Sustainable language practices in Norwegian kindergartens

By combining sustainability understandings with language acquisition, this research area (RA) aims to develop and adapt corpus linguistics to Norwegian and Sámi kindergarten needs for knowledge on pragmatics and vocabulary. To build a linguistic corpus, we will work closely with kindergartens and kindergarten departments to develop methodologies for collecting natural data on language use, also in minority language settings. Collaborating with pedagogs and researchers from other fields provides opportunities to apply holistic traditions to kindergarten research and develop pedagogical models for sustainable language acquistion. Participatory design for data collection requires close collaboration with kindergartens to identify the linguistic situations that kindergartens find useful to map.

We will use gopro-cameras for data collection, together with collecting other material such as scribbling and drawings to study how children learn and use their languages, with focus on North Sámi. The material will be transcribed and adjusted to use in the kindergarten it was filmed, other kindergartens with similar profile and in ECE education and research. Data management will be closely monitored by project owners and secured with ethical guidelines of the UiT Norges arktiske universitet.

Locations for fieldwork will, for the first phase of our project, be in the counties of Finnmark, Troms and Hordaland. Our research in Troms and Finnmark will be in towns or cities with Sámi kindergartens or kindergartens with Sámi departments. It would be interesting for the project to compare communities of different sizes.

Collaboration with other research area of KINDknowprovides opportunities to apply Scandinavian holistic kindergarten traditions to kindergarten research. Participatory design for data collection requires close collaboration with kindergartens to identify the linguistic situations that kindergartens find useful to map.

This RA will undertake the following sets of tasks:

1. create national, shared corpus through collection, transcription and coding of linguistic data
2. develop a user friendly interface of the corpus in collaboration with kindergartens and researchers in different fields 
3. disseminate the new possibilities of exploring child language to students, researchers and kindergarten teacher