Child Care and Early Education Research Connections

Skip to main content

Prosodic variation and rich linguistic environments in a preschool setting

Description:

Children require rich linguistic environments (RLEs) to support their development in early education settings (Bratsch-Hines et al., 2019; Justice etal., 2018). RLEs are defined by high-quality language, teacher tone (prosodic/fundamental frequency-f0 variation), and interactions between the teacher and children (increased turn-taking, contingent responses, open-ended questions) (Jones & Rowland, 2017). As we support enhancing the quality of interactions, we lack a quantifiable way to assess teacher language to provide clearer feedback. Our aims are (1) to quantify the measures used to assess the quality of teacher language, (2) to examine teacher prosodic variation across a typical day, and (3) to explore any connections between teacher (quality) language and prosody. Audio data were recorded from preschool classroom teachers (teachers of children aged 3 to 4-years-old; n = 5 to date). Each site had two days of recording, 4 to 8 hours per day. Teachers completed a background survey and reported a log of daily activities. The recordings are transcribed to analyze language and speech: measures of f0 variation, types of open-ended questions, word usage diversity, number of turns taken between the teachers-students, and presence of contingent responses. Data from this study help us to understand RLEs and provide a coding system to systematically capture teacher language in a more nuanced manner. (author abstract)

Resource Type:
Reports & Papers
Country:
United States

- You May Also Like

These resources share similarities with the current selection.

Linguistic environment of preschool classrooms: What dimensions support children's language growth?

Reports & Papers

Welcoming families: A parent literacy project in a linguistically rich, high-poverty school

Other

Variations in classroom language environments of preschool children who are low income and linguistically diverse

Reports & Papers
Release: 'v1.77.0' | Built: 2024-05-14 14:23:10 EDT