The Swedish preschool should see to that multilingual children [1]: "receive the opportunity to develop both their Swedish language and their mother tongue" (p. 6), which corresponds with research claiming that children benefits from using their mother tongue in preschool[2]. However, according to recent Swedish research children rarely get that[3]. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyse multilingual children’s possibilities to translanguage in a preschool practice.
García and Li Wei[4] by using the concept translanguaging want to move away from a dual-monolingual view, and acknowledge a person’s full linguistic repertoire of features from different languages, as well as different modalities.
The study adopts a constructionist perspective and takes an ethnographic approach with video observations of children in a preschool. The films have been analysed through discourse analyses, based on Foucault[5]. The results show that children use different languages as resources as they communicate with children and adults. I propose that it is possible to translanguage in social situations, but not in pedagogical situations, where the focus is on teaching the children the “correct” language, in this case Swedish.
Keywords: translanguaging, preschool, discourse, bilingualism
[1] Curriculum for pre-school: Lpfö 98. (1998). Stockholm: Ministry of Education and Science in Sweden [Utbildningsdepartementet], Regeringskansliet.
[2] See e.g. Hyltenstam, K., Axelsson, M., & Lindberg, I. (red.) (2012). Flerspråkighet – en forskningsöversikt. Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet.
[3] See e.g. Kultti, A. (2012). Flerspråkiga barn i förskolan: villkor för deltagande och lärande. Diss. Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2012. Göteborg.; Skaremyr, E. (2014). Nyanlända barns deltagande i språkliga händelser i förskolan. Licentiatavhandling Karlstad : Karlstads universitet, 2014.
[4] García, O. and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[5] See e.g. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977. Brighton: Harvester P.
