What Vocabulary do Swedish Nursery Children Master Orally in English as a Second Language? : A Study on Swedish nursery children’s oral vocabulary knowledge in English

Sammanfattning: This essay examines Swedish nursery children’s oral vocabulary knowledge in English. The aim is to investigate what they know and find the source to their knowledge. This essay will focus on the receptive and productive knowledge the children know based on the categories tested, how much children learn in their Zone of Proximal Development, how much they learn from context and how much does media and electronic devices influence their learning. The data of this essay were collected from interviews of 25 children and from questionnaires answered by their parents. The results of the study indicate that the children have more receptive knowledge of the English words tested. It also suggests that the productive knowledge they have is connected with the words that sound similar in Swedish and that children learn English from their surroundings such as siblings and parents, and from games on iPads and video clips from YouTube.