”En flerspråkig förskolas didaktik i praktiken”.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine and analyse didactics at a multi-lingual daycare centre in order to generate knowledge about didactic questions that arise when working with multi-lingual children. The study focuses on the two didactic questions about what and how.

The study shows how the child carers work with the multi-lingual children through spoken language as well as sign language. The child carers consider language development as the most important content of the activities, and the study shows that, to a high degree, there is a match between how child carers want to work with the content and how they actually work. The child carers are able to work with and develop all the children’s languages by changing between Swedish and the other languages etc. The study hereby shows that multi-lingual child carers are a precondition for being able to use the children's native language systematically and functionally as a supplement to Swedish in their daily pedagogical work.

Data was collected through interviews and observations from a department at a daycare centre, in which the majority of the children were bilingual. The children were aged three to five years old. Two managers at the daycare centre were interviewed about their views on their own daycare centre and the work with multi-lingualism. Three child carers and one child carer for children with special needs worked at the department and were all interviewed about their attitudes to the activities and methods of the daycare centre. The child carers spoke Swedish, Arabic, Bosnian, Albanian and Rumanian; all languages spoken by the children. Observation was the primary data collection method to examine the didactics of the work with multi-lingual children. A total of 15 hours of activities were recorded on video with a hand-held camera, and the author also took notes. Interviews and recordings were transcribed, and the material was analysed by dividing it into themes that were characteristic for the work.

Skans, A. (2011). ”En flerspråkig förskolas didaktik i praktiken”. Malmö: Malmö högskola.