Initiativ og responsmønstre i boklesingsdialoger mellom barnehagelærer og barn med minoritetsspråklig bakgrunn

The study investigates the dynamics of dialogues between kindergarten teachers and children with minority language backgrounds in two book reading situations. The study focuses on how the kindergarten teacher invites the child into the dialogue and how the child responds. The study addresses two research questions: (1) What degree of symmetry/asymmetry can be identified in the dialogues? (2) What characterises the kindergarten teacher’s questions and the children’s responses?

The results showed that the children were very passive and the kindergarten teachers relatively active in the dialogues. Large parts of the conversational contributions from the kindergarten teachers consisted of closed-ended questions, while the children’s contributions were mainly short verbal or non-verbal responses. From a language learning perspective, it is important that children learning a second language gain experiences of both understanding and producing language. Results from the study indicate that children with minority language backgrounds in Norwegian kindergartens are at risk of gaining limited experience of using the second language themselves.

Eight dialogues between kindergarten teachers and children were filmed while they read two books together. The dialogue was analysed in two phases: firstly, Initiative-Response analyses (IR) were used. Based on the recorded IR pattern, in-depth analyses of selected dialogical phenomena were conducted. The data was collected from observations (one week) in seven kindergartens. The sample consists of 16 kindergarten teacher-child interactions between seven different kindergarten teachers and eight individual children. All were recruited from various kindergartens that were centrally located in Eastern Norway, where both a high proportion of immigrants and Norwegian-born people with immigrant parents live. The children spoke Urdu or Punjabi as their mother tongue and had no known difficulties. All were between 59 and 70 months old at the time of data collection, and they had attended kindergarten for at least one year. All the kindergarten teachers were pedagogical leaders in the children’s departments.

Karlsen, J., Røe-Indregård, H., Wold, A.H., Lykkenborg, M. & Hagtvet, B. (2018). "Initiativ og responsmønstre i boklesingsdialoger mellom barnehagelærer og barn med minoritetsspråklig bakgrunn". NOA: norsk som andrespråk, (1-2):66-92.