språklesning

Språklesning is a term used in Nordic language contexts to denote the ability to read and understand written language, with particular attention to how reading skills develop in multilingual individuals. It combines aspects of decoding, vocabulary, and text comprehension across one or more languages. In education, språklesning describes instructional approaches that aim to promote fluent reading by leveraging phonological awareness and orthographic patterns from learners’ home languages alongside the target language.

The concept covers cognitive processes such as phonological decoding, grapheme–phoneme mapping, lexical access, syntactic parsing, and semantic integration. Proficiency in språklesning can depend on prior language experience, exposure to reading materials, and instructional quality. In multilingual settings, researchers examine cross-language transfer, where decoding strategies or vocabulary knowledge in one language support reading in another.

Assessment and pedagogy: Methods include reading fluency tests, decoding tasks, vocabulary and comprehension measures, and meta-linguistic awareness tasks. Instruction may integrate phonics, morphology, vocabulary development, and reading strategies tailored to multilingual learners. Some frameworks emphasize translanguaging and cross-linguistic support.

Terminology and usage: Språklesning is not universally standardized; in some contexts it overlapps with concepts such as multilingual literacy or reading in second language. The term may appear in policy documents, teacher education, and applied linguistics without a single accepted definition.

See also: multilingual literacy, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, cross-language transfer, translanguaging.