Bilinguals Contingently Respond to Teacher Inferential Questions during Shared Reading in Preschool

The study investigates how bilingual children respond to kindergarten teachers’ questions in connection with book reading. Particular focus is placed on the children’s ability to adapt to the difficulty of the questions. The research question is: To what extent do children adapt their responses to the kindergarten teachers’ level of inference-based questions?

The results show that a higher level of difficulty in the questions consistently elicited higher-level responses from the children, and that most children responded at the same level as the questions. It indicates that kindergarten teachers can promote language development in bilingual children by asking questions that challenge their thinking. The study also found that kindergarten teachers used more complex questions rather than literal questions during reading sessions, which can contribute to the development of children’s language understanding and skills.

The study is based on a reading intervention in multicultural kindergarten departments in the City of Oslo in Norway. The current study includes 53 kindergarten teachers and 202 bilingual children. The kindergarten teachers took audio recordings of reading sessions together with a group of children aged three to five years. The researchers transcribed the recordings and used sequential analysis to investigate how the children adapted their answers to the level of difficulty in kindergarten teacher’s questions. In total, the analysis included 8667 kindergarten teacher statements and 5303 child statements.

Kucherenko, S., Rydland, V., & Grøver, V. (2022). Bilinguals Contingently Respond to Teacher Inferential Questions during Shared Reading in Preschool. Early Education and Development, 34(7), 1528–1544.

Online year: 2022

Issue year: 2023

Review year: 2022