To Örebro University

The overall aim is to develop strategies and knowledge about multilingual children’s conditions to learn Swedish as well as literacy skills in Swedish preschools. This presentation highlights preschool teacher’s didactic strategies to support multilingual children’s language and literacy learning in preschool play- activities.

Relationship to previous research works: This paper presentation refers to an ongoing research project with the character of an action research project. The research project has been carried out in collaboration between the researcher and eighteen preschool teachers in Sweden.

Theoretical and conceptual framework: Starting from a social constructivist perspective with focus on the strategies employed by preschool teachers to support multilingual children’s language learning in play-activities, the data analyses are based on the theoretical foundations of bioecological and sociocultural theory (Barton, 2007; Bronfenbrenner, 1999; Vygotsky, 1962).

Paradigm, methodology and methods: The study has a mixed methods design where qualitative data were derived from the preschool teachers descriptions of their didactic strategies in supporting multilingual children, as well as quantitative data scoring eighteen dimensions of strategies in play-activities,  by using the scoring and  analysis tool, Social Language Environment - Domain, SLE-D (Norling, 2015).

Ethical Considerations: The study was carried out in accordance with the ethical principles of social sciences research (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017).

Main finding or discussion: Results regarding preschool staff’s descriptions and scored strategies to support multilingual children’s language and literacy learning in preschool play- activities will be presented.

Implications, practice or policy: This paper will contribute to a better understanding of how preschool teachers develop didactic strategies to support multilingual children’s language and literacy learning in preschool play- activities.