Support for Extended Discourse in Teacher Talk With Linguistically Diverse Preschoolers

Abstract

A study was conducted in a large Head Start organization that serves large numbers of Latino children in order to empirically describe the nature and quality of the classroom language learning environment. By observing 147 literacy-based lessons in 6 classrooms and surveying 167 teachers throughout the organization, we investigated the amount of teachers' use of extended discourse during literacy-based lessons, and when and how Spanish and/or English was used as the medium of communication. Research Findings: Only 22% of the 147 literacy-based lessons observed fostered extended discourse; the most commonly implemented lesson was characterized by a routine format of the teacher talking and the children listening. English was regarded as the language of instruction, whereas Spanish was used mostly to regulate behavior and emotions. By fitting multilevel models to the data, we found that teaching practice was relatively stable across the classrooms. Practice or Policy: More emphasis should be placed on professional training focused on supporting classroom language interactions that foster literacy development and on the use of language that best fosters and facilitates such extended discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of research assistants Armida Lizarraga and Emma Billard. Additionally, we thank the members of the HGSE Research Group on Language Diversity and Literacy Development, who provided comments on earlier drafts of this work. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of our colleague, Barbara A. Pan, whose dedication to this work made it all possible.

Notes

¹For these purposes, a major city is one that has more than 100,000 residents.

²The survey directions indicated that all questions were optional, and the questions about race/ethnicity and gender were purposefully grouped at the end of the survey under the explicit heading “Optional Questions.” Thus, response rates varied by question, with 13 respondents choosing not to answer questions of race/ethnicity and gender, though most of these same respondents did answer questions of language.

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