Children’s socialisation into literate practices through engaging in translation activities in immersion preschool.

The study investigates how five-year-olds are socialised into certain interpretive practices that are considered important for the development of reading and writing skills.

The analyses indicate that the kindergarten teacher and the children not only orient themselves towards each other here and now, but that they also orient themselves towards the institutional framework (kindergarten) in which the activity takes place, and that they are involved in both creating and recreating this framework (double dialogic). The analyses also shed light on something typical of teaching activities: the redistribution of influence. Initially, the teacher controls the activity, but eventually the children take over control (acquire the practice of interpreting song lyrics) and become co-authors of the lyrics discussed. The study highlights how the children collectively made use of and acquired important meta-communicative tools, which theoretically suggest the emergence of reading and writing skills. Such skills are a prerequisite for being able to participate in cultural practices in and outside educational contexts.

The data material was collected through activities where a group of kindergarten children and their kindergarten teacher listened to and talked about the lyrics to a popular Swedish children's song. The activity was carried out three times, and the conversations between the children and the kindergarten teacher were audio recorded. The kindergarten children and teacher belonged to a bilingual kindergarten in Finland and participated in a Finnish-Swedish ‘language bathing programme’, where Finnish children are introduced to the Swedish language by being ‘bathed’ in it.

Kultti, A. & Pramling, N. (2021). "Children’s socialisation into literate practices through engaging in translation activities in immersion preschool". Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 21(4):590–613.