Acehnese Students’ Perceptions Toward Early Childhood Multilingualism

This study is about the perception of Acehnese students towards early childhood multilingualism. This study uses a qualitative method with an ethnographic approach to obtain a comprehensive picture of the opinion of Acehnese students towards multilingualism from an early age and how they maintain their multilingual skills, with a focus on describing everyday individual experiences through interviews. Purposive sampling technique was used to recruit participants and collected the data through in-depth semi-structured interviews with six batch 2018 students of the Department of English Education at UIN Ar-Raniry Banda Aceh, with their multilingual ability, heritage language (one ethnic language or more), national language (Indonesian) and foreign languages (English, Arabic and or more). The results show that all Acehnese students view multilingualism from an early age as very beneficial for children to their adulthood. With multilingual ability they are easier to interact with many people, it also helps their development in academic matters. In order to maintain their multilingual ability, students use various ways to maintain their language skills. The most influential way is by communication. Communicating with relatives really helps students maintaining their multilingual skills. In addition, the environment greatly influences the development of language as well as maintains the language of students, both in the environment where students live or in the school environment.