Instructional strategies and linguistic features of kindergarten teachers’ shared book reading: The case of Singapore

Abstract

Teachers’ language practice during shared book reading may significantly affect the rate and outcome of early language proficiency. The current study has focused on 37 kindergarten teachers and 440 4- to 5-year-old kindergartners during their shared book reading sessions in Singapore, exploring teachers’ variation in instructional strategies and linguistic features, and its relations with children’s language development and teacher’s background. Results demonstrated that teacher’s language strategies and linguistic features varied considerably. Instructional strategies with a medium level of cognitive load were found to be positively related to children’s growth in receptive vocabulary and word reading skills. Teacher’s lexical sophistication was found to be positively associated with children’s vocabulary size. Years of teaching experience was revealed to predict teacher’s variation in medium-level instructions.

Vocabulary Development in Early Language Education

“…The large individual difference in language proficiency suggests that bilingual preschoolers should not be taken as a homogeneous group, even when they come from the same ethnic background and have similar social economic statuses. When designing the curriculum, teachers should keep these individual differences in mind and match the strategies they are going to use with children's language proficiency (e.g., questions with different cognitive loads; Sun et al 2020b).…”

“…In the bilingual setting, the employment of dual language books (Sneddon 2008) and the presence of books in children's L1 in the classroom (Ernst-Slavit and Mulhern 2003) have been found to be effective language-teaching strategies in particular. The target words are embedded in the story and the contextualization enables children to better understand the word meaning (Sun et al 2020b). Teachers are suggested to actively engage children in defining, discussing, analyzing, repeating, and spelling new words, helping children connect new concepts with what they have learned, and reinforcing the word meaning with various approaches (Silverman 2007).…”

Mind Mapping during Interactive Book Reading in Early Childhood Classrooms: Does It Support Young Children’s Language Competence?

“…However, it must be noted that in this meta-analysis only the 2-to 3-year-olds benefitted from interactive reading practices with their parents, whereas the effect on the level of expressive vocabulary was much smaller for the 4-to 5-year-olds. Other studies have looked more specifically into the role of early childhood classroom teachers instead of parents, and they have generally found positive relations between interactive book reading and vocabulary (for example, Barnes & Dickinson, 2017;Sun et al, 2020;Wasik & Bond, 2001), even longitudinally (Dickinson & Porche, 2011;Zucker et al, 2012). Especially engaging children in interactive book discussions after reading the book (instead of before or during) proved to be effective (Gonzalez et al, 2014).…”

“…One possible explanation might be that young children in general show large individual differences in their language development (see for example, Fenson et al, 1994;Hart & Risley, 1995). Besides, relatively large differences in language learning opportunities between early childhood classrooms are reported as well (Barnes & Dickinson, 2017;Pelatti et al, 2014;Sun et al, 2020). These differences between classrooms can, for example, be found in the language that teachers use during their interactions with children.…”

“…These differences between classrooms can, for example, be found in the language that teachers use during their interactions with children. A study on teacher talk in interactive book reading sessions with young children showed that especially medium-level comments, such as word elaboration, story recall, and textto-world connection promoted children's language and vocabulary development, whereas higher-level comments, such as inferencing and predicting, were less effective as they might have been too challenging (Sun et al, 2020). Perhaps the experimental conditions in our study (focused attention and mind map) were too challenging for at least some of the children in our sample.…”