‘Can you teach me a little Urdu?’ Educators navigating linguistic diversity in pedagogic practice in Swedish preschools

The study investigates how Swedish kindergarten teachers deal with linguistic diversity in pedagogical practice. The focus is on how they strike a balance between being communicators of the national language while also promoting multilingualism. The research question is: How do kindergarten teachers navigate linguistic diversity in pedagogical practice, and how does this practice create space for children’s multilingualism?

The results show that kindergarten teachers support children’s language development by acknowledging and including the children’s own linguistic initiatives. Through translanguaging, where children use their entire linguistic repertoire, opportunities are created for a new form of independence and identity development. The study shows that both middle-class children and children with different socioeconomic backgrounds benefit from this approach. The researchers conclude that pedagogical practices that combine national language norms with multilingual perspectives can thus help reduce social inequalities and promote children’s language skills.

The study is based on ethnographic data collected from three different kindergartens in Sweden with socioeconomic differences and different degrees of multilingual children. A total of 61 children between three and six years of age and eleven kindergarten staff were observed. The data include observations and video recordings of daily pedagogical activities and interactions between children and kindergarten teachers. A total of 20 days of observations were conducted at each kindergarten over a period of three months.

Lundberg, O., Lundqvist, U., Åkerblom, A., & Risenfors, S. (2023). ‘Can you teach me a little Urdu?’ Educators navigating linguistic diversity in pedagogic practice in Swedish preschools. Global Studies of Childhood, 13(3), 245–260.