Hva slags innsikt om barnets språk formidles i foreldresamtaler?

The purpose of this study is to examine what child carers think and say about the speech acts of children aged between three and four years within the framework of interviews with parents, and the types of technical terminology about language used by child carers when talking about the language skills of the children. Speech acts are the communicative and social aspects of the language and cover different contexts of children’s’ language. This may be in play situations at daycare centres, in which children alternate between talking and listening in a conversation.

The study shows that very little time is spent on discussing the children’s’ language skills in interviews with parents, as routine situations and other topics than language take up most of the time. Moreover, the study shows that child carers rarely use technical concepts about language, and that they have an ambivalent attitude to using such vocabulary. The author therefore concludes that language-related technical concepts should be given a more pivotal role in the technical discourse at the daycare centres, and that they should function as a basis for observations of daily speech acts.

The empirical material used in the study comprises transcriptions of interviews carried out with child carers before and after interviews with parents regarding eight children. The interviews with the child carers included general questions regarding their interviews with parents and specific questions regarding linguistic themes.

Aagre, W. (2011). ”Hva slags innsikt om barnets språk formidles i foreldresamtaler?”. I: Gjems, L. & Løkken, G. (red.): Barns læring om språk og gjennom språk. Samtaler i barnehagen. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. 176-201.