Language Input and Preschoolers’ Language Development: Naturalistic Observation of Teacher Talk Addressing Monolinguals and Multilinguals

• In Event: Supporting Multilingual Language Development at Preschool: Evaluating the Influence of Language Input from Teachers

Abstract

In our increasingly diverse society, young children are likely to speak different first languages which might not be the majority language of society. For some children, preschool is one of the first and few environments where they experience the majority language. This poses great challenges to preschool teachers – how should they communicate with these children and support them in learning the majority language for a successful school entry (Hutchinson, 2018)? Although various linguistic features of caregiver speech (e.g., number of word types and use of decontextualised talk; Rowe, 2012) were found to predict first language development, less is known about how different linguistic features contribute to second/additional language development. The present study aimed to investigate how preschool teachers communicate with monolingual English preschoolers and preschoolers learning English as an additional language (EAL) in a UK setting in an attempt to identify strategies that preschool teachers can adopt to support EAL children’s language development.

We video-recorded a preschool classroom for 1 hour per week for 4.5 months and built a corpus of preschool teacher talk to examine whether and how preschool teachers (n = 7) tailor their speech to children (age = 4 years) of different language proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds (13 monolingual English; 10 EAL). The corpus was analysed for various quantity and quality measures using CLAN and Coh-Metrix. The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Preschool 2 (CELF-P2) was administered twice, towards the beginning and end of the 4.5 months, to assess the children’s language proficiency.

We first focused on the first four recording sessions to characterise the general linguistic environment of the classroom. We found that the teachers were sensitive to the preschoolers’ language ability and linguistic background and adapted the quality, but not quantity, of their language use accordingly. The teachers used more diverse vocabulary and more complex syntax, including longer utterances, more diverse syntactic structures, and more conjunctions with the monolingual children and children who were more proficient in English.

We then focused on the first two and final two recording sessions and the CELF-P2 scores for a longitudinal analysis. Within 4.5 months, we observed substantial improvement in the EAL children. We also found that, across time, the teachers increased the lexical diversity and syntactic complexity in their speech towards all the children. In addition, the teachers’ increasing use of demonstratives was associated with the EAL children’s language development, whereas their decreasing use of demonstratives was associated with the monolingual children’s language development. Moreover, teachers adapted their grammar to the EAL children’s language proficiency and used more modifiers before nouns, coordinators, and determiners with those whose language skills had developed more. Further, the teachers’ use of coordinators has been identified as a predictor of the EAL children’s language development.

Our findings suggest that preschool teachers’ language input to EAL children can scaffold and therefore support the children’s language development. Building on Rowe and Zuckerman’s (2016) age-appropriate scaffolding framework, our findings suggest that ability-appropriate scaffolding could be beneficial for early second language acquisition.

Authors

• Kin Chung Jacky Chan, Lancaster University
  Presenting Author

• Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marije Michel, University of Groningen
  Non-Presenting Author