‘I'm rewriting the law’:When children bring literacy into nursery school

Based on an analysis of three literacy events in nursery schools, this article focuses on how literacy forms part of children's social practices and co-creates the language environment in the nursery and how place, affect and materiality play a key role in children's multimodal and embodied meaning-making around literacy. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two nursery schools, in which we followed different children through their days in order to explore how they used language in different contexts, what characterised their language practices and what appeared to encourage and constrain their desire to express themselves. It shows how the written word means much more to children than knowledge about the structure of books and identification of letters and how children draw on their own experience and include the place and the available materials in their joint meaning-making processes. Against this background, we argue for the need for a reconceptualisation of what literacy is and can be in a nursery school context and for a discussion of the implications of this for teaching literacy.Based on an analysis of three literacy events in nursery schools, this article focuses on how literacy forms part of children's social practices and co-creates the language environment in the nursery and how place, affect and materiality play a key role in children's multimodal and embodied meaning-making around literacy. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two nursery schools, in which we followed different children through their days in order to explore how they used language in different contexts, what characterised their language practices and what appeared to encourage and constrain their desire to express themselves. It shows how the written word means much more to children than knowledge about the structure of books and identification of letters and how children draw on their own experience and include the place and the available materials in their joint meaning-making processes. Against this background, we argue for the need for a reconceptualisation of what literacy is and can be in a nursery school context and for a discussion of the implications of this for teaching literac

To år bagud:En kritisk analyse og diskussion af sprogforståelsen i forsknings- og udviklingsprogrammet ”Fremtidens Dagtilbud”

Med udgangspunkt i den øgede opmærksomhed på børns sproglige udvikling i daginstitutioner i de nordiske lande sætter denne artikel fokus på sprogforståelsen i et omfattende dansk forsknings- og udviklingsprojekt ”Fremtidens Dagtilbud”. Artiklen trækker på et policyetnografisk perspektiv og belyser og diskuterer centrale aspekter i projektets forståelse af børns sprog og sproglige udvikling, herunder projektets identificering af sproglige problemer og nødvendige indsatser. Det konkluderes, at projektets sprogforståelse trækker på en særlig læseorienteret faglig tradition. Denne tradition udgrænser tendentielt sociokulturelle og interaktionelle teoretiske orienteringer inden for sprogvidenskaben, der kunne inddrages til at støtte arbejdet med børns sproglige udvikling i daginstitutioner