In this chapter, we review some of the most commonly invoked educational challenges of working with children who are bilingual or multilingual and point to their moorings in a normative, strictly monolingual perspective – a monolingual bias. We then move on to present an alternative, and radically social, understanding of childhood multilingualism firmly based in the growing body of CA-oriented studies of bi- and multilingual interaction in early childhood education settings. Drawing on data from different educational contexts, we examine the manifold ways that participants make use of language alternation, showing how the availability of more than one language can be used productively, as a resource that supports learning. We round off the chapter by highlighting some implications for educators who work with multilingual children. Although the extracts provided in the text are taken from settings where both teacher and children share more than one language, the affordances we discuss will be of relevance to educators who do not have access to children’s first language.

This paper examines how unplanned vocabulary work arises out of students’ talk. Furthermore, we show how the teacher and students jointly contribute towards the ensuing teaching trajectories, whereby the vocabulary items are turned into ‘teachables’, i.e. interactionally emergent objects of explicit teaching. In doing so, we also explore what aspects of vocabulary knowledge are targeted.

This collection-based study uses conversation analysis to examine video recordings of fairly advanced heritage speakers of English from English mother tongue instruction classes in Sweden. The analyses reveal a variety of ways in which the teaching trajectories arise: the teacher’s substitution requests for a more appropriate word; a student’s naming and word-confirmation requests; the teacher’s or a student’s translation and meaning requests. A third of these requests were initiated by a student. The trajectories then developed collaboratively and were tailored to the local context to address issues of meaning, form and use. Establishing the meaning of a word frequently involved (and could combine) requesting/providing, e.g., definitions and translations. Form could be targeted by carefully enunciating topicalised lexis or writing it on the board, and vocabulary use was typically elaborated by contextualising words and sometimes by exploring collocations.

The thesis investigates teacher-student interaction in English mother tongue instruction (MTI), offered within mainstream education to English heritage language students in Sweden. In particular, it examines the type of language work that was in focus during the lessons and the ways teacher and students engaged in the language work in situ. The study is based on approximately thirty hours of video-recordings of three groups of students who attended the lessons with the same teacher, at two Swedish schools. The students in the groups ranged from age six to fifteen. Using an ethnomethodological conversation analytic framework, the thesis analyzes the situated ways that teacher and students co-constructed what aspects of language were topicalized and how this was accomplished.

The empirical studies shed new light on the dynamic connections between pedagogy and the emergent practices through which MTI is achieved. From the analysis, vocabulary emerged as a prominent feature of the lessons, where the teaching of form, meaning and use of lexical items variously grew out of both planned and unplanned activities. Hence, the empirical studies explore different aspects of vocabulary work. The studies also discuss the role of the local availability of both English and Swedish in shaping the types of practices that took place at the MT lessons.

Föreliggande avhandling undersöker samspel mellan lärare och elever i modersmålsundervisning i engelska. I synnerhet studeras det språkliga arbete som lyftes under lektionerna samt lärare och elevers situerade deltagande i detta arbete. Studien baseras på cirka trettio timmars videoinspelningar av tre grupper elever som deltog i undervisningen med samma lärare, vid två svenska skolor. Elevernas åldersspann var 6-15 år. Genom etnometodologisk samtalsanalys utforskar studien hur lärare och elever samkonstruerade vilka språkliga aspekter som aktualiserades i undervisningen samt hur detta åstadkoms.

De empiriska studierna belyser det dynamiska förhållandet mellan pedagogik och de situerade praktiker genom vilka modersmålsundervisningen åstadkoms. Det framgår i data att ett fokus på ordförråd var framträdande på lektionerna, där ordens form, betydelse och användning diskuterades under såväl planerade som oplanerade aktiviteter. Avhandlingens empiriska studier undersöker därför olika aspekter av arbetet med ordförråd. I studierna diskuteras också vilken roll den lokala tillgången till både engelska och svenska spelar i att forma olika typer av språkliga praktiker under lektionerna.

The present chapter investigates teacher-initiated translation requests as spontaneous vocabulary teaching during English mother tongue instruction in Sweden. The collection-based analysis draws on a corpus of 30 hours (11 weeks) of video-recordings of compulsory school-age students. The analysis shows how the teacher routinely draws on the local availability of two shared languages to accomplish a variety of actions: to check students’ comprehension of topicalised vocabulary; to engage the entire cohort; to perform medium repair; and to prompt student production of the target language. The findings may be of relevance for numerous types of bi- and multilingual settings, where language alternation serves to augment the teaching and learning of languages as well as other subject matter.