“Teacher talk and children’s queries: Communication about natural science in early childhood education”. & “Anthropomorphically speaking: on communication between teachers and children in early childhood biology education”.

The overall goal of this dissertation is to generate new knowledge about how children and child carers communicate about scientific topics at daycare facilities. More specifically the goal of the published article, which is one of three articles on which the dissertation is based, is to examine how, by whom and with what purpose anthropomorphic speech is used at daycare facilities. Anthropomorphic speech is a term for speaking about something non-human in human terms.

The article concludes that anthropomorphic speech can serve as an appropriate way to speak about scientific topics, but anthropomorphic speech can also make it more difficult for the children to acquire scientific knowledge. Thus anthropomorphic speech can hinder as well as promote scientific learning. The authors therefore recommend child carers to be aware of the language they use, so they recognise when the language serves as a tool to reduce the gap between the child’s experience and scientific learning, and when it locks the conversation into human terms and thereby hinders the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Often the child carer introduces anthropomorphic speech and sticks to this type of speech, even though the children disagree with the anthropomorphic argumentation.

Interactions between child carers and children during the thematisation of biological topics at the daycare centre were recorded on video and later transcribed. Anthropomorphic speech was not discussed with the child carers, and no special instructions were given prior to the recordings. The material was organised in themes which expressed different modes of expression of anthropomorphic speech.

Thulin, S. (2011). “Teacher talk and children’s queries: Communication about natural science in early childhood education”. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet. Thulin, S. & Pramling, N. (2009). “Anthropomorphically speaking: on communication between teachers and children in early childhood biology education”. International Journal of Early Years Education, 17(2), 137-150.