Function, Type, and Distribution of Teacher Questions in Dual-Language Preschool Read Alouds

摘要

This exploratory study investigated the nature and distribution of dual-language preschool teachers' questions across parallel Spanish- and English-medium read-aloud activities. The notions of comprehensible input (Krashen, 198525. Krashen, S. 1985. The input hypothesis: Issues and implications, Beverly Hills, CA: Laredo. View all references) and language output (Swain, 198537. Swain, M. 1985. a??Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its developmenta??. In Input in second language acquisition, Edited by: Gass, S. and Madden, C. 235-256. New York, NY: Newbury House. View all references), along with a reciprocal interaction model of teaching (Cummins, 20007. Cummins, J. 2000. a??Biliteracy, empowerment, and transformative pedagogya??. In The power of two languages 2000: Effective dual language use across the curriculum, Edited by: Tinajero, J. V. and DeVillar, R. A. 9-19. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. View all references), guided our understanding of teachers' use of questions to engage students in book-based extended dialogue in each target language. We utilized digital video recordings and field notes to capture the naturally occurring teacher-child interactions of read-aloud activities in two dual-language preschool classrooms over a period of two months. Findings revealed that teachers asked a variety of questions, exhibiting a multitude of functions and levels of cognitive challenge; however, question types were not equitably distributed across the two instructional languages as teachers asked significantly more inference-based and factual questions during Spanish-medium read alouds and more experience-based and word-focused questions in English-medium read alouds. Implications for practice are discussed.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; var addthis_config = {"data_track_addressbar":true,"ui_click":true}; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2012.734262