Reported parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning: voicing agency in interview narratives

Abstract

This study investigates parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in tracing how the interviewed parents draw on this resource to enact and negotiate their agency vis-à-vis their children's educators. The analysis reveals that the parents use reported speech as a strategic discursive tool to variably claim their agency across time and space. While L2 emerges as the most prominent theme of the dialogues, the participants also display a sense of ownership of the meaning-making processes involved in their children's L1 development. Through constructions of concerted bilingual home-pre/school support, the parents thus propel their capacity to imagine their children's membership in the host and home language communities to the fore.

A Review of Trends in Scandinavian Early Childhood Education and Care Research from 2006 to 2021

“…However, our findings indicate that despite the same research institute being responsible for assessing quality from 2006 to 2012 and from 2015 to 2017, the variation persists. The findings of this study can be interpreted as a positive response to the call for better-quality research, as emphasised in the literature [18,19,25,26,35,43].…”

“…Recent systematic reviews focusing on Scandinavian ECEC have explored a variety of topics, such as the overall significance of ECEC [17][18][19], staff development and competence [20,21], parent partnerships in families with immigrant backgrounds [22,23], special education within the ECEC context [24], pedagogical staff competence in both ECEC and schools [25], early learning in ECEC settings [26][27][28], the impact of group size and caregivers on children's outcomes in Scandinavian ECEC [29], and the overall quality of ECEC provision [30,31]. Thus, several thematic reviews on Scandinavian ECEC research have been conducted, but there is a notable absence of a comprehensive overview mapping long-term trends in both thematic and methodological approaches.…”

Credible as Evidence? Multilayered Audience Reception of Narrative Arguments

“…A detailed description, as well as an extensive analysis of the data set, has been presented elsewhere (Bubikova-Moan 2017a, 2017b, 2019. It is nonetheless of special note here that the interview participants are primarily labour migrants to Norway and hence explicitly or implicitly implicated in the wider societal discourse on migration.…”