Browsing by Author "Sundström, Xenia"

The aim of the study is to find out how children use language in everyday situations in pre-school and how the educators work with language in daily activities. Language is used on daily basis in various situations and is therefore one of the most important things to work with in kindergarten and pre-school. Because of this there is a large responsibility on the educators to offer children opportunities to develop their language. The theoretical part of the study deals with language and communication, children’s language development, theories about language development, instructions provided by pre-school education curriculum and finally, some previous research done in the area. The study is qualitative and the material was gathered through observations and interviews. A child group of 26 pre-school children were observed for six days and three educators working in the group were interviewed. The interviews with the educators were made after the observations. The interviews were recorded and transcribed for easier analysis. The material was analysed by qualitative content analysis. The observations revealed that children’s conversations are both play and fantasy related as well as reality based. Their conversations also contained dialect and influences from the English language. Approximately one third of the children were bilingual and their language background appeared in some situations. The interviews revealed that all three educators were aware of the importance of working in a purposeful way with language development in daily activities. Language stimulation has to be planned in a way that supports all children, because different needs exist for each individual child. All three informants are aware of the importance of being a linguistic model for the children.