Purpose
The aim of the study is to investigate how a kindergarten teacher organises a conversation about compound words in a pre-school group where most of the children have Swedish as a second language. The investigation explores how the kindergarten teacher achieves the concretisation of words and the compound word system, the generation of words by pupils, as well as the repetition of the words through the way she organises the teaching.
Result
The results show that the teacher is able to concretise the teaching by allowing students to experience the referents of words both visually and spatially. This was achieved by allowing pupils to generate words and solve word formations themselves through repetition, and by allowing them to correct their own linguistic errors. The teacher illustrated compound words by using the names of different parts of the body and then attaching them to other words (for example, foot-ball). Based on the pupils’ reactions, the teaching programme seemed to engage them. The author believes that the study contributes to promoting meaningful teaching methods in Swedish as a second language.
Design
The empirical material is part of a corpus of video recordings made in the period 2012-2014 as part of the research project Interaction for Language - and Identity Development in Multilingual Classrooms. The two-minute video sequence analysed in this investigation is from a teaching session on compound words for a pre-school group where most of the children had Swedish as a second language. The investigation focuses in particular on one of the children, six-year-old ‘Samir’, who has just started learning Swedish.
References
Näslund, S. (2018). “Ord i interaktion: En lärares organisering av ett klassamtal om ordsammansättning”. Nordand: nordisk tidsskrift for andrespråksforskning, 13(2):151–167.