“Whow—when I was going to pretend drinking it tasted coke for real!” Second-language learners' out-of-frame talk in peer pretend play: A developmental study from preschool to first grade

Abstract

Much research has pointed to the importance of out-of-frame negotiations in peer pretend play for preschool children's social, cognitive and literacy development. However, few studies have investigated the longitudinal relations between out-of-frame talk in preschool and children's oral-language skills when entering school, or the pragmatic language competencies second-language learning children have to draw upon to be involved in this planning and negotiating phase of play. In this study, a group of children, who had Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second language, was followed for two years, from preschool to first grade, and videotaped in play with peers (N = 15 at age 4, and N = 23 at ages 5 and 6). In the first part of the analysis, relations between out-of-frame talk in preschool and vocabulary skills and story comprehension in first grade were investigated. The second part of the analysis focused on how children developed in regulating their peers through addressing and opposing others in out-of-frame negotiations. The main findings indicate that out-of-frame talk in the preschool years explained variance in oral-language skills in first grade, and that these second-language learners developed to increasingly address and oppose their peers over this two-year period.