The language of educators and preschool children in different classroom situations El lenguaje de las educadoras y de los(as) niños(as) en distintas situaciones de aula

Abstract

This research explores certain properties, like the quantity, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity of the speech of teachers and children in different classrooms situations in early childhood education. Specifically, it analyzes whether those properties configure differentiated language patterns according to the ongoing classroom activity. Forty seven interactions between medium-low and low socioeconomic status children and their teachers in public educational institutions of the Province of Entre Ríos, Argentina, were analyzed. A multivariate analysis that gathers techniques of factor analysis and classification was carried out. The results configured three classes: composed mostly of story-reading situations, with long turns by the teacher and syntactic complexity in the children; composed of corner play situations, where both the teacher and the children displayed a greater volume of speech; and constituted mainly by round situations, with an overall lower speech volume than the other two classes. With the exception of lexical diversity, the linguistic properties considered contributed to explain the particular configurations of the interchanges in the story reading, corner play and round situations. The results are discussed in light of the literature and the educational implications.