Föreläsningar och seminarier Gästseminarium: Olga Anatoli Smith

Olga Anatoli Smith
Linköpings Universitet

In this talk, I will discuss children’s participation in and opportunities for bilingual learning in the setting of a Swedish–English preschool. The presentation will be based on my recently completed doctoral thesis (Anatoli, 2025) and current projects. Theoretically, I draw on the co-operative action approach and use multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin, 2018). The data (approx. 80 hours of video-recordings) were collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a bilingual preschool in Sweden. The guiding research questions in my research are how children’s participation and influence manifest in a bilingual preschool, and how teachers and children collaboratively accomplish bilingual education across a broad range of institutional settings. 

With excerpts from my data, I will illustrate how opportunities for bilingual teaching and learning are distributed throughout mundane, care-oriented encounters. Specifically, I will show 

1. how children issued informings (Gardner and Mushin, 2017) to initiate a conversation with teachers and, by doing so, created situations in which they could practice their bilingual interactional skills;
2. how children and teachers collaboratively engaged in impromptu vocabulary work (Stoewer and Musk, 2019) in multiparty interactions; and
3. how children’s enskilment (Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018) in practical facilitated bilingual learning. With the focus on teachers’ and children’s practices in situ, I will highlight how children and teachers use multimodal semiotic resources in dialogical (Linell, 2021), mutually transformative interactions, and how these interactions create opportunities for children’s language learning.

Keywords: bilingualism, multimodal conversation analysis, co-operative action, early childhood education, informing, transitional spaces, enskilment

Anatoli, O., 2025. Being and Becoming a Bilingual Preschooler : A Co-Operative Action Approach to Bilingual Early Childhood Education and Care. Linköping University Electronic Press.

Gardner, R., Mushin, I., 2017. Epistemic Trajectories in the Classroom: How Children Respond in Informing Sequences, in: Bateman, A., Church, A. (Eds.), Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Springer Singapore, Singapore, pp. 13–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_2

Goodwin, C., 2018. Why Multimodality? Why Co-Operative Action? (transcribed by J. Philipsen). Social Interaction