Describing oral language opportunities and environments in head start and other preschool classrooms

Abstract

This article describes the nature of children's oral language experiences in Head Start and in other preschools serving low-income children, and relates those experiences to broader features of the classrooms' programs. The data are drawn from multiple sources, including general demographic information, teacher interviews, and audiotapes of teachers' and children's spontaneous interaction that occurred throughout one morning in 61 individual classrooms. Drawing on a sociocognitive model of literacy development, we hypothesize that particular classroom circumstances (e.g. smallgroup size), pedagogical orientations (e.g. desire to foster early literacy development), and activity settings (e.g. small-group activities) will maximally facilitate the types of talk known to be predictive of later language and literacy development (e.g. pretending, cognitively challenging interactions). As hypothesized, correlational analyses revealed relationships between classroom circumstances and interactions, between pedagogical orientations and interactions, and between activity settings and interactions; the more educated teachers, the teachers whose pedagogical orientations strongly supported literacy or social development, and the teachers who reported spending more time in small group activities engaged in more cognitively challenging conversations with children. Implications of these findings are discussed and related to both practice and policy.