0000000001118096
AUTHOR
Elin Almér
showing 2 related works from this author
Children’s beliefs about bilingualism and language use as expressed in child-adult conversations
2017
AbstractThe aim of this article is to describe young children’s beliefs about language and bilingualism as they are expressed in verbal utterances. The data is from Swedish-medium preschool units in three different sites in Finland. It was generated through ethnographic observations and recordings of the author’s interactions with the children. The meaning constructions in the interactions were analyzed mainly by looking closely at the participants’ turn taking and conversational roles. The results show that children’s beliefs of bilingualism are that you should use one language when speaking to one person; that languages are learnt through using them; and that the advantage of knowing more…
Where communication flows, languages swim freely : developing fieldwork methods for investigating preschool children's language beliefs
2015
In this paper I reflect on methodological aspects to take into consideration when developing methods for investigating three- to five-year-old children’s beliefs about language, language use and bilingualism. I analyze participant observations and notes taken in the field. The study focuses on bilingual Finnish-Swedish children in Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. At one of the schools, most of the children and I did not share a common language, so the interaction between us heightened both the children’s language awareness and that of my own. This drew my attention to communicative aspects of embodiment and multimodality and to the distribution of responsibility for interaction. I dete…