; it is the real, sometimes messy, everyday environment in which millions of children worldwide grow up. Schwartz used purposive sampling to select children who could articulate their experiences, and she treated them not as passive subjects but as agents—people with their own theories, preferences, and strategies for navigating multiple languages.

The methodological choice that distinguishes the study is its use of playful art activities as an ecologically valid research tool. Traditional research on language learning beliefs typically relies on questionnaires or interviews, instruments that presuppose verbal fluency and metalinguistic vocabulary that five-year-olds simply do not have. Drawing and play, by contrast, sit squarely within children’s existing communicative repertoire. When a child paints a picture of her classroom and explains who speaks what to whom, she is externalizing a mental map of her linguistic environment. The researcher then engaged the children in conversation around these artifacts, allowing their perceptions to emerge in a register natural to them. This approach aligns with a growing movement in early childhood research that insists children’s voices be heard on their own terms rather than filtered exclusively through adult proxies such as teachers and parents.

Analysis of the material followed a theory-drawn thematic approach, a qualitative method in which themes are identified in the data but interpreted through established theoretical lenses—in this case, frameworks on metacognition, language socialization, and child agency. The analysis surfaced six interlocking themes: children’s awareness of the multilingual environment; their attitudes toward different languages and their language preferences; their motives for learning a new language; issues in their language socialization; and two clusters of metacognitive beliefs—what children believed about themselves as language learners, and what they believed about others as learners and about how a second language should be taught. Together these themes sketch a portrait of children who are not merely absorbing language but actively reasoning about it.

The metacognitive findings are arguably the most striking. Metacognition—the capacity to think about one’s own thinking—was long assumed to emerge later in childhood, but research since Flavell’s foundational work in 1979 has pushed its origins earlier and earlier. Schwartz’s data show five-year-olds holding beliefs about their own efficacy as learners, echoing the self-efficacy theory developed by Albert Bandura: children expressed confidence or doubt about their ability to master Hebrew, and those beliefs plausibly shape how persistently they engage with the new language. Even more remarkably, the children articulated ideas about pedagogy. They had notions about how a second language should be taught and about the role of more proficient peers—what the literature calls language experts, children further along in second-language competence who can serve as models and informal teachers for their classmates.

That peer dimension connects the study to a rich tradition of research on language socialization, the process by which children learn not just linguistic forms but the social rules governing who speaks what, when, and to whom. In a multilingual preschool, those rules are contested and negotiated daily. The children in the study were aware of asymmetries: some classmates knew Hebrew and others did not, and this awareness fed into their social strategies. Previous work by Schwartz and colleagues documented children’s metalinguistic talk in bilingual preschool classrooms—moments when children explicitly comment on who knows which language and why. The new study extends that line by showing how such awareness is woven into children’s self-concepts and their motives for learning. Learning Hebrew, for some children, was not an abstract academic goal but a social one: a ticket into playgroups, friendships, and full participation in classroom life.

The study’s emphasis on agency reframes how we should think about young second-language learners. In the ecological perspective Schwartz has developed across her recent work, language learning is not a one-way transmission from teacher to child but an interaction among parents, teachers, peers, and the children themselves, each exercising agency in different ways. The preschoolers in this study deployed what the author describes as diverse cognitive and social strategies in their second-language learning—repetition, imitation, recruiting help from proficient peers, and strategically choosing which language to use in which situation. Their perceptions, the study concludes, reflect their here-and-now experiences in a multilingual environment, amid a complex meeting of different ethnolinguistic communities. In other words, children’s language beliefs are not free-floating; they are grounded in the specific social geography of their city, classroom, and family.

The findings also carry practical weight for early childhood educators. A substantial body of research, including systematic reviews of teacher–child interactions with multilingual young children, shows that teachers often struggle to respond to linguistic diversity in the classroom. If educators understand that five-year-olds already hold metacognitive beliefs about language learning—beliefs about their own abilities, about their peers’ roles, and about what good teaching looks like—they can design classrooms that build on those beliefs rather than ignoring them. Play-based pedagogy, already widely endorsed in early childhood education, gains an additional justification here: play is not only a vehicle for learning but a medium through which children reveal and refine their understanding of language itself. Art activities, imaginary play, and peer talk become diagnostic and developmental tools at once.

There are, of course, limits to what a small qualitative study can claim. Six children in one Israeli city cannot represent all multilingual preschoolers, and the mini-ethnographic design prioritizes depth over breadth. The author acknowledges the interpretive challenges inherent in representing children’s voices, a concern long raised in the childhood studies literature about authenticity and critical reflexivity. Yet the value of such work lies precisely in its granularity: it documents mechanisms—how a child reasons about a peer’s language expertise, how a drawing encodes linguistic hierarchies—that large-scale surveys could never capture. It also demonstrates a replicable method for other researchers seeking to include young children’s perspectives in studies of language and education.

The broader takeaway is a challenge to common intuition. Adults often imagine young second-language learners as sponges—passive, effortless, untroubled by doubt or strategy. Schwartz’s preschoolers tell a different story. They weigh languages against each other, form preferences, set social goals, assess their own progress, and theorize about instruction. They are, in the fullest sense, agents in their own language learning, navigating a multilingual environment that they perceive with surprising clarity. For researchers, the study adds a method—play and art as windows into children’s linguistic minds. For teachers and parents, it delivers a humbling message: the five-year-old struggling with Hebrew in the corner of the classroom is not just acquiring vocabulary. She is running her own ongoing experiment on what language is, who speaks it, and how she might come to speak it too.

Subject of Research: Preschool children's perceptions and metacognitive beliefs about learning a second language in a multilingual environment

Article Title: Children’s Perceptions of Early Experiences With a Multilingual Environment and Language Learning

Article References: Schwartz, M. (2026). Children’s Perceptions of Early Experiences With a Multilingual Environment and Language Learning. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02342-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02342-1

Keywords: multilingualism, second language acquisition, early childhood education, metacognition, child agency, language socialization, preschool, play-based research, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, language learning beliefs