Promoting oral texts in kindergarten classrooms – development of a new instrument to measure oral text abilities in kindergarten students
Submitted by:
Claudia Hefti
Abstract:
Co-Authors: Claudia Hefti (co-presenter), Katharina Kirchhofer, Iris Dinkelmann
Challenging communicative tasks such as reporting real life experiences, inventing stories, explaining knowledge or negotiating points of view are essential in classroom communication and crucial for successful academic learning. In addition, higher order abilities on the text or discourse level are key for the production and comprehension of written texts (Ruddell & Unrau, 2004). If provided with the opportunities and tailored support by their language models (Bruner, 1983 [2002]), children begin to acquire these abilities as soon as they start using oral language to represent complex information transcending the space of shared perception. However, young children's familiarity with these oral texts varies widely depending on the linguistic and educational practices in their families (Heller, 2012). Furthermore, educators in daycare institutions and kindergarten classrooms do not yet sufficiently focus on promoting linguistically and cognitively challenging conversations (König, 2006). As recent studies show, the interactional support provided by educators and teachers can be improved by professional development, and progress in teacher support positively affects the children's language acquisition (Piasta, 2012). These promising results have not yet been confirmed for children's higher order text abilities, though.
The intervention study «Promoting oral texts in kindergarten classrooms» aims at supporting teachers to purposefully and effectively promote the production of oral texts in everyday kindergarten communication. In a pre-post-follow-up-design with intervention and control group (80 teachers and 480 children in total), the quality of the teacher's interactional support and the abilities of the children to produce oral texts will be measured at the beginning of the first (t0) and the second (t1) as well at the end of the second (t2) year of kindergarten. The teachers of the intervention group will receive a nine months professional development program consisting of both individual video-based coaching and small group coursework. The instrument needed for measuring of the children's oral text abilities has already been developed and tested. The instrument focusing on the quality of teacher interaction is currently under construction.
The proposed contribution will focus on the measurement of children's oral text abilities: In an individual setting, the children first watch a short animated movie (free of verbal language) and then retell the story to the researcher. The video recordings are transcribed and the children's oral text productions extracted. These oral texts are assessed using a standardized rating instrument based on a new theoretical model focusing on higher order text abilities and combining existing theoretical perspectives. In our paper, we will present the theoretical foundations, the materials and procedures of data collection, the rating instrument and the statistical analysis of a trial with 109 children from nine kindergarten classrooms. Our results can contribute to the discussion of the measurement of oral language abilities. In addition, the design of the planned intervention study and the conceptual relations between oracy and literacy may be discussed.
References:
Bruner, J. (1983 [2002]). Wie das Kind sprechen lernt. Bern: Hans Huber.
Heller, V. (2012). Kommunikative Erfahrungen von Kindern in Familie und Unterricht. Passungen und Divergenzen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
König, A. (2006). Dialogisch-entwickelnde Interaktionsprozesse zwischen ErzieherIn und Kind(ern). Eine Videostudie aus dem Alltag des Kindergartens (Dissertation). Dortmund: Universität Dortmund
Piasta, S., Justice, L., Cabell, S., Wiggins, A., Turnbull, K. & Curenton, S. (2012). Impact of professional development on preschool teachers’ conversational responsivity and children’s linguistic productivity and complexity. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27, 387–400.
Ruddell, R. B. & Unrau, N. J. (2004). Introduction. In R. B. Ruddell & N. J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and processes of Reading. Fifth Edition (pp. 1116–1126). Newark DE: International Reading Association.