Stance and footing in multilingual play: Rescaling practices and heritage language use in a Swedish Preschool

The study analyses how young immigrant children engage with other children in multilingual play activities, and investigates the role the multilingual children’s mother tongue plays in kindergarten (linguistic traits, social values and pragmatics). In addition, the study investigated the process of translanguaging. The researchers’ working hypothesis was that such conscious language practices were linked to and contributed to sociocultural values and tensions between languages at a macro level.

The results indicated that the children’s multilingualism and linguistic heritage influenced how they played. This occurred through so-called ‘linguistic incongruity’, which means that the children exaggerated repetitions, linguistic transformations, various emotional key resources (serious or playful) and metalinguistic points of view. The researchers emphasise the importance of young immigrant children’s co-determination opportunities when new pedagogical routines and activities are being designed.

The data collection was video ethnographic and was carried out in a Swedish kindergarten. 25 hours of video recordings of activities in kindergarten were collected over a four-month period. The video observations focused on the kindergarten children and followed their daily activities. The kindergarten in question had children from many different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

Cekaite, A. & Evaldsson, A.-C. (2019). «Stance and footing in multilingual play: Rescaling practices and heritage language use in a Swedish Preschool». Journal of Pragmatics, 144:127-140.