Litterasitetsfremmende samtaler i barnehagen

The purpose of this study is to examine how spontaneous everyday conversations between a preschool teacher and children in preschool can support children's development of language acquisition (early literacy).

The authors conclude that the teacher must pay attention to the themes the children want to talk about in order to support their language and challenge them in conversations. The preschool teacher must build on the children's own modes of expression and then assess what kind of support the children will benefit from. The study shows that when the children can decide how to take part in conversations, the conversations become positive and expansive for children's use of language. The results indicate that the conditions for expansive conversations are best when there are only a few participants in the conversation. This enables each child to express themselves linguistically and to talk about their own experiences. According to the authors, this is important for children to develop their language acquisition.

The empirical material is based on video recordings from one preschool with 22 children aged 3-6 years, nine of whom were multilingual. Data was collected over a period of 18 months, where the researchers recorded on video spontaneous everyday conversations between the preschool teacher and the children. Five selected extracts of conversations were presented in the study and analysed on the basis of how the teacher's response to and questions about the children's language interaction with the teacher develop the children's use of language. The extracts were selected because they illustrate the scope of the language-stimulating conversations in terms of both theme and the different situations in which the conversations took place. The conversations arose in several different contexts, and the length of them varied significantly.

Slettner, S., & Gjems, L. (2016). Litterasitetsfremmende samtaler i barnehagen. Nordisk barnehageforskning 12(2), 1-16.