Preschool teachers' language use during dramatic play

Abstract

This study sought to describe preschool teachers' language use during dramatic play using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Findings indicate that the teachers' language use during dramatic play varied among teachers. Quantitative analyses revealed the variability of teachers' lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, talkativeness, and children-to-teacher utterance ratio. Qualitative analyses revealed four types of teacher play-instruction talk: play-embedded instructional talk, explicit instructional talk, play language coaching, and play administrational talk. In addition, the frequency of children's talk varied across the cases. The teachers who frequently used play-embedded instructional talk scored relatively high in the frequency of children's talk. Findings suggest that further investigation on the relationship between teachers' language use during dramatic play and children's language productivity can be useful for teacher education.