Dr Polly Björk-Willén on Children's language in preschools
Date / Time: 6 December 2016
Dr. Polly Björk-Willén is a Senior Lecturer and Reader in Educational Practice at the Department of Social and Welfare Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She obtained her Ph.D. at the interdisciplinary Department of Child Studies at Linköping University in 2006. The thesis concerns preschoolers’ language use and social interaction in a multilingual preschool. Her research interest is in interactional studies in preschool, investigating bilingual children’s language use, ethnicity, children’s computer use, as well as language policy in families and preschool, and most recently she is involved in research about cultural heritage, tradition and religion in Swedish preschool practices.
Presentation: Children’s language use and play in Swedish preschools
Dr. Polly Björk-Willén will present on information drawn from video-studies of children’s everyday interaction and talk in Swedish preschools. The analytical framework of the target data is influenced by ethnomethodological work that focuses on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities (Garfinkel, 1967). Play, and especially pretend play, at preschool is a breeding ground for children’s everyday (peer) socialization and language learning. Initially, Polly will aim to talk about how second language learners use a range of communicative resources to achieve intersubjectivity (Heritage, 1984, 1987) in Swedish as a lingua franca. She will also show how shadowing and language crossing can be used as interactional tools to accomplish participation in bilingual peer play (Björk-Willén, 2007).
Date: 6 December 2016
Time: 10.00-11.00am
Venue: Meeting Rooms A & B (TC 2.27), Te Kura Toi Tangata Faculty of Education, University of Waikato, Hillcrest Rd, Hamilton.
RSVP: http://bit.ly/2fYIPiD