Infant Educators’ Use of Pedagogical Questioning: Relationships With the Context of Interaction and Educators’ Qualifications

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted with infants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as confirm (yes/no), specify (what, who, where, when) or explain (why, how) on the basis that these question types present infants with different opportunities to use their developing communication skills to provide information to others. We sought to determine associations between question use, activity context and educators’ qualification levels. Explain questions were used very rarely, while confirm and specify questions were more frequent, comprising 7.60% and 8.32% respectively of the messages expressed by educators to infants. A 2 (activity context) × 2 (qualification level) mixed factorial MANOVA, supplemented with post-hoc qualitative analyses, demonstrated that, in specific activity contexts, degree qualified early childhood teachers used pedagogical questioning in ways which differed from their less-qualified counterparts. Practice or policy: The findings provide much needed data on how educator questioning is used with children under two, how questioning affords context-specific language learning opportunities for infants in ECEC centres, and how educator qualifications may be implicated in these opportunities.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge and thank the educators and infants who participated in this study, and we appreciate the fine work of the research assistants who made the study possible.

Notes

¹ A comparison using t tests of the ages and qualification levels of those who met the selection criteria and those who were excluded showed no significant differences (age: t = 0.25, p = .80; qualification: t = 0.43, p = .43).