Preschoolers’ Talk About Languages in Classrooms Where Teachers Don’t Talk About Languages

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Listening to What Children Say: Narratives in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Drawing on work in Language Awareness and the Vygotskian idea that learning takes place first in interaction with others, mediated by language, this paper seeks to understand the kinds of peer talk about language that Head Start students engage in, who is most likely to participate, and what students can tell a researcher about the languages their classmates speak. The students in the study were from two Head Starts classrooms with 50%+ multilingual children, but in which teachers avoided talk about language. Findings indicate that close relationships with speakers of other L1’s were important for language talk and that student age also mattered, while being bilingual or monolingual was less important.

Author

• Katie Bernstein, University of California - Berkeley