“Vi förbjuder inte modersmål, alla språk har plats på förskolan” : En kvalitativ studie om förskollärares beskrivningar av språkutvecklingsarbete i planerad undervisning med flerspråkiga barn.

Sammanfattning

The aim of this study is to contribute knowledge about how preschool teachers describe language development work in planned teaching with multilingual children, based on two research questions that highlight which strategies pre- school teachers use to support multilingual children’s language development, as well as the opportunities and challenges they encounter in this work. The study was conducted using a qualitative approach and is based on semi-struc- tured interviews with six preschool teachers working in two different munici- palities, and the empirical material was analysed using thematic analysis. The strategies that are made visible concern how preschool teachers consciously adapt their language, repeat concepts, and use multimodal resources in teach- ing. The results show that preschool teachers view children’s mother tongues as pedagogical resources that contribute to children’s participation, sense of security, and identity development, and that also support the development of the Swedish language, while language development work may be constrained by professional and organisational challenges such as large child groups, time constraints, uncertainty regarding how children’s mother tongues can be inte- grated into teaching, and limited linguistic resources. The analysis is grounded in a sociocultural perspective, in which language development is understood as a social process shaped through interaction with others by means of cultural and linguistic tools. The study demonstrates that an inclusive, language-sup- portive, and conscious approach to planned teaching is of central importance for promoting language development in a multilingual context, while a shared professional perspective and organisational conditions are fundamental for en- abling language development work in practice.