Flerspråkiga barn i förskolan: Villkor för deltagande och lärande.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the conditions at the daycare facility that support multilingual children’s linguistic and communicative development and their participation in activities.

The study shows how group activities controlled by adults in particular support multilingual children’s participation and conditions for language development if the individual children are allowed to take part on different premises. In addition, it seems important that, at a very young age, multilingual children are given the opportunity to take part in activities in which several different ways of expressing themselves are used, and in which early childhood educators consciously support the children’s participation on the basis of the individual child’s experiences and interests. The study shows that the daycare facility offers an environment in which the children are socialised into communicating in Swedish through participation in linguistic interactions and institutional activities such as meals, play, singing and reading. In this way, the children learn how to express their experiences in a manner which is understood by others. Moreover, the study shows that despite that fact that other languages than Swedish are only used to a very limited extent at the daycare centre, multilingual children are not limited in their participation in the activities at the daycare centre. The authors conclude that children pick up from a young age which language to use in a specific context. Furthermore, the study shows that the activities of the daycare centre provide good conditions for supporting multilingual children’s participation and language development.

The data material is based on field work in eight different daycare facilities over a period of six months. The material consists of participation observations and video footage of activities initiated by children and controlled by adults. Ten multilingual children aged from 19 months to 35 months took part in the study.

Kultti, A. (2012). Flerspråkiga barn i förskolan: Villkor för deltagande och lärande. Ph.d.-afhandling. Göteborgs universitet.