Transspråkandets villkor i en supermångfaldig förskola. En konstruktivistisk grundad teori

Abstract in English

The aim of the thesis is to examine how preschool children’s translanguaging is performed, and the conditions that enable or limit translanguaging in preschool. Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2014a) has been used to code collected data from a superdiverse preschool in a structurally disadvantaged suburb in Sweden, and to generate a provisional theoretical model of how to understand the conditions for translanguaging in this preschool. The following research questions have been posed: How is translanguaging performed in a superdiverse preschool? What are the conditions that enable or limit translanguaging in this preschool? How might a theoretical model on the performances and conditions for translanguaging, based on data from this superdiverse preschool, be constructed as a result of a constructivist grounded theory? The data were gathered in an ethnographic study, where approximately 90 percent of the children were multilingual. Seven multilingual children aged 1 to 5 years were shadowed during an intense 12-week period, during their first semester at preschool; initially doing fieldnotes, succeeded by six weeks of video-recordings. The children had different family languages (i.e. mother tongue) and were all emerging bilinguals, and thus new to the Swedish language. In line with definitions of translanguaging, I have coded the data from a multimodal view of language. This means observing body language, facial expressions, gaze, sounds, and the use of aesthetic ways of expressing yourself while drawing, moving your body, etc. as a part of what the Swedish preschool curriculum calls aesthetic expressions.

The results show that children translanguage by using their entire repertoire of verbal and non-verbal communication. Younger (1–3-year-old) children’s multimodal repertoire is more enhanced and supported by adults and other children. Older children (3–5-year-old) are expected to, but also more likely to use verbal language (Swedish, English or their family language). However, they are also often misunderstood, due to expectations when the verbal language is failing them. The study shows that translanguaging is conditioned by a complex mix of space-time and concrete-abstract dependent factors. These factors are: the didactic situation of play, care or teaching, material artefacts in environment, and notions, expectations and reception expressed by educators and other children. Especially strong are the expectations tied to the child’s age and its prior experiences of expressing itself verbally, bodily or in other ways. The results suggest that the openness in attitude, reception, response and expectations shown by adults and other children towards the youngest children while translanguaging, would greatly benefit older children as well. The study concludes that more knowledge about translanguaging in its wider definition, which also includes working with the possibilities afforded by aesthetic expressions, is beneficial for all children to enhance their communication, language development and multicultural identity-formation in accordance with the stipulated aims of the preschool curriculum.