Children’s language play as collaborative improvisations–rethinking paths to literacy

The study investigates children’s use of language in play in order to gain more knowledge about how language games in kindergarten can have an impact on language development and reading skills. The research question is: How do children play with language when interacting with peers?

The results show that a combination of language fragments, musicality, movements, emotions, and materiality is constitutive of children’s language play. It emerges that children use a wide range of such semiotic repertoires and that language play is an integral part of children’s language practices. The study suggests that knowledge about children’s language practices can help expand the theoretical and empirical understanding of children’s development of language and literacy skills.

The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork and video observations from a kindergarten with a total of 80 children aged 0-6 years, located in a village in Denmark. With a few exceptions, most children had Danish as their native language and good language skills. The source data consist of over 31 hours of video recording, and the observations took place primarily in a room with 20 children aged 3-4 years. The researchers transcribed the recordings, encoded the content, and performed a multimodal micro-ethnographic analysis of two play sequences to see how the children used language in games through improvisation, adaptation, and co-creation.

Holm, L., & Ahrenkiel, A. (2022). Children’s language play as collaborative improvisations–rethinking paths to literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 24(2), 298–317.