Multilingual educational teaching strategy in a multi-ethnic preschool

Abstract

The revised Swedish national curriculum stresses that preschools should, on the one hand, place emphasis on stimulating children’s language development in Swedish, while on the other hand help children with a mother tongue other than Swedish develop their mother tongue. The aim of this study is to analyse preschool teachers’ strategies to develop multilingualism in daily life in preschools. The analysis was conducted by analysing their reflections on multilingualism and how their beliefs are transformed into educational strategies and parental cooperation. The results reveal two main strategies: joint language expression and reflection with children and parental cooperation in developing children’s multilingualism. The analysis revealed patterns of strategies for activities that we argue form multilingual educational strategies. These various strategies tend to occur in the daily work of the preschool staff.