CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The aim of the work is to carry out a comparative analysis of the different types ofinformation that teachers provide when teaching ?unfamiliar? and ?highly unfamiliar?words to students. The corpus is made up of 8 teaching situations in which teachersdeveloped in full the thematic unit ?Types of Work?. The classes were videotaped in 8groups: 4 five-year old kindergarten classes and 4 first-grade classes. For each level ofschooling we selected 2 grades from schools in urban areas and 2 grades from schoolsin rural areas. All the situations amount to 19 teaching hours and were transcribedfollowing the CHILDES project norms. We employed quantitative and qualitativemethods of analysis. By means of the CLAN software, we selected the 15 most frequentwords uttered by teachers, which made up the academic text of the class (Green, Weade& Graham, 1988). Then, a subjective assessment was carried out in order to categorizethe selected words into ?very familiar?, ?unfamiliar? and ?highly unfamiliar?. Afterthat, we identified and quantified interactional sequences, considering whether or notthe teacher taught the ?unfamiliar? and ?highly unfamiliar? words. Next, we carried outa qualitative analysis of the interactional sequences based on the different types ofinformation given by teachers when they teach the selected words. The qualitativeanalysis combined the use of the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss,1967), with the heuristic use of concepts developed by interactional sociolinguistics,conversation analysis and gesture studies. In the sample analyzed, results show that theteachers of both levels focused on the teaching of ?unfamiliar? words and that theytended to juxtapose different kinds of information when teaching them. However,kindergarten teachers resorted more to the retrieval of previous knowledge than firstgrade teachers. Moreover, in this sample, teachers from urban schools used moregestural information than those from schools of rural areas.