MODEL2TALK: An intervention to promote productive classroom talk

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2021

The aims of the present study were to design and implement an intervention focused on dialogic classroom talk in early childhood education and to evaluate what it may contribute to children's oral communicative competence. Together with four teachers we developed and implemented an ecologically valid intervention that supports teachers to use several dialogic talk moves. We evaluated our intervention using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Discourse analysis of preand post-observations of classroom talk revealed that teachers used more dialogic talk moves over the course of our intervention. Pre-and post-tests of children's (N = 92) oral communicative competence indicated that our intervention significantly relates to an increase of children's communicative competence. Furthermore, analysis of pre-and post-observations of classroom talk showed an increase in the use of key linguistic features of oral communicative competence in the participating children. Although the setup of the studies does not permit propositions about causal relationships, the results of this study show that dialogic classroom talk can be promoted even in early childhood education, and give reasons to suppose that further studies may show that this might be beneficial for children's oral communicative competence.

Learning and Instruction, 2022

The first purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of dialogic classroom talk on children's language skills (i.e. oral communicative competence and receptive vocabulary knowledge). The second purpose was to examine the effect of this type of classroom talk on children's social competence (i.e. theory of mind and social acceptance). A total of 17 teachers and 311 children (aged 4-7 years) participated in this study. Eight teachers participated in an 8-week intervention directed at dialogic classroom talk. Multilevel analyses revealed that the intervention had a significant effect on children's oral communicative competence. No significant effects were found on children's receptive vocabulary knowledge, theory of mind, and social acceptance. The results of this study indicate that dialogic classroom talk is beneficial for children's oral communicative competence. Further research is required in order to investigate how dialogic classroom talk might affect receptive vocabulary knowledge and social competence as well.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of productive classroom talk and metacommunication on the development of young children’s oral communicative competence. This study can be characterized as a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-intervention-post-test design. A total of 21 teachers and 469 children participated in this study. 12 teachers were assigned to the intervention condition and participated in a Professional Development Program on productive classroom dialogue. Multilevel analyses of children’s oral communicative competence pre- and posttest scores indicated that productive classroom dialogue has a significant and moderate to large effect on the development of young children’s oral communicative competence. The results of this study seems to indicate that dialogically organized classroom talk might be more beneficial than non-dialogical classroom talk for the development of children’s oral language skills.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of productive classroom talk and meta-communication on the development of young children's oral communicative competence and subject matter knowledge. This study can be characterized as a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-intervention-post-test design. A total of 21 teachers and 469 children participated in this study. 12 teachers were assigned to the intervention condition and participated in a Professional Development Program on productive classroom dialogue. Multilevel analyses of children's oral communicative competence pre-and post-test scores indicated that our intervention had a significant and moderate to large effect on the development of young children's oral communicative competence. No significant effects were found for children's subject matter knowledge. The results of this study suggest that dia-logically organized classroom talk is more beneficial than non-dialogical classroom talk for the development of children's oral language skills.

PhD thesis University of Melbourne, 2014

Teacher-child interactions in early childhood education settings can have a strong influence on children’s emerging literacy and language abilities which are essential for life-long learning and productive engagement in society. In this study, teacher-child quality talk interactions were examined from videos of three different teacher-led literacy activities in 23 preschool rooms in the children’s year before primary school - rooms selected for the preschools’ excellent reputation. A socio-cultural approach focusing on children learning to think is followed throughout. Specifically, participation by turns during episodes of Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2003) and complexity of talk in terms of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Type Token Ration (TTR) were compared to ordinary talk. Teachers’ use of questions, acknowledgments, Gricean maxims and leadership of child concept development, or blending, were also counted. Based on these measures, six quality indicators were selected, averaged and used to rank rooms for further comparisons. Coded transcripts were subjected to a quantitatively dominant mixed methods analysis which found significant relationships within and between classes. Children’s MLU and TTR increased in SST talk, whereas teachers ranked higher tended to decrease their complexity of language while using a higher ratio of words in relation to the children, especially at the start of SSTs. Other indications of intentionality led to the conclusion that teachers higher on the overall ranking were more systematically purposeful in adjusting their goals, activities, and language than those of lower ranking. Quality talk in three distinct patterns emerged from among these same top ranked teachers. The approach used by the majority of teachers had high numbers of open questions and blends and was termed “Expansive” to capture the dialogic process and goal of concept development. A clearly defined minority approach using high numbers of closed questions and Gricean maxims was termed “Focusing” to capture the dialogic process and goal of refining the clarity of thinking encapsulated at the level of the utterance. A third approach did both, but with low levels of acknowledgements. The usefulness of distinguishing and gaining further understanding of these approaches for measuring and improving teacher-child talk interactions is discussed. Keywords Early Childhood; talk; interactions; preschool; language; education http://hdl.handle.net/11343/54623

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2011

This study investigated relations between preschool talk exposure and immigrant first graders' second language literacy and oral skills outcomes. Participants in the study were 25 children with Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second, attending various multilingual and ethnically diverse preschool classrooms in Norway and videotaped during preschool group conversations. Group conversations were coded for vocabulary richness, discourse complexity and emergent phonics talk. Relations between the qualities of the preschool group conversations that the children participated in and their second language vocabulary, listening comprehension and code related skills outcomes 1 year later in first grade were examined. Preschool classroom vocabulary richness and discourse complexity predicted first grade vocabulary (receptive vocabulary and word definition skills), but not listening comprehension. No associations were found between preschool classroom emergent phonics talk and first grade code-related skills. The findings have implications for early interventions addressing reading comprehension.

2020

Dialogic teaching emphasizes changes to classroom interaction to promote student participation, yet there are still few studies which investigate how this might occur in early years’ literacy classrooms. This practitioner action research study focuses on one classroom teacher’s journey as she implemented a range of dialogic strategies to promote student talk, aiming to create a richer learning environment in a Kindergarten and Year One elementary classroom. Changes were made over a six-month period and these were documented using a reflective journal, video and audio recordings of classroom lessons and transcript analysis of those. Classroom talk was coded according to types of interactions, and the number of interactions produced by students and the teacher. Patterns in turn-taking and language use were identified and compared over time as various strategies were implemented. As a result of changes, a more dialogic classroom environment developed providing increased opportunities f...

2016

The Reading Teacher, 2020

Discover practical, research-based strategies for creating conversational opportunities in early childhood classrooms to foster young students' oral language development and support their future reading success.