Digital högläsning för flerspråkande i förskolan

The study investigates how the Polyglutt digital book application can support multilingual development in children in Swedish kindergartens. It seeks to evaluate the app’s design and functionality, as well as how educators use it in practice. The study aims to shed light on the opportunities and challenges the app represents in terms of promoting multilingualism in everyday kindergarten routines. The research questions are:

1. What conditions for multilingualism are present in the digital reading resource?
2. How do educators express that they use the digital resource in reading activities in kindergarten?

The results show that the Polyglutt app has great potential to support multilingual children through visual and auditory interaction in different languages. However, the educators involved in the study expressed uncertainty about how to best exploit this potential. The use of the app was most often limited to Swedish, with few instances of active use of its multilingual features. The educators valued the possibility of automatic narration but reported challenges in maintaining the children’s attention. The study concludes that increased pedagogical effort is required to fully utilise the app’s multilingual potential in practice.

The study used semi-structured interviews with 17 educators from nine Swedish kindergartens to collect data on their use of the digital book application Polyglutt. The app’s design and functionality were analysed using a social semiotic perspective on multimodality, which examines the interaction between different modalities such as text, image and sound. In addition, the data were analysed through a qualitative content analysis to identify patterns and themes in educators’ descriptions of how they support multilingual development in kindergarten.

Nilsen, M., Petersen, P., & Danielsson, K. (2023). Digital högläsning för flerspråkande i förskolan. Utbildning & Lärande, 17(4).