Learning about concepts through everyday language interactions in preschools

The purpose of this study is to examine how, through everyday activities and talk, preschool teachers can support children's understanding of and experience with abstract, scientific concepts.

The study shows that children aged 3-6 years can engage in spontaneous conversations about abstract phenomena and connect these phenomena to their own everyday experiences. For example, this is evident in a conversation on the concept of winter initiated by a child himself. The analysis shows that the child talks about winter as a season, as he stresses that winter is different from autumn. According to the author, the child's understanding of winter is probably related to an abstract and scientific understanding of winter (i.e. lots of snow, but no leaves on the trees) When the child categorises his everyday experiences by defining signs of autumn and winter, he communicates that he has knowledge about winter as an abstract concept referring to the concept of season – a concept that is even more abstract than the concept of winter.

The author finds that the preschool teachers interact with the children around topics that interest the children and topics that the children take initiative to talk about. These are topics such as seasons, illness, naughtiness and bad behaviour. The preschool teachers generally have a warm and acknowledging approach to the children. The preschool teachers communicate bodily and verbally that they listen to the children and are interested in what they say, and they try to prolong the conversations on topics that interest the children. More specifically, the preschool teachers try to engage the children to talk about their thoughts and experiences with abstract, scientific concepts by asking open-ended questions and by giving the children enough time to think about the questions.

However, the analysis shows that the preschool teachers do not seem to create room for further expansion of the abstract concepts covered by the conversations. According to the author, the teachers could have expanded the children's understanding of abstract concepts, for example by presenting some of their own viewpoints or by introducing some more well-known everyday concepts related to the more abstract concepts. According to the author, the fact that the preschool teachers do not talk sufficiently with the children about the many elements that could have helped the children expand their understanding of abstract concepts may be because the social pedagogical tradition dominates the pedagogy in the preschool studied. In the social pedagogical tradition, there is less focus on children's cognition and concept formation and more focus on children's social competences. Thus this focus may contribute to the preschool teachers' reduced attention towards language interactions with the children.

The data material consists of 12.5 hours of video observations of two preschool teachers' language interactions with children in various everyday activities. The observations were recorded in two departments at one preschool with children aged 3-6 years. The observations were conducted over a period of four months (a total of 12 days of observation). The video recordings were subsequently transcribed and formed the basis for an in-depth interaction analysis to which the author selected three spontaneous conversations, all of which were about the meaning of words.

Gjems, L. (2017). Learning about concepts through everyday language interactions in preschools. Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 10(4), 33-44.