Språkkartlegging av flerspråklige barn – ekskludering i praksis?

The study investigates the relationship between inclusion and the language mapping of multilingual children in kindergarten. The thesis statement is about whether, and how, the language mapping practice can contribute to the inclusion or exclusion of the multilingual children. The purpose is to investigate and discuss inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in language mapping as a social practice. The researcher studies what takes place in the meeting between the children and the mappers, and the mapper’s reflections on this.

The findings show that an instrumental and standardised use of mapping tools renders the children passive and also implies an institutionalisation of a deficiency perspective. The researcher claims that the mapping practice contributes in recreating and reinforcing the prevailing representations of the relationship between the majority and minorities, in accordance with terms such as ‘us’ and ‘the others’.

The data material consists of observations of mapping situations involving a total of five children, aged five to six years old, in five Norwegian municipal kindergartens. A selection criterion was that the kindergartens had experience of working with multilingual children and mapping. The researcher has observed how the children sat in the situation, how active they were before and during the mapping, and how they responded to what happened during the mapping.

Individual interviews have also been conducted with the five kindergarten teachers who carried out the mapping in order to take a closer look at their opinions, attitudes and experiences. The observations and interviews spanned a period of five months.

Vik, N. E. (2018). «Språkkartlegging av flerspråklige barn – ekskludering i praksis?». Barn, 36(2):11-28.