Barns möten med skriftspråket : analys med utgångspunkt i Bruners teorier

Sammanfattning: Researchers from many disciplines are engaged in searching for knowledge about what happens when an individual is becorning literate. Each researcher contributes with his or her little piece to this important process of building knowledge about one of the most complex activities a human being can be involved in. This thesis should be seen as another contribution to the huge research field dealing with literacy development.The thesis describes a qualitative case study where some theories are used as tools in order to deepen the analysis of the data.The thesis has two aims. The first is to investigate children's conceptions of the written language, by letting 6-7 year olds talk about it, and perform some cognitive tasks, related to reading and writing. Thirty-one children were studied in pre-school and then fol1owed up after a year in school. What the children said and what strategies they used in performing the tasks in pre-school exposed their different conceptions ofwritten language.The data from the pre-school study were categorised and demonstrated a great variation among children as to how they think about the written language. In the school study there was a focus on those II children who in pre-school had not yet got agrasp ofthe symbolic code system.The second aim of this thesis is to choose some theories formulated by the American psychologist Jerome Bruner and use them as tools in analysing the data from the child study. The theories are, for example, the "Representation theory" and theories about concept formation.