Barnehagen som språklæringsarena: En kasusstudie av tre barnehagelæreres andrespråksdidaktiske praksiser.

The purpose of this study is to examine early childhood educators' work with language development for multilingual children in Norwegian daycare centres (barnehager) in order to generate new knowledge about the daycare centre as an arena for learning language.

The study concludes that all the different pedagogical practices of the three early childhood educators provide good conditions for the children's development of a second language, however each of their practices has advantages and disadvantages.

The early childhood educator who works with children whose first language is a minority language, and who does not have access to a bilingual assistant, primarily works with language stimulation in spontaneous situations, in which several children are included in the conversation. By doing so, she creates space for multilingualism in the group of children and all children are heard. She generally assigns high priority to the social dimension and prefers the children to experience language in different informal learning situations during a day at kindergarten.

The researcher finds it positive that the children experience language usage which is dependent on circumstances and cognitively demanding. However, the disadvantage of this approach can be that activities to prepare the children for reading and writing recede into the background, because planned, prepared activities (e.g. reading and writing exercises) are given lower priority.

The other two early childhood educators (Astrid and Rigmor) who both have access to the children's native languages focus on separate skills (e.g. vocabulary) and use planned exercises that stimulate language learning to a greater extent. An early childhood educator with access to the native language through a pedagogical assistant often applies individual training. The advantage of this approach is that their work strengthens the children's vocabulary, but there is not much focus on language and language usage in different social contexts.

The data material consists of field observations and interviews with early childhood educators. The field observations were conducted at three different municipal daycare centres in Norway. The selection criteria for the institutions were that one of the institutions introduced the children to English, whereas the other two had multilingual children. One early childhood educator working with children's language was selected from each institution. One early childhood educator (Astrid) taught English to Norwegian-speaking children. The other two early childhood educators (Heidi and Rigmor) worked with children whose first language was a minority language. One of the early childhood educators (Heidi) did not have a bilingual assistant, and therefore did not have access to the native language of the children, whereas the other early childhood educator (Rigmor) had a bilingual assistant.

The data collection took place in three stages in 2007, 2009 and 2010, respectively, and the observations lasted between four days and two weeks. In addition, two-three in-depth interviews were carried out with each early childhood educator as well as before-and-after interviews in connection with the situations observed in the kindergartens. Field observations and interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Moreover, the data material included documents from the daycare centres, such as annual plans, project plans and evaluations as well as field notes by the researcher.

Alstad, G.T. (2013). Barnehagen som språklæringsarena: En kasusstudie av tre barnehagelæreres andrespråksdidaktiske praksiser. Universitetet i Oslo, [Oslo].