Let´s play! : Play Events and Preschool Staffs Strategies and to Support Concept Development in Swedish preschools

• The purpose of this paper is to make visible which events that may occur in literacy-related play activities and how the preschool staff support concept development in these play activities. The theoretical approach is based on Barton’s (2007) ecological perspective of emergent literacy and Bronfenbrenner’s (1999) bioecological theory of human development to explore emergent literacy learning and development in a social context that occurs everywhere, not within a particular time throughout the day in preschool. The child ́s learning and developmental process is related to a person’s internal thinking process and external learning environment (Vygotsky, 1962) in which the language mediates meaning-making and learning in social practices. The study is based on a qualitative approach where six preschool units participated distributed across three different cities in Sweden. Video observations was conducted, from fall 2010 to spring 2011. For the purpose of this study 39 two-minute video sequences were selected and analyzed. The analysis are based on a deductive and inductive approach in order to find how do preschool staff support children’s concept development in literacy-related play activities and the characteristic features of these literacy-related events and concepts. Six thematic categories of events were discerned in the analysis of iteracy-related play activities. However the result in this study shows that the events, artifacts and preschool staff ́s timing in communication as well as interaction have major role to support children ́s concept development. The results of this study contribute to reflections and discussions regarding preschool staff’s approaches and didactic strategies to support verbal language, communication, reading and writing in relation to the Swedish preschool curriculum (Ministry of Education and Science, Lpfö 98/2011). This study put the lens on preschool staff ́s efforts in language learning and children’s opportunity for learning and development of emergent literacy processes in Swedish preschools.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Didactics

didaktik

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