Effects of pre-service teachers’ receptive vocabulary knowledge on their interactive read-alouds with elementary school students

Abstract

There are individual differences in the amount and type of vocabulary that adults produce to young children in the home environment before the children enter school. How many words a mother knows is a significant predictor of a child’s vocabulary. The current study addressed the question of whether there were individual differences in the amount and type of vocabulary that pre-service teachers produced in their first read-aloud lessons to first and second grade students. Specifically, would pre-service teachers with higher vocabulary scores differ from those with lower vocabulary scores in their choice of books to read and in the language they used to discuss the books? Results indicated that pre-service teachers with more advanced vocabulary scores chose books with more vocabulary diversity and sophistication. When they chose narrative texts, they also chose books that were more difficult in terms of their semantic cohesion. Both the receptive vocabulary of pre-service teachers and the language in the books that they chose had an effect on the “teacher talk” that they used in the lesson surrounding the book reading. Just as parents show individual differences in the richness of the language input provided to their children before they enter school, pre-service teachers own knowledge of language varies, and this influences the linguistic input that they provide to their students.