Purpose
From autumn 2013 to spring 2015, a municipal competence-development project was carried out to enable teachers in Swedish preschool class to gain new experience and strengthen their professional knowledge within the field of literacy. The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers' and children's meaning-making regarding literacy development in connection with an assessment activity.
Result
The informants chose at least two children for their assessment activity, and they unanimously express that the activity has increased their knowledge about the children's literacy and helped them to develop new knowledge about how to assess children's reading development. All the preschool class teachers were surprised to discover how far many of the children had come in their literacy development. Several of them describe that children they did not think could read have actually cracked the reading code. The children themselves were not necessarily aware that they had cracked the reading code until they took part in the activity and reflected on their reading ability together with the teacher. In this way, the activity not only results in new learning for the preschool class teachers, but also for the children, who, in interaction with an adult, create new meaning around their literacy development. Moreover, the task stimulates the children to read together with other children, for example, and in this way continue their development.
In the encounter between the project's subject focus and the practical tasks, the teachers are able to re-evaluate their former experiences and discover that preschool class children can read, how they read and how teachers can stimulate the children further in their literacy development. According to the author, the results indicate that competence development can result in new insights into children's literacy and thereby increase opportunities to stimulate children further in their development. The empirical material shows that the preschool class teachers' discovery that some children cracked the alphabetic code adds a new an important dimension to their pedagogical practice.
Design
The competence-development project included lectures on language awareness, decoding and reading fluency, reading comprehension and assessment of reading ability. Moreover, the project included tasks carried out by preschool class teachers with their preschool class children after each lecture. After each task, collegial conversations were carried out in work teams on experience from the task.
The competence development project was examined in different sub-studies. This article focuses on a task carried out by preschool class teachers following a lecture on decoding and reading fluency. The teachers had to assess the children's literacy development, particularly letter knowledge, grapheme-phoneme correspondence and decoding ability.
A total of seven preschool class teachers from three different school units were interviewed in groups or individually. The interviews focused on the informants' experience from the practical task of assessing the children's literacy development. The study is based on a socio-cultural perspective and pragmatism. In the analysis, the authors draw on the concepts of experience and meaning-making.
References
Alatalo, T. (2017). ”Kalle, du kan ju läsa!”: Förskoleklasslärare synliggör förskoleklasselevers skriftspråksutveckling. Nordic Journal of Literacy Research, 2017(3), 1-18.