Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024

Activity contexts are increasingly recognized as important for the variation observed in the type and quantity of speech heard by children. However, there is little data from children’s everyday experiences to properly study this role. We analyzed the quantity of target child-directed speech (TDS) and other-directed speech (ODS) according to children’s activity contexts. We used Daylong Audio Recordings of American English children aged 6–17 months old from the Bergelson Seedlings corpus. A higher quantity of ODS per minute was observed in Solitary playful and exploratory activity contexts, while a higher quantity of TDS per minute was observed in Social activity contexts in comparison to other activity contexts. However, the interindividual variation found needs to be further explored. These results highlight the link between the language environment and activity contexts, and their importance for understanding child language development.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings are challenging contexts for children to engage in conversations. According to previous studies, toddler participation is minimal. However, most studies have focused on vocal productions. This study investigates how gestures also enable children to participate in interactions. From video recordings of three types of activities (mealtime, playtime, booktime) in a French ECEC, we systematically categorised utterances as being vocal, gestural or multimodal. One third of the utterances was produced by children. In mealtime and playtime, most utterances contained a vocal production, while in booktime, most contained a gesture. Gestural utterances were only addressed to professionals. The qualitative analysis of two sequences further highlights how gestures enable the building of joint attention, the co-construction of dialogic exchanges and the engagement of some children as observers. Taking gestures into account sheds new light on children’s participation in interactions and dialogues in ECEC.

In early childhood education and care (ECEC), children do not participate in the same way and to the same extent in various kinds of interactions. One of the challenges for educators is to succeed in involving every child in the proposed activities, thereby enabling them to benefit from these experiences for language acquisition. The present exploratory study was conducted through video recordings of educator-child interactions in French ECEC contexts. The analysis focused on sequences where one or more children either withdrew or stayed in the background of the ongoing activities. The sequences were categorised according to the type of activity, the educators’ language strategies, and their outcomes in terms of the children’s participation. By focusing on the role and impact of language practices, our discussion re-examines the notion of involvement/engagement, its achievements in ECEC, and the effects of the educators’ moves on child involvement.

La formation des éducatrices·teurs est essentielle pour implémenter l’encouragement précoce du langage dans les environnements des structures d’accueil préscolaire. Afin de pouvoir ancrer les dispositifs de formation dans les pratiques, cette contribution vise à étudier les contextes institutionnels « ordinaires » et les pratiques interactionnelles qui s’y déroulent. A partir de données vidéo-ethnographiques, elle adopte une perspective interactionnelle en analyse du travail pour décrire la participation des interactants, et notamment des enfants, dans les moments d’arrivées et de départs. Une focale sur les formes d’adressages et les ressources sémiotiques permet d’étudier le langage en tant que processus collectif et distribué qui étaye l’acquisition du langage des enfants. Dès lors, l’analyse des interactions peut constituer un outil pour permettre aux professionnel·le·s de mieux comprendre les phénomènes interactionnels favorisant l’acquisition du langage chez les jeunes enfants.

The present study describes the use of recasts by early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals in five ECEC centres in France, and their effects on children’s language production – particularly on the phonological and morphosyntactic levels. We adopt a multimodal approach, taking into account recasts conveyed by vocal and visual modalities. The ECEC setting offers a complex interaction framework with more multiple and intertwined conversations than dyadic interactions. We aim to answer two questions: to what extent do the recasts of ECEC professionals contribute to the co-construction of meaning and discourse, and how do they constitute favourable contexts for children to experience the situated use of formal and functional linguistic features? Our results, based on 135 interactional sequences and qualitative analysis, show that under certain conditions, recasts are an efficient professional practice for scaffolding language acquisition and for involving children as active participants in dyadic interaction.