Teachers interventions and vocabulary development in kindergarten in Argentina

SEBASTIÁN CARIGNANO; ALEJANDRA MENTI; PATRICIA PAOLANTONIO; MARÍA PAULA DUTARI

Nijmegen

Workshop; Many Paths to Language; 2020

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen

Several studies have studied the impact of certain teaching interventions on the development of students´ vocabulary. The teaching of contextual cues (Baumann, Edwards, Boland, Olejnik & Kame´enui, 2003; Nash & Snowling, 2006), formulation of questions and the comments made by teachers, referring to the vocabulary unknown by the children (Ard & Beverly, 2004) constitutes the most effective methodologies for the teaching of vocabulary.In this paper, we analyze and describe teachers´ interventions focused on the treatment of unknown or unfamiliar words to students in kindergarten classes. The present study analyses teaching situations recorded in two kindergarten classrooms - one belonging to an urban school and the other to a rural school in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. In each of the two kindergarten classrooms, the complete development of the thematic unit "Animals" corresponding to the area of natural sciences was videotaped. The teaching situations recorded were transcribed according to the rules stipulated by the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) computer program. The transcriptions are contained in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) format which allows the data to be processed with CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis) software. For the analysis of the information, both qualitative and quantitative procedures were used. Firstly, the interactive sequences that make up the natural science classes were categorized taking into account the classification established by Green, Weade and Graham (1988) in which they distinguish between "social text" and "academic text". In their analysis of high school classes, Green and Weade (1987) showed that lessons are made up of different types of phases, each of which places different social and academic demands on students. In turn, Green, Weade and Graham (1988) noted that these demands co-occur as two interconnected and interrelated texts: a "social text" containing implicit and explicit information on how to participate and an "academic text" made up of the thematic content of the class and the structure of that content. Within the academic text, we analyzed the different discursive acts that make up the academic text in which the teacher develops the thematic unit. Within the framework of this corpus, those discursive acts used by teachers during the teaching of vocabulary were categorized. In turn, the discursive function of these acts was analyzed, as well as the linguistic characteristics that integrate them. The results of this study are discussed on the basis of background research that supports the importance of conversational exchanges for the learning of unknown or unfamiliar words.