The Frequency of Teachers’ Linguistic Strategies Across Classroom Contexts and Teachers in Preschool Settings During the Summer

Guided by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, which posits that children learn through their interactions with others, this study examined how frequently teachers used linguistic strategies designed to promote rich teacher-child conversations in preschool classrooms during the summer months. The participants were six teachers from three preschool centers in a Northeastern state of the United States. These centers served children (ages 3-5) from low- and middle-income backgrounds. Teacher-child conversations were video-recorded in each of the three classroom contexts: mealtimes, free play, and group time, on three different days. An interval-based coding system was adopted to code the frequency of eight linguistic strategies. Findings indicated that teachers used most of the linguistic strategies infrequently, particularly those designed to foster rich teacher-child conversations, such as asking wh-questions and using language modeling strategies (e.g., “expand” and “extend”). Notably, the linguistic strategies were used at comparable frequencies across classroom contexts, whereas their frequencies varied across teachers. These findings have important implications for professional development aimed at enhancing teachers' use of language-promoting strategies.