- This chapter examines how the entrance hall to a linguistically diverse Swedish preschool was used as a setting for talk and interaction between parents and teachers.
- The entrance hall became an interactional environment where families switched between their own language norms and the school-specific norms.
- For example, the parents would speak their first language when addressing their children, and speak Swedish when speaking to the teacher.
- The entrance hall was seen as a ‘transit zone’ that could scaffold children’s transition between the language used in the home, and the language used in school.
- The school encouraged the use of various languages to support language switching and participation.
- The author argues that schools encouraging the use of families’ first languages support the acquisition of the mother tongue for the child, and also supports their need to communicate in the dominant language of the setting.
Publication
Björk-Willén, P. (2017). The preschool entrance hall: A bilingual transit zone for preschoolers. In A. Bateman & A. Church (Eds.), Children’s knowledge-in-interactions: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 169-187). Springer.