Session Information
31 SES 11 B, Early Childhood Education: Language in Interaction
Paper Session
Contribution
The projects purpose is to assess and describe how multilingual children’s language acquisition develops between ages three and five, the last years of kindergarten before school, in Norwegian as a second language, L2. The children are randomly selected from kindergartens in the municipality of Bergen, where every tenth kindergarten with around the mean percentage of children that speaks another language at home (16, 9%), has been asked to participate. Multilingual children who do not have Norwegian as their first language often meet Norwegian for the first time in the kindergarten. In order for kindergartens to be a good arena for language learning, we need knowledge on how multilingual children learn Norwegian as a second language. In this project, I will assess language acquisition amongst multilingual children, with a focus on vocabulary acquisition in Norwegian at three measurement points, which gives the project a longitudinal perspective. The project's overall research question is: How do multilingual children develop language competence in Norwegian as a second language?
I use two methodological approaches to answer this question. Firstly, I examine how the children's language develops by measuring word comprehension and production in verbs and nouns with a picture vocabulary test, Cross linguistic lexical task (CLT) (Haman et al., 2017), in both languages. Secondly, I observe with video recording the child’s participation in a play situation. The empirical data from the second approach, observations of communications in play, is the purpose for this presentation and is the purpose of my third sub-research question and article: 3) how does the pragmatic language competence develop? This proposal will not contain observations from all three measuring points, but will be an analysis of data from the first measuring point, as I have not yet collected for a second and third time.
The other two sub-research questions of the project are the subjects for the first theoretical article: 1) why is the vocabulary a good indicator of language competence? In addition, the second article: 2) what characterizes vocabulary development for nouns and verbs? Will be an analysis on empirical data collected with the picture vocabulary test, CLT.
In context, several studies in Norway has examined language use in kindergartens in Norway with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Most common methods in kindergarten research are observation, interview, questionnaire and audio and video recording. Their perspectives are often on inclusion in play and participation in activities of multilingual children (Sandvik, Garmann & Tkachenko, 2014, s. 20-23). This project ascribe the research field new insights on how the children’s language acquisition develops on both their first- and second language, Norwegian, in a longitudinal perspective.
The theoretical underpinnings of the study builds on Grosjean’s (1998, s. 146) holistic definition of a multilingual speaker, as a person using his or hers whole language repertoire. Furthermore, the study builds on Cummins (1980, s. 87) ice-berg theory which understands literacy related aspects of a bilingual’s proficiency in L1 and L2 as common across languages, but with different expressions in each language.
A common used model to describe what language and language learning is, is the model by Bloom & Tinker, 1999 (Bloom, 2000, s. 26). The model shows language competence based on three components: form, content and use. Grammatical competence is related to form, semantic competence to content and pragmatic competence to use. As we learn to speak, we develop all three of these components.
Method
With a purpose of randomly selecting informants, I put up first criteria that the informants are successively multilingual. The informants are all born in 2015, and all speak a first language, which has a developed CLT picture vocabulary test, but what first language the children spoke were not criteria. The result was nine informants that speak Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Lithuanian, German and Dutch at home. Learning words are not all a language user needs to be able to communicate. Although the picture vocabulary test measure both understanding and production of nouns and verbs, language use and language acquisition are more than measures of vocabulary in a test situation. Testing happens in an unnatural context, and tests does not measure pragmatic language competence and language use in normal contexts that has to do with interaction between people. Therefore, I chose to triangulate methods and strengthen my project by investigating language use in a less-test-situation and more conversation context during play sessions. To be social and a part of a community demands that a language user knows how to communicate. Therefore, pragmatic language skills will be important for a child to be able to participate in everyday activities. The methodological design for the study consist of the informant and one monolingual playmate. The playmate is of same age and goes well with the child. I have a box with toys and the children gets one instruction, to look in the box, nothing more. When the children play, I observe without interfering. The empirical data consists of nine 20-minute video recordings with the informants playing with a monolingual Norwegian-speaking child. The purpose of this observation is to measure how the child uses pragmatic language skills. For the analysis, I will investigate pragmatic language skills’, discursive, strategic and sociolinguistic competences. My perspective is descriptive, and the purpose is to look in to how the children use their vocabulary to communicate in Norwegian within these three language-use skills.
Expected Outcomes
Through the projects methods I will gain insight and discuss these components on language acquisition for multilingual kindergarten children. We know that if multilingual children do not develop their vocabulary, they may later face challenges when they start school. It is therefore crucial that we know how we can work in the best possible way to stimulate Norwegian language learning in the kindergarten. With this project, I want to increase understanding on how successive multilingual children learn Norwegian as their second language in the kindergarten. Expected findings from the conversations analysis is to show how the children use different communication strategies to be a part of a play session. I anticipate that children with small vocabularies in Norwegian mostly will parallel play, and take a more passive role in communication with one-word utterances. Children who has more language and vocabulary will try to participate more in communication by repeating what the monolingual child says. The data consists of the first observations out of three and the informants are between three and four years old. The empirical data on communication during playtime sessions makes it possible to make comprehensive assessments of vocabulary in use and provides data on language use and communication strategies outside a test situation. How do multilingual children interact in play situations when they do not speak Norwegian adequate for his or her age? Which words uses the children, how often do the children take the word, how is the volume and how is the expressions lengths? These are all questions for my analysis and discussion on the empirical data, which I will investigate further.
References
Bloom, L. (2000). The Intentionality Model of Word Learning - How to Learn a Word, Any Word. I K. H.-P. Robert Michnick Golinkoff, Lois Bloom, Linda B. Smith, Amanda L. Woodward, Nameera Akhtar, Michael Tomasello, George Hollich (Red.), Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition (s. 19 – 50). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cummins, J. (1980). The construct of proficiency in bilingual education. Current Issues in Bilingual Education, 81-103. Grosjean, F. (1998). Studying biliguals: Methodological and conseptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2), 131-149. Haman, E., Łuniewska, M., Hansen, P., Simonsen, H. G., Chiat, S., Bjekić, J., . . . Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages : Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT). Clinical Linguistics And Phonetics. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2017.1308553 Haman, E., Łuniewska, M. & Pomiechowska, B. (2015). Designing cross-linguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) for bilingual preschool children. Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment, 196-240. Sandvik, M., Garmann, N. G. & Tkachenko, E. (2014). Synteserapport om skandinavisk forskning på barns språk og språkmiljø i barnehagen i tidsrommet 2006-2014. Oslo: Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.