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Abstract
This paper describes how early childhood teachers' incorporation of pauses raises the quality of talk-in-interaction during play-based mathematics activities. Responses of both children and teachers are shown to be more contingent and expansive when conversations include protracted pauses than during interactions in which pauses are largely absent. Pauses provided children with opportunities to initiate topics and facilitated more equitable access to discourse moves for children. By pausing before responding to a child's conversational gambit, teachers gained opportunities to assess children's demonstrated numeracy-related skills and understanding, and could thus provide authentic, individualised scaffolding. Pauses were not necessarily silent: a pause in an interaction with one child could be used strategically to model the learning interaction with a second child before returning to the first child in order to continue the discourse sequence.
Acknowledgements
E4Kids is led by Professor Collette Tayler at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, in partnership with Queensland University of Technology. We sincerely thank the ECEC services, directors, teachers/staff, children and their families for their ongoing participation in this study.
Funding
This research was funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award Industry Scholarship as part of E4Kids, a longitudinal study investigating the effectiveness of early learning experiences in early childhood settings in Australia. E4Kids is funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects Scheme [grant number LP0990200], the Victorian Government Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and the Queensland Government Department of Education and Training.