Teacher–child interactions during toy play and book sharing

The study investigates how the communication between kindergarten staff and children varies in two different activities – a reading session and playing with toys – with a particular focus on the linguistic features of these interactions. By comparing reading sessions and play, the study seeks to explore how these activities can affect the quality and type of learning opportunities given to children in kindergarten through different interaction patterns. The research questions are:

1. What are the differences and similarities in the contributions of staff and children during interaction in book reading and playing with toys?
2. To what extent do children’s contributions depend on employee contributions during book reading and playing with toys?
3. To what extent do employees’ contributions depend on children’s contributions during book reading and playing with toys.

The results show that kindergarten staff asked several questions during play with toys, while they used several explanatory statements during book reading. The children responded more frequently with longer statements when the staff asked complex, inferential questions, especially during reading sessions. The study indicates that play promotes more ‘back and forth’ communication, while book reading provides opportunities for deeper linguistic processing.

The participants, consisting of 38 staff-child pairs, were filmed during organised activities, including both book reading and play. The kindergarten staff and children had no time limits, and the interaction was encoded for questions, statements and other communicative contributions. Sequence analysis was used to identify the dependency between the contributions of the employee and the child in the two activities.

Røe-Indregård, H., Brinchmann, E. I., Rydland, V., Rowe, M. L., Hagtvet, B. E., & Zambrana, I. M. (2024). Teacher–child interactions during toy play and book sharing. Early Education and Development, 35(2), 234–249.

Online year: 2022

Issue year: 2024

Review year: 2022