Browsing by Author "Jaurimaa, Anni"

Objectives. The purpose of the study was to clarify what kind of methods the professionals who work with pre-schoolers use to identify the multilingual children's specific language impairment and how their support is arranged with pedagogic methods, structural methods and other methods that support wellbeing. When the number of multilingual children in preschool education rises continuously, the professionals have found identification of the special language impairment challenging. At the same time, there is considerable pressure to notice the need for support as early as possible in order to secure the child's development. There are no earlier studies about identification and arranging of support for multilingual children with special language impairment. Methods. The research material was collected in December 2018 with semi-structured theme interviews. Interviewees were four professionals (a teacher of early childhood education, a special needs teacher of early childhood education, a special needs teacher and a logopaedist) who work among preschool education and at elementary schools. All of them have experience of working with multilingual children with special language impairment. The material was classified and analyzed by methods of content analysis to four classes: an observation and evaluation, the pedagogic methods, the structural methods and other methods that support wellbeing. Results and conclusions. The interviewees brought up that observing the child's interaction is especially important when identifying the multilingual children's special language impairment. The special language impairment was identified from the child's defective contact to the adults and the other children, the small vocabulary despite of the abundant input and the challenges in the language development connected to the comorbidities. The observations of parents of the child were regarded as extremely significant. In the results the arranging of the support using pedagogic methods and other methods supporting wellbeing were emphasised. From pedagogic methods visually supporting communication and working in small groups were regarded as more significant from the point of view of the supporting the child's language development. From methods supporting wellbeing the family and the logopaedics were regarded to have primary importance. Significance of teachers who teach Finnish as a second language rose forth from the material regarding the structural methods.