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Preschool Teachers' Child-Directed Talk: Unlocking Opportunities for Language Learning and Knowledge-Building

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Title: Preschool Teachers' Child-Directed Talk: Unlocking Opportunities for Language Learning and Knowledge-Building
Language: English
Authors: Susan B. Neuman (ORCID 0000-0002-3065-1678), Lauren Krieger, Tanya Kaefer, Hugo Gonzalez-Villisanti
Source: Early Education and Development. 2025 36(5):1134-1155.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 22
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education
Preschool Education
Descriptors: Preschool Teachers, Interpersonal Communication, Preschool Children, Language Acquisition, Knowledge Level, Audio Equipment, Preschool Education, Classroom Environment, Self Efficacy, Language Usage, Difficulty Level, Teacher Attitudes
DOI: 10.1080/10409289.2025.2503024
ISSN: 1040-9289
1556-6935
Abstract: Research Findings: Preschool teachers' child-directed talk has a powerful and enduring impact on young children's language and knowledge development. This study examines the extent to which teachers engaged in talk that supports children's language and knowledge-building, and how it might vary in different instructional contexts in classrooms. Using a cutting-edge open-source tool that could automatically identify the characteristics of teachers' child-directed talk through voice recording, language experiences over a typical morning hour in 97 4-year-old classrooms were recorded from a variety of federal, state, and private preschool programs. In addition, a classroom literacy environmental checklist and a survey indicating the teachers' confidence in teaching language experiences were collected following the recording. Results revealed that the quality of linguistically and cognitively challenging talk was strikingly low. Instructional time was primarily devoted to alphabetics, with a stark paucity of opportunities for children to acquire the language and content knowledge essential for later learning. Despite this finding, however, teachers overwhelmingly indicated their confidence in engaging children in language-rich activities. Practice or Policy: These findings suggest that teachers will need more professional development and content-rich curricular support for creating a language-rich environment. Further, integrating language development metrics into early learning standards and screening assessments could incentivize stronger classroom discourse policies.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2026
Accession Number: EJ1494324
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0186418918;h4j01jul.25;2025Jul08.05:51;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0186418918-1">Preschool Teachers' Child-Directed Talk: Unlocking Opportunities for Language Learning and Knowledge-Building </title> <p>Research Findings: Preschool teachers' child-directed talk has a powerful and enduring impact on young children's language and knowledge development. This study examines the extent to which teachers engaged in talk that supports children's language and knowledge-building, and how it might vary in different instructional contexts in classrooms. Using a cutting-edge open-source tool that could automatically identify the characteristics of teachers' child-directed talk through voice recording, language experiences over a typical morning hour in 97 4-year-old classrooms were recorded from a variety of federal, state, and private preschool programs. In addition, a classroom literacy environmental checklist and a survey indicating the teachers' confidence in teaching language experiences were collected following the recording. Results revealed that the quality of linguistically and cognitively challenging talk was strikingly low. Instructional time was primarily devoted to alphabetics, with a stark paucity of opportunities for children to acquire the language and content knowledge essential for later learning. Despite this finding, however, teachers overwhelmingly indicated their confidence in engaging children in language-rich activities. Practice or Policy: These findings suggest that teachers will need more professional development and content-rich curricular support for creating a language-rich environment. Further, integrating language development metrics into early learning standards and screening assessments could incentivize stronger classroom discourse policies.</p> <p>The environment has a powerful and enduring impact on how young children develop and what they learn (Sperry et al., [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref1">66</reflink>]). Right from birth, children are actively engaged in exploring their world, beginning to construct their ideas and theories about how things work. The pace of that learning, however, will largely depend on whether and to what extent that environment provides opportunities that spark children's natural inclinations to know and learn (Bowman et al., [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref2">3</reflink>]). Keenly responsive to their environment, children will derive implicit theories from the actions and words directed to them by others (Allen & Kelly, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref3">1</reflink>]), forming the foundation for their understanding of the physical and social worlds. Consequently, adult child-directed talk that provides stimulating and responsive language experiences to support children's natural curiosities and desires to know is essential in early childhood.</p> <p>Crucial for children's development, therefore, is an early educational environment that supports knowledge-building and responsive language interactions. Several dimensions of child-directed talk have direct bearing on its development in preschool classrooms. Perhaps, the most well-researched dimension is the quality and quantity of teacher talk when interacting with children (Hadley et al., [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref4">25</reflink>]; Justice et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref5">36</reflink>]). This includes the complexity of teachers' syntax, the number of words used (tokens), and the number of different word types. Hearing the linguistic features associated with a more academic language register such as sentences with multiple clauses is thought to help young children learn about the forms of language typically valued in the school context and to be able to converse in content topics of interest.</p> <p>A second feature in children's language-learning environment is the teachers' use of cognitively challenging talk (Michener et al., [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref6">48</reflink>]), the language used to promote children's thinking. These practices are known to be more cognitively demanding, pushing young children to explain, analyze, and think more deeply about a topic (Carlisle et al., [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref7">9</reflink>]). They are likely to encourage back-and-forth conversations (particularly around content-related topics) and include such language-building features as open-ended prompts, questions that typically require multiple-word responses, and wh-questions, which lay the groundwork for children to build knowledge about themselves and their worlds (Duncan et al., [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref8">14</reflink>]; Wasik & Hindman, [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref9">71</reflink>]).</p> <p>These features not only help to enhance lexical processing speed but children's developing knowledge. Knowledge-building as a concept refers to the general knowledge and features that make up concepts which children may acquire (Pollard-Durodola et al., [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref10">57</reflink>]; Wright et al. [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref11">77</reflink>]). It may reflect certain domains like science, and topics, concepts, and words that connect to them, creating knowledge-networks or schemas. These schemas are thought to act as an organizational framework, aiding children in accessing, and retrieving knowledge on a given topic (Anderson & Pearson, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref12">2</reflink>]). Prior knowledge enables the listener to fill in the gaps in texts, to form connections among ideas, and to build a coherent mental model of the meaning of a text (McCarthy & McNamara, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref13">46</reflink>]). To comprehend text, listeners are thought to create a situation model (Kintsch & Van Dijk, [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref14">38</reflink>]), activating their existing knowledge with new textual information to acquire and potentially modify their understanding of text.</p> <p>Some of these language features have been addressed in the context of examining the effects of professional development, content interventions, and curriculum on the quality of language exchanges in pre-K classrooms serving at-risk children (Cabell et al., [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref15">8</reflink>]; Hadley et al., [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref16">26</reflink>]). Yet the degree to which these child-directed talk features occur outside of a particular intervention or on any typical day in early childhood settings that children are likely to attend has been less understood. Furthermore, given the increasing recognition of the importance of knowledge-building in the early years (Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref17">55</reflink>]), teachers' uses of language to support more cognitively challenging talk has taken on an increasing sense of urgency, often described as the field's "best bet" for boosting children's language and skills (Maier et al., [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref18">44</reflink>]). Whether these more cognitively demanding talk features occur regularly in classrooms, however, remain unclear. Therefore, the goal of this project was to examine the extent to which teachers' child-directed talk provided opportunities for knowledge-building and critical thinking. Further, we explored whether these features were likely to vary according to the instructional activities in classrooms.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-2">Theoretical framework</hd> <p>This work is based on a socio-ecological perspective which assumes that language development occurs through the complex interplay between children's social interactions and the environment (Vygotsky, [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref19">68</reflink>]). Central to this perspective is that individuals and their contexts have reciprocal influences on one another (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref20">5</reflink>]). Children are not merely shaped by their environment, they are active agents in learning. Consequently, activity settings in classrooms that maximize opportunities for participation and instructional conversations with the teacher and peers can provide opportunities for children to add and use language for learning about their world. These language interactions may allow teachers to better assist children in their learning as they see their progress as well as their stumbles and misconceptions that call for additional support. In short, this socio-ecological perspective highlights the critical role that child-directed talk by teachers and the instructional context in classrooms can play in children's language and knowledge development.</p> <p>It may also help to explain both the amount and limitations of teachers' child-directed talk. Institutional and/or policy influences (e.g. the exosystem), for example, might affect how classrooms are structured and potentially constrain teachers' child-directed talk (e.g. the microsystem). Emphasis on data-driven instruction from the administration might shift focus away from content-rich interactions and exploratory conversations toward a more direct instructional approach. Similarly, state-approved standards or guidelines might affect how time is used in the classroom, and the expectations for school readiness. If readiness is defined as simply knowing the letters, numbers, colors, and shapes by the end of prekindergarten, then teachers are likely to prioritize these skills. Moreover, cultural and societal norms in the larger macrosystem, might play a role, shaping how families' and teachers' view play as a learning activity, and the opportunity that it creates for open-ended, exploratory talk between teachers and children.</p> <p>The classroom is where many of these influences converge. It serves as a bounded context where teacher–child interactions occur, reflecting the exogenous influences of the broader social and institutional environment that shape language practices. In this article, therefore, we examine preschool classrooms as the primary setting where these broader ecological influences are enacted and observed.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-3">The quality and quantity of teacher talk</hd> <p>There is a broad consensus in the literature that the quantity and quality of engaging and responsive interactions between teachers and children contribute to children's language growth and knowledge development (Justice et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref21">36</reflink>]; Language and Reading Research Consortium, [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref22">43</reflink>]). Exposure to frequent, positive verbal interactions allows children to extract information about the pragmatics and the linguistic forms of language. However, by themselves, quantitative measures of input (i.e., the amount of speech caregivers produce) are limited because they do not account for the use of repeated words and syntax. More than the quantity of input, children will need to be exposed to a rich diversity of words and syntactic structures (Huttenlocher et al., [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref23">31</reflink>]). For example, in a study of 47 families, Huttenlocher and team showed that the diversity of caregivers' speech (i.e. word types) significantly predicted the corresponding diversity in children's speech some years later (Huttenlocher et al., [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref24">32</reflink>]).</p> <p>In addition, measures of clausal diversity, those indicators of more complex sentences such as caregivers' uses of conjunctions have been tied to the growth of children's language skills. Huttenlocher and team ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref25">31</reflink>]), for example, examined teachers' speech in 40 preschool classrooms at the start of the school year, and found that it was not significantly related to children's syntactic comprehension skill level (<emph>r</emph> =.19, <emph>p</emph> >.25). By the end of the year, however, the complexity of teachers' syntax was the strongest predictor of children's syntactic growth scores, accounting for 17.8% of the variance, indicating that the syntax of the teachers was a factor affecting children's syntactic growth throughout the year.</p> <p>In fact, there is evidence that teachers' use of syntactically complex talk may serve to accelerate children's language development. In a study of teacher-child engagement in small group conversations in 39 preschool classrooms, researchers reported a bi-directional relationship in teachers and children's complex syntactic use. The teachers' use of complex syntax increased children's complex utterances; similarly, children's use of complex utterances influenced that of the teachers, suggesting both the power of teachers as models and the interdependencies of language interactions in the classrooms (Justice et al., [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref26">37</reflink>]). Therefore, the variety of words, phrases, and clauses described by Justice and colleagues as the data-providing features of adult talk and its linguistic aspects (Rowe & Snow, [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref27">62</reflink>]) appear to have a direct relationship to children's language and vocabulary development.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-4">Cognitively challenging talk for knowledge-building</hd> <p>Cognitively challenging talk focuses on teachers' pedagogical language (Shulman, [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref28">65</reflink>]). It refers to the communication-facilitating talk that seeks to challenge children to think by using open-ended questions or prompts (Wasik et al., [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref29">70</reflink>]). For example, asking wh-questions as an elicitation strategy such as "why did you think that?" may push a young child to reason and explain their ideas in greater depth. Whitehurst and colleagues, in their classic studies of dialogic reading (Whitehurst et al., [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref30">74</reflink>]), found that these open-ended questions led to increasing frequency in adult-child exchanges, more expansions and feedback to the child. Because these types of wh-questions often require multi-word responses and conversational turns, they are known to promote conceptually, linguistically, and interactively rich language development (Seven et al., [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref31">63</reflink>]). Open-ended prompts like these have also been found to predict preschoolers' expressive language growth in preschools as well as in the home (Wasik & Hindman, [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref32">71</reflink>]; Whitehurst et al., [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref33">74</reflink>]).</p> <p>The back-and-forth conversations that these open-ended prompts solicit play an important role in linguistic and knowledge development. While investigating the relationships between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary, Donnelly and Kidd ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref34">12</reflink>]) followed a group of 122 monolingual English-acquiring infants from 9 to 24 months, recording their language and their vocabulary knowledge every three months. Their results showed a bidirectional relationship, indicating that the two were mutually reinforcing across children's development. Increases in vocabulary seemed to lead to greater complexity in conversations, creating a "virtuous developmental circle."</p> <p>Language interactions also have the capacity to help children acquire knowledge about kinds of things or category-based reasoning (Mirman et al., [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref35">49</reflink>]). For example, a noun can be used to refer to a particular item, such as "a tiger," or it can be used to refer to a broader category such as "tigers are dangerous." Known as generics, these latter phrases have a conceptual base, referring to a commonality among things and can be effective in teaching children particular category-wide generalizations (Gelman, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref36">17</reflink>]; Markman & Hutchinson, [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref37">45</reflink>]). Learning about the common properties of wild animals, pets, and habitats using generic noun phrases (e.g. wild animals live outside away from people), for example, can serve as invitations to children to attend to the commonalities among objects or its conceptual similarities (Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref38">52</reflink>]). These groupings can serve as an initial basis for forming categories, crucial for developing knowledge about the world (Gelman et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref39">19</reflink>]).</p> <p>There is now a good deal of evidence that even young children may use category membership for drawing novel inferences. Yet they are sensitive to the type of wording used in child-directed language. Gelman and colleagues, for example, found that when preschoolers were given novel information predicated by the use of "some," they made relatively few inferences; however, when given novel information predicated by the word "all," they made many more inferences (Gelman & Raman, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref40">18</reflink>]). These and other studies (Gelman et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref41">19</reflink>]) suggest that when properties are stated generically, they may become more central to children's developing conceptual representations. Although intervention studies have shown the effects of using generic noun phrases in instructional settings (Hadley et al., [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref42">26</reflink>]; Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref43">55</reflink>]), whether or not or to what extent they are used as a feature of instructional talk in pre-k settings has yet to be examined.</p> <p>Consequently, features of cognitively challenging talk such as asking wh-questions, along with conversational turns and feedback, and generics are known to support inferential thinking that encourage children to think more deeply. Guided by a socio-ecological perspective, together with the quality and quantity of teachers' talk, these features emphasize the importance of interactions between adults and children and their environment as mechanisms that fundamentally shape children's learning and development during the preschool years.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-5">Features of child-directed talk for knowledge-building</hd> <p>Several features of teachers' child-related speech might set it apart from other types of talk. For very young children, child-directed speech tends to be characterized by its slower pace, exaggerated prosody, pacing, and simple semantic structures (e.g. That's a furry dog!) (Kuhl, [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref44">41</reflink>]). As children progress into the preschool years (e.g. 3–5), however, adults tend to adopt a more standard prosody, using longer sentences, and more complex words in their interactions with children (Rowe, [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref45">61</reflink>]). During these years, a key aspect of teachers' child-directed talk is language modeling. This includes introducing specific vocabulary, using complex grammatical structures, and creating opportunities to foster child engagement through questions that encourage conversational turns and provide constructive feedback (Hindman et al., [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref46">29</reflink>]; Landry et al., [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref47">42</reflink>]). Child-directed speech may focus intentionally on using new words, and phrases, expanding on what children say, or guiding children's practice and recasts to support their learning of new words. Wasik and Hindman ([<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref48">72</reflink>]), for example, found that adult talk about specific target words, and multiple repetitions of those words led to significant gains in children's expressive and receptive vocabulary on standardized measures.</p> <p>These talk features are likely to occur in a number of content domains throughout the children's day. Perhaps, the most well-researched context is during shared-book reading, known as an ideal context to promote language interactions and cognitively challenging talk (Dowdall et al., [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref49">13</reflink>]; Grover et al., [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref50">24</reflink>]). Nevertheless, recent studies have highlighted the role that other content domains may play in supporting challenging and enriching interactions between teachers and children (Gonzalez et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref51">22</reflink>]; National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine, [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref52">50</reflink>]; Wright & Gotwals, [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref53">78</reflink>]). For example, Studhalter et al. ([<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref54">67</reflink>]) reported that teachers' use of content-specific talk with children during science instruction acted as a positive predictor of children's conceptual learning (<emph>N</emph> = 32 kindergarten classes). Similarly, in a year-long study, Klibanoff and team (Klibanoff et al., [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref55">39</reflink>]) found that the frequency of teachers' math-related talk during circle time in these 26 classrooms was significantly related to the growth of preschoolers' conventional mathematical knowledge. More recently, several studies (Gonzalez et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref56">22</reflink>]; Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref57">55</reflink>]) have shown significant and robust effects of content-rich shared book reading text-sets on science- and social studies related receptive and expressive vocabulary among preschoolers in districts with significant dual-language learners and minoritized populations. These studies suggest that <emph>what</emph> teachers teach may have an important influence on <emph>how</emph> they teach, <emph>and</emph> the amount and quality of the linguistic and knowledge-building talk with children.</p> <p>However, in addition to planned instruction, much of teachers' child-directed talk in preschool settings is likely to occur spontaneously as "teachable moments," instructional interactions in these content domains that occur during the course of other activities (Neuman & Roskos, [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref58">54</reflink>]). These teachable moments might look like brief digressions or unplanned opportunities to explain a concept. Teachers might seize on the opportunity to practice math facts as children are lining up for dismissal, for example, or assign children to center activities by color names. Or they might try to infuse learning by taking advantage of mundane routines or capitalizing on a particular event. Generally, although regarded as powerful learning opportunities, teachable moments have rarely been captured in research since they often come when least expected. However, by including an analysis of "teachable moments," we can provide a more comprehensive analysis of classroom talk by content domain, adding to the field's understanding of the frequency and quality of teachers' knowledge-building talk with children in the preschool context.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-6">The present study</hd> <p>The current study aims to build on the existing research on teachers' child-directed language in preschool programs. It focuses on teachers' use of language and instructional exchanges in knowledge-building learning activities during a typical morning in a variety of preschool contexts in a southeastern region in the U.S. The study addresses three research questions:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> To what extent do teachers engage in talk that supports knowledge-building in these preschool settings?</item> <p></p> <item> Does the quality and cognitive challenge of teachers' talk vary according to the instructional content and the environmental context in classrooms?</item> <p></p> <item> Do teachers believe they are prepared to engage children in cognitively challenging talk that supports knowledge-building?</item> </ulist> <hd id="AN0186418918-7">Method</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186418918-8">Participants and setting</hd> <p>Preschool teachers from 97 4-year-old classrooms in regions throughout a southeastern state participated in this study. Participation was strictly voluntary. Recruited by local districts through the Barksdale Institute, teachers consented to the study procedures in accordance with the principal investigator's University Institutional Review Board guidelines. As shown in Table 1, teachers in classrooms from five regions, representing 15 towns and cities, and 17 different zip-codes agreed to participate in the study. Half of these classrooms were from urban areas, and half from rural or suburban communities.</p> <p>Table 1. Demographics of the sample.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Characteristic</td><td>Number/Percentage</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>School region</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Mid-state</td><td>42%</td></tr><tr><td>South</td><td>20%</td></tr><tr><td>East</td><td>17%</td></tr><tr><td>Northeast</td><td>1%</td></tr><tr><td>Northwest</td><td>18%</td></tr><tr><td>Town/cities</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Rural</td><td>39%</td></tr><tr><td>Suburban/rural</td><td>11%</td></tr><tr><td>Urban</td><td>50%</td></tr><tr><td>Funding stream/program</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Title 1</td><td>57%</td></tr><tr><td>State-funded</td><td>29%</td></tr><tr><td>Private</td><td>8%</td></tr><tr><td>Head Start</td><td>6%</td></tr><tr><td>Teacher's age</td><td /></tr><tr><td>20–30</td><td>26%</td></tr><tr><td>31–45</td><td>41%</td></tr><tr><td>46–50</td><td>20%</td></tr><tr><td>Over 50</td><td>13%</td></tr><tr><td>Teacher's race/ethnicity</td><td /></tr><tr><td>African-American</td><td>50%</td></tr><tr><td>White</td><td>37%</td></tr><tr><td>Hispanic</td><td>1%</td></tr><tr><td>Mixed race</td><td>12%</td></tr><tr><td>Average class size</td><td>16 children</td></tr><tr><td /><td>(<italic>SD</italic> = 3.50)</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Teachers were recruited from four different types of programs: Title I pre-kindergarten (<emph>N</emph> = 55, in the more urban areas); state-funded Get Ready pre-kindergarten (<emph>N</emph> = 27); privately-funded pre-kindergarten (<emph>N</emph> = 11) and Head Start (<emph>N</emph> = 4). Title I and Head Start were federally funded programs out of the Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services, respectively. State-related programs represented a newly-established funding stream for a small number of classrooms for 4-year-olds. Private programs were largely religiously based. The sample of teachers was diverse, and middle-aged. Average class size was 16 4-year-old children. Teachers and children shared similar racial and cultural backgrounds. Table 1 describes the demographics of the sample.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-9">Procedures</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186418918-10">Data sources</hd> <p>The research team collected three sources of data for this study: an automated voice-activating recording of teachers' child-directed language during a morning lesson on a typical day; an observation of the classroom literacy environment; and a survey of teachers' beliefs about their language and literacy activities. Each of these sources of data are described below.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-11">Voice-activating recording</hd> <p>Recent advances in the field of language development have turned to automatized language recordings, most notably through the use of the language environmental analysis system (LENA) device to examine adults' child-directed language (Gilkerson et al., [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref59">20</reflink>]). Using a wearable recorder, the device has been able to capture child-directed talk, estimating adult word count, child vocalization, and adult-child conversational turns, contributing to the growing understanding of language development in the early years. Recent devices, however, have been able to track more nuanced measures of linguistic complexity, such as the number of different words, mean length of utterance, and conjunctions, as well as adults' use of instructional language, such as generics, wh-questions, and conversational turns (Irvin et al., [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref60">33</reflink>]).</p> <p>For this study, we captured these features of teachers' child-directed language using the IDEAS tool developed by Gonzalez-Villasanti et al.([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref61">23</reflink>]). Similar to the LENA device, the tool is designed to record the teacher's language, but in this case through a processing pipeline that extracts speech segments (e.g. described as diarization), speech-to-text conversion, and linguistic unit estimation. To fine-tune the processing, four hours of classroom recordings with teachers from the region were manually diarized to ensure the accuracy of the speech segments prior to any formal data collection.</p> <p>The speech-to-text feature of the tool automatically transcribes speech segments using third-party automatic speech recognition services (e.g. Whisper), with timestamps for each transcribed segment. For this project, the IDEAS tool generated the number of words, conjunctions, unique words, plural nouns, wh-questions, number of conversational turns, and speech duration. In addition, it created a transcription of each recording which could be used to determine which content domains might support quality and quantity of talk and its knowledge-building features.</p> <p>The tool also classified whether the speaker was the teacher, child, or other adult in the room. This information was invaluable to determine conversational turns and the proportion of adult talk to child talk. At the same time, preschool classrooms are busy places, often with a cacophony of children's voices at a time. Therefore, our technology was designed to capture teachers' child-directed talk and responsiveness to the children. It could pick up children's experiences in the classroom, and many of their individual utterances. However, our major focus was at the teacher level and was designed to depict the ways in which they talked to children in preschool classrooms.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-12">Classroom environment checklist</hd> <p>High-quality classroom environments can provide stimulating contexts that enhance teachers' interactions and cognitively challenging talk with children (Rance et al., [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref62">59</reflink>]). The Classroom Environment Checklist was designed to examine the availability of print and resources in the classroom (e.g. books), and the overall design and management of the preschool classroom and individual centers. Adapted from the CIRCLE resources available through the Children's Learning Institute (Landry et al., [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref63">42</reflink>]), the 21-item checklist rated classroom management, the variety of accessible materials organized and labeled for children's use, book availability and reading aloud supports, interactive writing, and meaningful print displays in the room on a three-point scale, ranging from low to moderate to high.</p> <p>Two research assistants were trained in a 2-hour session using materials from the CIRCLE resources, followed by a set of classroom examples which were coded independently. Reliability was.90. Taking approximately 15–20 minutes per classroom, the checklist was completed by a researcher assistant after the teacher's lesson was recorded.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-13">Teachers' beliefs about their language and literacy</hd> <p>To understand how teachers regarded their work in language and literacy in preschool, we constructed a 12-item survey. Using a Google form, teachers were sent a link and asked to rate their confidence in teaching and supporting their children on a 4-point likert-type scale. Questions included their confidence in helping children learn new words, to answer wh-questions, and whether they thought they had the knowledge and skills to support them, as well as with those who might have language delays. The survey was completed in late spring after all of the classroom data were collected.</p> <p>Since all recorded language data was to be de-identified to maintain anonymity, the survey was not designed to directly link to teachers' activities in the classroom. Rather, we sought to use information from the survey to gauge teachers' confidence and interest in language and literacy learning for their children and their potential desire as a collective to have more professional development in the future.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-14">Procedural activities</hd> <p>Data recordings occurred throughout the state in the Spring. Visits were scheduled by research assistants to reflect a morning on a typical day of instruction (i.e., no field trips or "specials"). Recordings were collected on different days of the week.</p> <p>On the day of recording, the lead teacher was given a wearable voice recorder with a lavalier microphone and asked to go about her typical morning activities and routines. After ensuring that the technology was working, the research assistant left the classroom. After an hour, a research assistant retrieved the recording. Throughout the data collection period, the technologist on the team examined the recordings for quality and clarity. In total, 97 hours of instruction were recorded from classrooms. All recordings were de-identified.</p> <p>Following the data collection, the IDEAS team conducted a validity study to examine the accuracy of voice type classification, accuracy of linguistic units, and the accuracy of the automated transcript. Analyzing twelve manually time-stamped audio segments, they examined the coded audio recordings and compared them with human coders. Computations indicated that the tool accurately captured teacher talk (e.g. binary F1-scores 0.896), but lower accuracy for child talk (e.g. binary F1-scores 0.316), due in part to the low frequency of child talk in the training data and the low volume of their speech recorded from the hardware worn by the teacher. Therefore, these recordings could differentiate the conversational turns but often not the exact language of the child or children speaking. Both the accuracy of the linguistic units and the accuracy of the automated transcript, as well, showed high agreement. Teacher talk across all categories of speech averaged 0.95 agreement. Similarly, the accuracy of the automated transcript which was calculated using the word-error-rate (WER) indicated 20.57%, well within the current benchmark values of 12–30% for adults' speech in naturalistic settings like a classroom (see validity data for additional information). Together, these data indicated that the language produced, its clarity and its characteristics as well as its written form were valid, representing teachers' talk in these 97 classrooms.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-15">Data analysis</hd> <p>The IDEA software provided descriptive categories of talk, providing a portrait of classroom language. Given that there were slight variations in the amount of time recorded by teachers, all data was calculated to reflect the number of indicators per minute. Uses of subordinate and coordinating conjunctions were combined into one variable as an indicator of overall complexity of sentences.</p> <p>Transcripts were imported into the MAXQDA qualitative software to examine the content of instruction. Categories of learning activities included alphabetics, book reading, vocabulary, writing, math, science, social studies, and dramatic play. Time stamps were used to identify the beginning and the ending of each activity, which allowed us to determine the amount of time devoted to each activity.</p> <p>We defined each activity in a coding manual, including examples. An <emph>Alphabetics</emph> lesson focused on the recognition and/or manipulation of spoken parts of sentences and words, including rhyming, letter recognition or identification, letter-sound correspondence, sound segmentation, and blending; <emph>book reading</emph>, when children were being read to. <emph>Math</emph> included a lesson involving quantity and/or space, counting, number identification, or recognizing patterns, quantities, or size; s<emph>cience</emph>, on topics related to life, physical, earth or environmental sciences, and <emph>social studies</emph>, on topics such as community helpers and family, neighborhood places and road rules, and transportation. <emph>Vocabulary</emph> included a dedicated lesson on words and their meaning; and <emph>writing</emph>, a focus on forming letters, writing their name, or using a computer keyboard. Twelve percent of these activity codes were coded independently by two graduate research assistants in applied psychology with 95% exact agreement.</p> <p>Following this analysis, transcripts were also examined for teachable moments, conversational content that might be informally instructive, occurring at times other than within a formal lesson. Once identified, 10% of these were double-coded to determine their content focus by the two graduate assistants. There was 100% agreement. A teachable moment, for example, might look like this:</p> <p>(During lunch time)</p> <p>Teacher:"How does your bread taste, Zanesha? That bread is shaped like something.</p> <p>It's shaped like a triangle. How many sides on a triangle?"</p> <p>Child:"It has ... "</p> <p>Teacher:"A triangle has three sides. Two sides this way is equal and one under the bottom."</p> <p>Teachable moments were then coded and placed in similar content categories as above. Given their spontaneous, and unplanned nature, we examined them for evidence of informal learning, when teachers might seize a moment or an opportunity to promote children's learning. In this way, we could examine both planned and informal language interactions and the particular contexts in which they were likely to take place.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-16">Results</hd> <p>In the following results, we describe the extent of teachers' knowledge-building talk in classrooms, highlighting both its quality and cognitively challenging features. We then examine where this talk was most likely to occur across the different instructional activities, looking at both planned instruction as well as the more informal, teachable moments. Finally, we review teachers' beliefs about their ability to engage in talk that supports knowledge-building with children in classrooms.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-17">The extent of teachers' knowledge-building talk in classrooms</hd> <p>Table 2 summarizes the descriptive features of teachers' talk presented as the number of indicators per minute of recording.</p> <p>Table 2. Mean (and SD) of language cues per minute.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td /><td>Teacher</td><td>Child</td><td>Range of language cues</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Quantity of language (utterances per minute)</td><td>14.21 (3.99)</td><td>6.48 (2.40)</td><td>.06–24.77</td></tr><tr><td>Quantity of language (words per minute)</td><td>108.72 (35.80)</td><td>32.60 (15.94)</td><td>.22–207.27</td></tr><tr><td>Diversity of language (unique words per minute)</td><td>5.81 (1.63)</td><td>2.86 (1.05)</td><td>.06–9.64</td></tr><tr><td>Complexity of language (Conjunctions per minute)</td><td>3.16 (1.57)</td><td>.57 (.46)</td><td>0–9.42</td></tr><tr><td>Instructional language (Generic nouns per minute)</td><td>1.74 (.86)</td><td>.40 (.27)</td><td>0–4.12</td></tr><tr><td>Instructional language (WH-questions)</td><td>.70 (.40)</td><td>.15 (.12)</td><td>0–2.13</td></tr><tr><td>Instructional language (Conversational Turns)</td><td>2.70 (1.10)</td><td>2.73 (1.07)</td><td>0–6.52</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Overall, these descriptive measures indicate that on average, teachers talked a good deal to children as noted by the number of utterances and words per minute. However, compared to the quantity of language, the diversity of this language was strikingly low. Only about 5% of these words were unique or different. These data indicated that teachers frequently repeated themselves using relatively simple sentences throughout the lessons. The following excerpt illustrates this pattern.</p> <p>The teacher is working with the whole group during circle time:</p> <p>Teacher:We're gonna review the sounds. Are the sounds different with the lowercase letters than the uppercase letters?</p> <p>Children:(no response)</p> <p>Teacher:Are the sounds different? Are the sounds different?</p> <p>Children:(no response)</p> <p>Teacher:No! No, the sounds are not different. The sounds are the same. They may look different. But when we do our sounds, our sounds are exactly the same.</p> <p>Teacher:There are 26 letters in the alphabet but there are more sounds. There are more than 26 sounds. There are more than 26 sounds, but there are... (pause to let children answer)</p> <p>Teacher:(Together) 26 letters in the alphabet</p> <p>Teacher:We have 26 lowercase and we have 26 uppercase</p> <p>Teacher:Alright, when I point to the letter I want you to give me the...(pause to let children answer)</p> <p>Teacher:sound. What do I want to hear you say?</p> <p>Child:Ummm</p> <p>Teacher:The sound.</p> <p>(The conversation continues ...)</p> <p>And another example:</p> <p>It's circle time, and the children are gathered around the teacher who has a chart with the alphabet letters in upper-case. She is holding a wand. Each child has a small set of letters.</p> <p>Teacher:(to the group): So what letter are we going to be looking for? What letter is this? (points to M). Tell me what letter.</p> <p>Teacher:What letter is this, Maddie?" (no response). What letter did we just-</p> <p>Child:(gets up and points) M</p> <p>Teacher:Yay. It's an M. So, we're going to be finding the letter M. Is this letter M right here? (she points to an X). Is that a letter M?</p> <p>Child:(shakes her head)</p> <p>Teacher:No, it's the letter X. (to children). Now find the letter M on your [letters].</p> <p>Teacher:Good job, Charlotte.</p> <p>Teacher (to Tristan) No, no, no, no, just the letter M. We're finding the letter M.</p> <p>So we gotta find ... (picks up the letter M for Tristan). Here you go. Here's the letter M."</p> <p>(The conversation continues ...)</p> <p>The range of teacher talk was also striking. For some classrooms, there was no evidence of much teacher talk at all. Some classrooms averaged less than one word per minute, while others included over 200 words per minute.</p> <p>Not much cognitively challenging talk occurred throughout the morning instructional hour. Although teachers engaged in about 14 utterances per minute, only one of the utterances, on average, was likely to be a meaningful wh-question, and only two included utterances that conveyed generalizable information. Conversational turns, as well, were limited to almost three turns on average, evidencing only half of the number of teacher–child interactions recommended by recent research (Zucker & Cabell, [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref64">79</reflink>]).</p> <p>Taken together, these data highlight the potential inequality in language opportunities across different contexts. Some children were likely to experience a language environment with frequent child-directed language, while others were likely to be in settings with limited language enrichment. Nevertheless, in all classes, children experienced a limited dose of cognitively challenging talk. Overall, it suggests that opportunities that challenged children to think and to build knowledge through talk were in short supply in classrooms throughout our sample.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-18">How the environmental context and the instructional content relate to teachers' talk</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0186418918-19">The Classroom Environment and Teachers' Child-Directed Talk</hd> <p>Table 3 describes the results of the quality of the classroom environments, focusing on the availability of resources in these preschool classrooms. Quality measures indicated that classrooms largely included work station areas for children to play, book and library resources, and print areas, with more limited instructional displays. Overall, these data suggest that these environments in terms of resource allocations were of good quality.</p> <p>Table 3. Means and standard deviations of the quality of the classroom environment.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Quality of ...</td><td>Classroom Features</td><td>Correlation with language cues</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Work station areas (15 possible)</td><td>13.35 (<italic>SD</italic> = 1.50)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Literacy areas (12 possible)</td><td>9.75 (<italic>SD</italic> = 2.54)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Print areas (12 possible)</td><td>8.38 (<italic>SD</italic> = 3.33)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Instructional displays (9 possible)</td><td>4.57 (<italic>SD</italic> = 2.37)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Overall quality (Out of 48 possible)</td><td>36.25 (<italic>SD</italic> = 8.66)</td><td>.07 (n.s.) Quality of language.05 (n.s.) Cognitive challenge of language</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>However, as shown in the Table, the correlation between the overall quality of these environments was not related to the teachers' child-directed language. There were no statistically significant relationships between the quality features or the cognitive complexity or instructional language of their talk. In short, this analysis indicated that the environmental features of classrooms did not appear to play a role in the amount or quality of teachers' interactions with children.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-20">Variation in Teachers' Talk Based on the Instructional Content</hd> <p>We next examined whether teachers' child-directed talk might be influenced by the specific activity of instruction. In total, less than half of the recording time (40%) was dedicated to any instructional time either in whole group, small group, or learning center activity. Notably, the majority of that time—40%—was devoted to alphabetics, while all other activities combined accounted for less than half of that duration. Table 4 describes the activities and average amount of time devoted to them.</p> <p>Table 4. Means, standard deviations, and range of activities (percent of academic time on each activity).</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td /><td>Mean (and SD) percent of recorded time</td><td>Range in percent of recorded time</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Total Planned Activities</td><td>40% (38.54)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Activity</td><td>Mean (and <italic>SD</italic>) percent of activity time</td><td>Range in proportion of activity time</td></tr><tr><td>Alphabetics</td><td>40% (33.63)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Sight words</td><td>2% (7.22)</td><td>0–46%</td></tr><tr><td>Book Reading</td><td>14% (27.13)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Vocabulary</td><td>3% (11.90)</td><td>0–83%</td></tr><tr><td>Writing</td><td>9% (18.72)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Math</td><td>10% (23.2)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Science</td><td>10% (22.33)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td>Social Studies</td><td>1% (4.69)</td><td>0–27%</td></tr><tr><td>Dramatic Play</td><td>11% (27.85)</td><td>0–100%</td></tr><tr><td><bold>Teachable moments</bold></td><td>6.75%</td><td>0–10%</td></tr><tr><td>Alphabetics</td><td>1.3% (2.46)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Vocabulary</td><td>.5% (.92)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Math</td><td>2.3% (3.91)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Science</td><td>1.6% (2.83)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Writing</td><td>.3% (1.39)</td><td /></tr><tr><td>Social studies</td><td>.6% (2.4)</td><td /></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Similarly, informal conversations around teachable moments throughout the recorded sessions were rare. The few instances were likely to occur in math (2.3%) or science (1.6%). For example, during an art activity where children were creating ladybugs, the teacher commented, "A ladybug is symmetrical, which means it has the same number of dots on each side. Let's count them together." Similarly, while playing with a doll in the housekeeping area, the teacher pointed out, "Look, this doll is making a shadow. A shadow is the dark shape that appears when something blocks the light." Teachable moments related to alphabetics (1.3% of observed time) might include transitions, such as when the teacher guided children to centers by saying, "If your name begins with this letter, you may go to the center ... (pause) E." Overall, however, teachable moments occurred infrequently.</p> <p>Unfortunately, the emphasis on alphabetics, dominating the instructional time, seemed to have consequences on the quality and the cognitive challenge of teachers' child-directed language. Table 5 reports the correlation between the instructional activities and teachers' talk. As noted in the Table, time spent on alphabetics negatively correlated with all language features. This was evident in the quality and diversity of teachers' language and its potential for cognitive challenge. In short, time spent on alphabetics had the least potential for rich language interactions.</p> <p>Table 5. Correlation of time on academic subjects with teacher language.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Activity</td><td>Teacher Quantity of language (Utterances per minute)</td><td>Quantity of language (words per minute)*</td><td>Diversity of language (unique words per minute)</td><td>Complexity of language (Conjunctions per minute)*</td><td>Instructional language (Generic nouns per minute)*</td><td>Instructional language (WH-questions)</td><td>Instructional language (Conversational Turns)*</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Overall academic time</td><td>.47**</td><td>.28*</td><td>.09</td><td>.20†</td><td>.17</td><td>.40**</td><td>−.14</td></tr><tr><td>Alphabet</td><td>.08</td><td>−.13</td><td>−.14</td><td>−.23*</td><td>−.19†</td><td>−.10</td><td>−.269*</td></tr><tr><td>Sight words</td><td>.02</td><td>−.05</td><td>−.11</td><td>−.10</td><td>−.06</td><td>.08</td><td>.05</td></tr><tr><td>Book Reading</td><td>−.10</td><td>−.17</td><td>.20†</td><td>−.12</td><td>−.09</td><td>−.18</td><td>−.10</td></tr><tr><td>Vocab</td><td>.06</td><td>.36**</td><td>.29*</td><td>.39**</td><td>.37**</td><td>.29*</td><td>−.03</td></tr><tr><td>Writing</td><td>.15</td><td>−.04</td><td>−.16</td><td>−.06</td><td>−.15</td><td>−.06</td><td>−.21†</td></tr><tr><td>Math</td><td>−.04</td><td>.01</td><td>−.08</td><td>−.03</td><td>−.02</td><td>−.04</td><td>.16</td></tr><tr><td>Science</td><td>.07</td><td>.12</td><td>.10</td><td>.18</td><td>.28*</td><td>.20†</td><td>.38**</td></tr><tr><td>Social Studies</td><td>−.08</td><td>−.04</td><td>−.06</td><td>−.04</td><td>.08</td><td>.12</td><td>.06</td></tr><tr><td>Dramatic Play</td><td>−.16</td><td>.11</td><td>−.02</td><td>.18</td><td>.06</td><td>.05</td><td>.13</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>1 Note: † <emph>p</emph> <.10; *<emph>p</emph> <.05; **<emph>p</emph> <.01.</p> <p>In contrast, times spent on vocabulary and science were significant and positively related to teachers' child directed language, supporting the most complex, generalizable, and pedagogical language. Dramatic play showed some positive correlation with teachers' challenging talk though the relationship was not significant.</p> <p>But other instructional times generally showed negative relationships with teacher talk. Perhaps, the most surprising was the negative relationship between book reading and teacher talk features, a stark contrast to much of the research on storybook reading (Dowdall et al., [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref65">13</reflink>]) and potentially, reflecting limited interactive engagement when reading books with children. Together, these findings indicate that, apart from vocabulary and science instruction, cognitively stimulating discourse that fosters knowledge-building was largely absent during instructional time.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-21">Teachers' beliefs about their engagement in knowledge-building talk</hd> <p>Survey results, on the other hand, showed that teachers were largely confident about their ability to engage children in language and literacy activities: 100% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they were able to support children's language development and could help children learn new words. Moreover, 96% agreed or strongly agreed that they used wh-questions, and 93% enjoyed answering their questions. At the same time, teachers were more sanguine about working with children who exhibited language delays: in this case, only 60% were confident about their abilities.</p> <p>Consequently, these responses suggest that teachers' confidence in their teaching may not necessarily coincide with their actual practice or the day-to-day realities in the classroom. Even with their overall confidence in teaching language and literacy, however, over 73% indicated they could use more training in supporting language development Table 6.</p> <p>Table 6. Teacher survey responses.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Question</td><td>Strongly Agree</td><td>Agree</td><td>Neutral</td><td>Disagree</td><td>Strongly Disagree</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>I am confident in my ability to support the early reading skills of all of the children in my care.</td><td>71.7%</td><td>28.3%</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>I think that I can help all of the children in my care learn new words.</td><td>71.7%</td><td>28.3%</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>I am confident that I can teach all of the children in my care to answer wh-questions</td><td>52.2%</td><td>43.5%</td><td>4.3%</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>I enjoy answering children's questions to help them learn new information.</td><td>67%</td><td>26%</td><td>0</td><td>3%</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Changing my practice to better support early language development would take a lot of time and energy.</td><td>19.6%</td><td>8.7%</td><td>19.6%</td><td>45.7%</td><td>6.5%</td></tr><tr><td>I need to learn more about how to support children's language development.</td><td>15.2%</td><td>58.7%</td><td>17.4%</td><td>6.5%</td><td>2.2%</td></tr><tr><td>I have the knowledge and skills to work effectively with a child who has language delays.</td><td>21.7%</td><td>39.1%</td><td>26.1%</td><td>13%</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Being able to support children's language development is more important to me than other teaching skills.</td><td>19.6%</td><td>17.4%</td><td>52.2%</td><td>10.9%</td><td>0</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0186418918-22">Discussion</hd> <p>Children thrive in linguistically rich preschool classrooms. Studies have shown that teachers' conversational and linguistic responsivity when interacting with children are linked to children's language growth (Bratsch-Hines et al., [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref66">4</reflink>]; Donnelly & Kidd, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref67">12</reflink>]). Recognizing the importance of these language exchanges, the purpose of our study was to examine the language environment in classrooms and its potential for building cognitively challenging talk that promotes knowledge-building. Based on numerous studies, the knowledge that children bring and develop through schooling has a profound effect on what children come to understand, remember and learn in texts (McCarthy & McNamara, [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref68">46</reflink>]).</p> <p>Our goal was to better understand the opportunities for building knowledge through language in preschool, knowing that the potential for vocabulary growth for young children is at its peak during these years (Farkas & Beron, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref69">15</reflink>]). We sought to understand the instructional circumstances that might support teachers' talk features and whether these exchanges were likely to occur in certain content domains more than others. To measure these features, studies have often used observational techniques which can be time-consuming, and at times, subject to bias, with teachers changing their natural teaching style due to the presence of an observer (Quintero, [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref70">58</reflink>]). Rather than relying on observations in previous studies, we used a cutting-edge open-source tool that could automatically identify the characteristics of teachers' child-directed talk through voice recordings to more accurately examine these features in greater detail. In contrast to traditional observations, it allowed for a more precise, scalable, cost-effective approach that could provide data-driven insights into the nature of teacher–child interactions.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-23">Teachers' uses of talk for knowledge-building</hd> <p>Our analysis showed that on an average morning, teachers' linguistic repertoire and their uses of cognitively challenging talk, a source of knowledge-building, was strikingly limited. The density and diversity of the words they used were low, and conversational exchanges, uses of wh-questions, and generic phases were all in short supply in the classrooms. Even their use of teachable moments, those brief, unscripted times when they could have provided snippets of information during other activities were rarely in evidence in any of these classrooms. Consequently, overall, the quality of language supports for young children in these early childhood settings was far from optimal for vocabulary development and knowledge-building. It revealed a stark paucity of opportunities for children to acquire the language and content knowledge essential for later learning.</p> <p>These results may have serious consequences for children's longer-term literacy development. While theoretically distinct, oral language, prior knowledge, and early literacy skills share a strong interdependent relationship and serve as important precursors to skilled reading (Cabell et al., [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref71">8</reflink>]). Due to their concurrent relationship, the lack of language opportunities may place children at a disadvantage for learning code-related skills later on. It may also have serious consequences for children's longer-term ability to comprehend information from text. Given that prior knowledge is said to predict between 30–60% of the variance in comprehension performance (Shapiro, [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref72">64</reflink>]), and that developing content knowledge is a slow and cumulative process that is acquired over time (Hirsch, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref73">30</reflink>]), the lack of attention to knowledge-building may also place children at a significant disadvantage, especially in the later grades. Therefore, while quality talk and challenging language opportunities may be beneficial for all children, these practices in preschool are particularly pivotal for those who may come to school from under-resourced communities with more limited resources.</p> <p>What might account for the low-level of teachers' child-directed talk? From a socio-ecological lens, multiple systems outside of the classrooms may partly account for the limitations of teacher talk (Burdick-Will et al., [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref74">6</reflink>]; Reardon & Portilla, [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref75">60</reflink>]). For example, early care and education programs in this region, similar to other areas across the country, tended to operate independently of one another without a cohesive system. Different programs such as state-related prekindergarten, private childcare centers, Head Start, and Title I programs all function under separate funding streams, regulations, and quality standards, leading to a patchwork of programs with variations in curriculum, differences in teacher preparation, and opportunities for professional learning (Friedman-Krauss et al., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref76">16</reflink>]). As a result, our data showed that language interactions in classrooms were highly variable, suggesting that a child's early learning experiences could look drastically different dependent on where it was located and what program the child might attend.</p> <p>State policies might have influenced how programs interpreted their role in preparing young children for more formal education. Recent legislation on the science of reading adopted in 48 states (Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref77">53</reflink>]), for example, has called for a greater focus on word recognition skills. Emphasis on foundational skills, such as phonological awareness and letter knowledge, might have shifted attention away from the importance of teacher–child interactions, and oral language development. Since alphabet skills and letter sounds are directly teachable and easily accessed, it may reflect teachers' pressure to be accountable for gains in children's progress in preschool. Unfortunately, teaching these constrained skills may limit the time or attention to the broader set of competencies such as language learning, vocabulary, and comprehension (e.g. unconstrained skills) that develop over time and are not as easily measurable as constrained skills (Paris, [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref78">56</reflink>]). Nonetheless, as demonstrated in a study of Boston Public Schools (McCormick et al., [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref79">47</reflink>]), these unconstrained skills seem to have more lasting power over time. McCormick et al. ([<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref80">47</reflink>]) found that by third grade, unconstrained skills had a more sustained impact on achievement compared to constrained skills. These findings, once again, highlight the importance of a rich foundation of language development in the early years, and the need for better guidance to promote a greater balance between constrained and unconstrained skills.</p> <p>Relatedly curriculum decisions may also play an important role in accounting for the limitations in teacher talk. Although a small number of classrooms in this study indicated that they had a curriculum (e.g. Creative Curriculum), most relied on locally developed instructional plans or activities. However, neither of these approaches to curriculum has been shown to be effective at improving oral language or print knowledge (Jenkins et al., [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref81">35</reflink>]). In contrast, in an examination of a wide-corpus of pre-K curriculum, Jenkins and her colleagues (Jenkins et al., [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref82">34</reflink>]) found that content-specific curricula (e.g. literacy; math) was associated with higher achievement gains. The most encouraging results came from programs that featured rich instructional content and a scope and sequence in a content domain.</p> <p>Evidence in our study supports this contention and the influence of content instruction on teacher talk. The brief moments spent on vocabulary and science gave us glimpses of the potential for rich teacher-child exchanges, showing more evidence of complex and high-quality teacher talk. In short, it suggests that the content of instruction may relate to <emph>how</emph> teachers interact with children, giving a reason and a purpose for conversational exchanges. These results align with previous research indicating a connection between the quality of teachers' oral language exchanges and the effectiveness of instructional activities in science and social studies (Cabell et al., [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref83">7</reflink>]; Wright, [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref84">76</reflink>]). Studhalter and colleagues (Studhalter et al., [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref85">67</reflink>]), for example, found that teachers' content-specific language in early science teaching enhanced children's conceptual learning of science topics.</p> <p>On the other hand, the quality of the classroom literacy-related environment did not play an important role in predicting teachers' child-directed talk. This lack of a relationship might be due to the limited variance across sites: Most preschool classrooms in our sample appeared to have an adequate literacy-enriched environment with interest centers and access to resources. However, it might also raise a question of whether certain structural features of a classroom (e.g. number of resources; availability of interest centers) effectively predict the quality of everyday interactions in these settings. In a more molecular analysis of structural features, Hanno and colleagues in a large- scale study (Hanno et al., [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref86">28</reflink>]) found that group size and child-to-adult ratio, not resources or materials, were the only structural features linked to the quality of children's experiences in the classroom.</p> <p>Therefore, while the relationship between classroom quality and teacher is often assumed to be positive, it might be that teacher talk is shaped by other influences. A study by Hamre et al. ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref87">27</reflink>]), for example, found that teachers' discourse practices were shaped by their training, professional development, and instructional beliefs more than the classroom materials or organization. Confirming this finding, our study of over 300 preschool classrooms across a mid-western state indicated that professional development in language-rich instruction was a stronger predictor of teacher talk quality than the physical learning environment itself (Neuman & Cunningham, [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref88">51</reflink>]). Therefore, unless teachers intentionally leverage these resources, using them to provide more opportunities for interaction, their talk quality is unlikely to change. These findings underscore the importance of professional development and intentional discourse strategies to improve the depth and quality of teacher–child interactions.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-24">Teachers beliefs about knowledge-building</hd> <p>Our findings contrast with teachers' self-perceptions regarding their teaching practices and the extent to which they engaged children in conversation and knowledge-building. Despite their confidence – reporting over 96% certainty in their ability to foster rich discussions – teachers spent minimal time on cognitively challenging questioning and vocabulary development. They rarely used wh-questions, allocated less than 5% of their instructional time to teaching new words, and engaged in only brief conversational exchanges with students. This discrepancy suggests a misalignment between teachers' beliefs and their actual classroom practices.</p> <p>Several factors might help to explain these findings. For one, teachers, like many professionals, may overestimate their skills due to self-perception biases. They may assume they are engaging in rich dialogue simply because they frequently talk to children. This bias has been described as a Dunning-Kruger effect or an illusory superiority effect (Kruger & Dunning, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref89">40</reflink>]) that may prevent someone from accurately examining their own actions. With their busy schedules, teachers might seek examples that support their beliefs in their strong language practices while overlooking moments when deeper conversations would be possible. For example, teachers might believe that storybook reading activity is an ideal time for language development yet not take advantage of that time. As our data indicated, there was a striking lack of teacher talk or teacher–child interactions during book reading activities.</p> <p>Once again, these findings may also point to external influences that contribute to the disconnect between teachers' beliefs and their instructional practices. State or local policies outside the classroom may prioritize rote learning and direct instruction – focusing on correct answers rather than fostering conversation and exploration. Recent reading reform policies across the country have further reinforced this trend, emphasizing skill-building as the core of early literacy development while often neglecting oral language and knowledge-building (Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref90">53</reflink>]). Moreover, given the fragmented nature of the preschool landscape, these findings may highlight the inadequacies in teacher training and ongoing professional development. Many teacher preparation programs have traditionally not provided explicit instruction in techniques such as scaffolding, open-ended questioning, and the importance of extended conversational turns, nor have they emphasized the critical role of oral language development (Dickinson & Caswell, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref91">10</reflink>]). Consequently, teachers might not recognize patterns of low-level, rote-like questioning or missed opportunities for child-led discourse.</p> <p>Finally, and perhaps most concerning, these patterns may reflect teachers' underlying beliefs – conscious or unconscious – about children's capacities to engage in meaningful language exchanges. They may underestimate children's ability to engage in deep conversations, leading to more simplistic talk which neither challenges children nor supports their interest in learning more about their world.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-25">Implications</hd> <p>How can we create richer language opportunities for knowledge-building? There are a number of important implications in this study. First, teachers will need more training and support for creating a language-rich environment. Professional development and training on dialogic reading, developing open-ended questioning, and extending children's language exchanges are some of the techniques that have been shown to enhance child-directed talk. Second, and relatedly, job-embedded coaching with continuing feedback, might lead to more intentional language opportunities. Providing teachers with structured self-reflection tools (e.g. classroom recordings) could help to increase their awareness of talk patterns and promote more conversational language use with children. Third, programs should consider adopting and implementing a structured curricular package. Research indicates that classrooms that use a curriculum with instructional content, highly detailed lessons, and training on these resources appear to improve the language and instructional quality of classrooms compared to those without a formal curriculum. In contrast to a whole-child curriculum (e.g. Creative Curriculum; High Scope), recent evidence suggests that more targeted curricula (e.g. math, literacy) are associated with high quality scores and more frequency literacy and math activities. Fourth, from a policy perspective, integrating language development metrics into early learning standards and screening assessments could incentivize stronger classroom discourse policies. Policy makers could use these metrics to establish explicit benchmarks to prioritize language in the classroom and potentially align these measures with K-3 literacy expectations to create a seamless transition for children entering formal schooling. And finally, establishing benchmarks to ensure that children are receiving a richer and more fulfilling language environment would help to ensure that all children – regardless of background or the particular program they are attending – have access to rich, knowledge-building language experiences in early childhood settings.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-26">Limitations</hd> <p>There are several important limitations in this research. Consistent with prior work (Cabell et al., [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref92">8</reflink>]), our study opted for an analysis of many different sites throughout many regions rather than a more in-depth analysis of a small number of sites. We recognize this decision is a trade-off, that is, breadth versus depth. In our case, we argued for breadth to better understand the extent to which programs might be helping children build language and knowledge. Our findings will hopefully inform programs about the need to address oral language more prominently in pre-service and professional development and lead to subsequent studies that delve more deeply into content-rich instruction.</p> <p>In addition, although the use of our automated recording tool allowed for a precise analysis of teacher talk and conversational turns, it was not designed to capture individual children's language. Therefore, it was not always possible to determine the children's actions or behaviors that might have elicited teachers' talk. Moreover, we based our categories of the quality and cognitive challenge of teachers' talk on those established in previous research which appeared to predict child outcomes, and instructional practices that were known to support children's thinking (Carlisle et al., [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref93">9</reflink>]). However, we recognize that there are clearly other instructional techniques that may engage children in cognitively challenging activities such as differentiating instruction, summarizing, or solving a problem that might have occurred that were not evident here. In addition, although our automated tool provided a wealth of teacher's language data, it failed to capture the many nuances of non-verbal communication, such as teachers' gestures or facial expressions which might also be important for children's language development (Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref94">21</reflink>]). Therefore, future studies should consider supplementing the information from this tool with in-person observations which might provide deeper insights into the classroom language environment. These observations may also help to refine and enhance the tool by capturing nuances that automated analysis alone may overlook. And finally, we chose to focus on teachers' child-directed talk features during the morning activities and not throughout the day.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-27">Conclusions</hd> <p>Studies have shown that the quality of teachers' child-directed language has a powerful effect on children's language learning and represents an important lever for knowledge-building in early childhood classrooms (Dickinson & Porche, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref95">11</reflink>]; Duncan et al., [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref96">14</reflink>]; Neuman et al., [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref97">55</reflink>]; Whittaker et al., [<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref98">75</reflink>]). Previous studies have reported that teachers' communication-facilitating behaviors, specifically their use of syntactically and semantically challenging talk in conversations predict children's vocabulary growth from preschool to kindergarten (Justice et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref99">36</reflink>]; Wang et al., [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref100">69</reflink>]). Further evidence suggests that these oral language skills make a causal contribution to the process of learning to read new words in the early grades (Wegener et al., [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref101">73</reflink>]) by helping children to acquire the representations of written words and their meanings that support rapid word recognition or orthographic learning.</p> <p>Consequently, these previous studies have shown the crucial contribution that high-quality teachers' talk can play on child language and knowledge development. However, the degree to which these language interactions actually occur in preschool classrooms, outside of any intervention activities, has not been well-documented. In this study, we attempted to measure the quantity and quality of teachers' child-directed talk using a tool that could capture language interactions of teachers in non-intrusive ways. It provided automated transcriptions that could allow for greater scrutiny of the content in which these language interactions took place to determine their potential for knowledge-building and language development.</p> <p>In future studies, such a voice-activated system could serve as a valuable feedback tool for both teacher preparation programs and in-service training, helping educators assess and refine their language interactions with children. By providing real-time data on teacher talk patterns, this system could also be used to track the magnitude of change in instructional discourse following targeted professional development. Additionally, future research should explore how changes in teacher behaviors correlate with children's language growth, offering critical insights into the effectiveness of language-rich interventions. Understanding these relationships could inform the development of evidence-based early interventions aimed at narrowing language disparities, improving early literacy outcomes, and enhancing long-term academic success. Moreover, integrating this technology into longitudinal studies could help to identify the most effective training strategies and instructional practices for fostering high-quality, knowledge-building conversations in early childhood classrooms.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-28">Acknowledgments</hd> <p>The authors wish to thank the teachers who allowed us to conduct this research.</p> <hd id="AN0186418918-29">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0186418918-30"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref3" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Allen, L., & Kelly, B. (2015). Transforming the workforce for children birth through age 8. National Academies Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref12" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. In P. D. 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  Group: Ti
  Data: Preschool Teachers' Child-Directed Talk: Unlocking Opportunities for Language Learning and Knowledge-Building
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  Data: English
– Name: Author
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  Group: Au
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Susan+B%2E+Neuman%22">Susan B. Neuman</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3065-1678">0000-0002-3065-1678</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Lauren+Krieger%22">Lauren Krieger</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Tanya+Kaefer%22">Tanya Kaefer</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Hugo+Gonzalez-Villisanti%22">Hugo Gonzalez-Villisanti</searchLink>
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  Label: Source
  Group: Src
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Early+Education+and+Development%22"><i>Early Education and Development</i></searchLink>. 2025 36(5):1134-1155.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Label: Peer Reviewed
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  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 22
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2025
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  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Early+Childhood+Education%22">Early Childhood Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Preschool+Education%22">Preschool Education</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Preschool+Teachers%22">Preschool Teachers</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interpersonal+Communication%22">Interpersonal Communication</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Preschool+Children%22">Preschool Children</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Language+Acquisition%22">Language Acquisition</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Knowledge+Level%22">Knowledge Level</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Audio+Equipment%22">Audio Equipment</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Preschool+Education%22">Preschool Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Classroom+Environment%22">Classroom Environment</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Efficacy%22">Self Efficacy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Language+Usage%22">Language Usage</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Difficulty+Level%22">Difficulty Level</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teacher+Attitudes%22">Teacher Attitudes</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/10409289.2025.2503024
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 1040-9289<br />1556-6935
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Research Findings: Preschool teachers' child-directed talk has a powerful and enduring impact on young children's language and knowledge development. This study examines the extent to which teachers engaged in talk that supports children's language and knowledge-building, and how it might vary in different instructional contexts in classrooms. Using a cutting-edge open-source tool that could automatically identify the characteristics of teachers' child-directed talk through voice recording, language experiences over a typical morning hour in 97 4-year-old classrooms were recorded from a variety of federal, state, and private preschool programs. In addition, a classroom literacy environmental checklist and a survey indicating the teachers' confidence in teaching language experiences were collected following the recording. Results revealed that the quality of linguistically and cognitively challenging talk was strikingly low. Instructional time was primarily devoted to alphabetics, with a stark paucity of opportunities for children to acquire the language and content knowledge essential for later learning. Despite this finding, however, teachers overwhelmingly indicated their confidence in engaging children in language-rich activities. Practice or Policy: These findings suggest that teachers will need more professional development and content-rich curricular support for creating a language-rich environment. Further, integrating language development metrics into early learning standards and screening assessments could incentivize stronger classroom discourse policies.
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  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2026
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  Label: Accession Number
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  Data: EJ1494324
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      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1080/10409289.2025.2503024
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      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 22
        StartPage: 1134
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Preschool Teachers
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Interpersonal Communication
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Preschool Children
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Language Acquisition
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      – SubjectFull: Knowledge Level
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      – SubjectFull: Audio Equipment
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      – SubjectFull: Preschool Education
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      – SubjectFull: Classroom Environment
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Self Efficacy
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      – SubjectFull: Language Usage
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      – SubjectFull: Difficulty Level
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      – SubjectFull: Teacher Attitudes
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      – TitleFull: Preschool Teachers' Child-Directed Talk: Unlocking Opportunities for Language Learning and Knowledge-Building
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