Browsing by Author "Arponen, Lina"

The objective of this thesis is to highlight opportunities or disadvantages for simultaneous bilingual children ́s language learning in early childhood education and discuss how educators should work to develop the simultaneous bilingual child ́s language in a proper way. I base my study on the following research questions: 1. Which opportunities can a bilingual child have considering language learning? 2. Which disadvantages can bilingual children have considering language learning? 3. How can bilingualism interfere with the learning when considered children with previous language impairment? I have chosen to research simultaneous bilingualism and by doing that, answering my research questions as it is a constantly occurring subject in bilingual Finland and by being conscious about bilingual learning educators can work consciously with developing children ́s language usage in Early childhood education. The thesis is written with the research method qualitative text analysis with the research approach grounded theory. The data analysed in the thesis are five articles discussing simultaneous bilingualism. The result of the thesis notes that bilingualism does not affect children ́s language learning as long as the child gets proper support in the language learning from the start. The educator has to be aware of the disadvantages of bilingualism to be able to properly support simultaneous bilingual children in their language learning. By giving the children proper support from the beginning of the bilingual language learning process, disadvantages can be prevented all together. The simultaneous bilingual child should get linguistic support from the educator by, for example, discussion or language exercises to develop both languages equally.