Children’s socialisation into literate practices through engaging in translation activities in immersion preschool

Abstract

In this empirical study, we analyse how five-year-old children are socialised into particular interpretive practices indicative of a literate mind. The data come from translation activities where children with their teacher listen to and then talk about how to understand the lyrics to a popular children’s song. The setting is a Finnish–Swedish immersion programme, where Finnish-speaking children are immersed in Swedish. Three such activities were audio recorded. These are analysed according to the principles of Interaction Analysis, that is, how participants sequentially respond to each other’s communicative actions. Theoretically, the study is informed by a sociocultural perspective, highlighting how intramental function, such as reasoning and problem-solving, are contingent on intermental communication. How participating children are introduced to literate distinctions and concepts of interpreting text is therefore premised to be critical to their emerging literate interpretive skills. The results highlight how the children are constantly challenged and supported by the teacher in a zone of proximal development where their abilities to interpret the lyrics discussed are stretched.