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Article

Teacher’s Use of English and Spanish Interactive Strategies during Wordless Shared Book Reading: Relations to Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses

by
Natalia M. Rojas
1,*,
Gigliana Melzi
2 and
Adina Schick
2
1
Department of Population Health, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA
2
Department of Applied Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Educ. Sci. 2024, 14(10), 1096; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14101096
Submission received: 18 June 2024 / Revised: 4 September 2024 / Accepted: 5 October 2024 / Published: 8 October 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supporting Multilingual Students in Schools: Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities)
Versions Notes

Abstract

:
Little attention has been paid to describing the ways early childhood education (ECE) teachers implement interactive strategies and the use of Spanish and English, in real time, to support Spanish–English emergent bilingual children’s contributions to shared book reading interactions. Video recordings from 19 ECE classrooms during shared book reading were used to conduct sequential analysis to examine the different types of interactive strategies (e.g., questions, extensions) implemented by bilingual ECE teachers and emergent bilinguals’ responses to these strategies. This study found that teachers’ interactive strategies may reflect a degree of reciprocity, with teachers and children sensitively attuned to one another’s contributions in real time. Teachers’ questions in English and Spanish were related to emergent bilinguals’ responses across a wide range of language complexity. Similarly, teachers and emergent bilinguals tended to respond to one another in the language of the prior utterance, suggesting teachers and emergent bilinguals are attuned to the contributions of one another. By examining teacher–child dynamics, this study produced results that can address issues that may have direct, translatable implications for ECE practice and intervention efforts.

1. Introduction

Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals are children learning Spanish and English simultaneously or sequentially and are one of the fastest-growing groups of children in the US [1]. Extant research indicates that high-quality early childhood education (ECE) builds upon emergent bilingual children’s early language and literacy skills in both English and Spanish, positively impacting their school readiness [2,3]. Even so, most ECE programs still teach emergent bilingual children primarily in English. They rarely draw upon the numerous assets that linguistically diverse emergent bilingual children bring into school, including their Spanish language skills.
Research suggests that culturally and linguistically responsive instruction in ECE, particularly in the domains of oral language and literacy, lays a strong foundation for the academic development of emergent bilinguals [4]. Shared book reading is a crucial instructional activity that supports emergent bilinguals’ language and literacy development [5,6]. This learning happens primarily through extratextual conversations between teachers and children, which are language interactions that go beyond the reading of the text. Teachers’ use of interactive strategies, such as questions and extensions of child contributions, provide children with rich language models and an opportunity to practice their oral language skills [7]. Emergent bilingual children, however, might be at a disadvantage during classroom group interactions, such as shared book reading, if these stimulating interactions with teachers are in English only [8,9]. Engaging Spanish and English during shared book reading may be more beneficial than monolingual instruction because teachers use one language to support the learning in the other, acknowledging the dual-language contexts in which emergent bilinguals are developing and learning [10,11]. Much of the shared book reading research has been conducted within English-instruction classrooms with monolingual English-speaking children. Therefore, there is a gap in our understanding of teachers’ use of Spanish and English alongside interactive strategies during wordless shared book reading within classrooms that serve Spanish–English-speaking emergent bilingual children.
The present study explored the language interactions between bilingual ECE teachers and their emergent bilingual children during shared book reading. The current study’s ECE classroom contexts reflect the widespread composition across the United States—classrooms with Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals and monolingual English-speaking children. This study relied on sequential analysis to examine (1) the different types of interactive strategies that stimulate back-and-forth dialogue and (2) emergent bilingual children’s responses to teachers’ interactive bids. Sequential analysis provides a conditional probability that a teacher’s interactive strategy is followed in time by a particular response from an emergent bilingual child. That is, it provides support for a cause-effect relation between the teacher and emergent bilingual children’s behaviors. While interactive strategies have been identified as particularly important for emergent bilingual children, outside of intervention studies, few studies have described how teachers implement these strategies in bilingual contexts to support emergent bilingual children’s contributions in shared book reading interactions. Moreover, despite the extant literature on the effects of teachers’ interactive strategies on ECE children’s language, only three studies analyzed children’s responses, and only one focused on emergent bilinguals [12,13]. Here, we advance this research by exploring emergent bilinguals’ contingent responses to teachers’ interactive strategies, a current gap in the literature, and an avenue that warrants more attention.

2. Teacher Interactive Strategies and Emergent Bilinguals’ Talk during Shared Book Reading

This study is situated within the sociocultural perspective [14], which theorizes that children learn language through interactions with more skilled speakers in their immediate contexts, such as teachers in the classroom. Most importantly, sociocultural theory provides a framework that shifts the focus from a child’s individual experience during a particular conversational event to the micro-level language learning processes embedded in the conversational event. Thus, a sociocultural framework foregrounds how children learn language as they interact with and interpret their world within their cultural community through socially mediated activities [15].
Shared book reading in a classroom context promotes adult–child talk based on the premise that the adults (i.e., teachers) should (a) encourage children to talk about the books that are read to them, (b) provide maximally supportive feedback to children, and (c) scaffold progressive changes in children’s abilities [16]. Additionally, there are specific practices, or interactive strategies, that adults can use to encourage children’s talk and extend or respond to children’s conversational offerings about the book.
One such interactive strategy is questioning. During the instructional experience of shared book reading, for example, teachers’ use of questions is critically important in supporting the back-and-forth linguistic exchanges with children. Teachers’ use of questions during shared book reading positively affects a wide range of children’s language and literacy skills [7,17]. Questions allow children to reflect on the text and vocabulary, connect new information to prior experiences, and use vocabulary to share their views [18]. Surprisingly, little descriptive research has focused on the rates of teachers’ typical questioning practices during shared book reading, specifically with emergent bilingual children, who constitute 25% of all children in ECE settings [1]. Past studies with monolingual English-speaking children suggest that teachers’ overall proportion of questions is moderate—approximately 25 to 35% of utterances during shared book reading [19,20,21]. For emergent bilingual children who are potentially engaging in two languages within ECE classrooms, the rates of teachers’ use of questions might be lower. Therefore, further descriptive exploration of teachers’ use of questions during shared book reading within classrooms of Spanish–English-speaking emergent bilinguals will make a necessary and important contribution to the literature by documenting how teachers navigate supporting emergent bilingual children’s contributions to shared book reading discussions in both languages.
Another key interactive strategy identified in the larger classroom literature during shared book reading is the teachers’ responsiveness to children’s linguistic contributions through extensions and expansions of children’s language. These strategies are crucial for fostering children’s productive language skills because they follow a child’s contribution to a conversation and directly build on a child’s topic to provide more information or explanation [22]. For instance, teachers may expand upon a child’s statement, building upon or correcting the child’s utterance to enhance the complexity or comprehensibility. By responding to a child’s utterance, a teacher places language within the child’s zone of proximal development [23]. In other words, teachers’ extensions and expansions are likely more interpretable responses to the child because they relate to the ongoing activity and are relevant to the child’s interest. In addition, teachers’ use of extensions allows them to follow the child’s lead, promotes extended discourse, and builds their knowledge, all associated with vocabulary gains [24].
For all children, especially emergent bilingual children, their active participation is critical for them to reap the benefits of shared book reading interactions. Nonetheless, many studies focus on the association between teachers’ practices during shared book reading and children’s vocabulary at a later point in time [25,26]; few studies have analyzed children’s real-time responses during shared book reading [12]. Children’s actual speech, typically operationalized as their length of utterances, is often used as a proxy for the language children can produce, especially with children under five. Prior studies, for instance, demonstrate that children’s length of responses during shared book reading is related to gains in a range of early literacy skills, including vocabulary, oral narrative abilities, and reading comprehension [24,27].

3. Unidirectional and Bidirectional Relations between Emergent Bilinguals’ Responses to Teachers’ Interactive Strategies

Studies seeking to test bidirectional, rather than unidirectional, associations between teachers’ use of interactive strategies and emergent bilinguals’ responses are rare, and thus, evidence of bidirectionality remains scant. Most existing literature focuses on whether teachers’ use of questions is related to children’s talk. Different studies have examined the types of questions that facilitate children’s talk during shared book reading [7,28]. These studies often categorize questions according to cognitive challenge and type, including open- or closed-ended [7], knowledge-building [29], literal or inferential [28], wh-style, and yes/no-style questions [18]. One study found that teachers who asked wh- or open-ended questions had children who responded more frequently with longer utterances than those who used mostly closed-ended or yes/no questions [19]. Yet, teachers’ use of questions that result in children’s talk might be relatively rare [25].
Prior research has also examined how ECE teachers extend and expand children’s talk [22]. However, studies rarely explored whether teachers’ use of extensions and expansions is related to the length of children’s responses or whether the length of children’s contributions to a classroom language exchange may also influence teachers’ use of questions, extensions, and expansions. A few existing studies suggest a bidirectional relation between teachers’ use of extensions and expansions and children’s talk. For example, one study found that children who produce longer utterances give teachers more conversational content to build upon for further use of discourse strategies, suggesting that the longer children’s utterances are, the more likely teachers are to respond with a question, extension, or expansion [19]. Results from two studies with monolingual English-speaking children discovered that children’s speech reflects the language of adults’ immediately contingent utterances [18,28]. That is, children adjust their responses to match what was expressed by their teachers [30]. Nonetheless, more research is needed to examine the potential bidirectionality between teachers’ use of interactive strategies and children’s responses, particularly among emergent bilingual children.

4. Role of Spanish and English in the Bidirectional Relation between Teachers’ Interactive Strategies and Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses

Emergent bilingual children enter the ECE classroom with a wide range of experiences and skill levels in Spanish and English [31]. Their language development in Spanish and English depends on the quality and amount of input received in both languages [32], suggesting teachers should utilize Spanish and English, when possible, to support their learning and development best [4]. Interactive strategies in Spanish might help emergent bilinguals access content that otherwise would be unfamiliar to them if offered only in English [33]. Teachers must be aware of emergent bilinguals’ proficiency in Spanish and English to differentiate appropriate interactive strategies based on an individual child’s language skills. Depending on emergent bilingual children’s skill level in Spanish and English, the language teachers use might serve different purposes [34]. Teachers make in-the-moment language choices when using interactive strategies to make the content understandable and to engage and challenge emergent bilinguals with varying English and Spanish proficiency levels. For example, if a child has weaker English language skills, a teacher’s use of expansion in English might be particularly valuable for their development of English language skills. Thus, the language of the interactive strategy may generate different responses from an emergent bilingual child depending on their distribution of language skills.
Nonetheless, outside of intervention studies, we know little regarding how teachers use Spanish and English when implementing interactive strategies (e.g., Spanish versus English) and the possible bidirectional relation between teachers’ use of Spanish and English with interactive strategies and emergent bilingual children’s responses in Spanish and English during shared book reading activity. Teachers often asked Spanish questions requiring children to recall information, resulting in limited extended discourse [35]. In contrast, teachers tended to ask English questions requiring children to make personal connections to the text, resulting in more extended responses [35]. These findings suggest that for emergent bilinguals, the interactive strategies and the language teachers use may result in different response lengths, resulting in various opportunities to engage in further enriching conversation. Examining how teachers’ interactive utterances yield differential emergent bilingual children’s response lengths can provide critical information for how teachers can best engage emergent bilingual children during group settings.
Moreover, most extant work does not explore the potential contribution of emergent bilingual children’s responses to teachers’ interactive language, that is, the relationship between the length of emergent bilingual children’s responses in English and Spanish and teachers’ use of Spanish and English interactive strategies during shared book reading. Qualitative studies suggest that teachers often follow the language lead of emergent bilinguals [36,37]; if an emergent bilingual child speaks to a teacher in Spanish, the teacher tends to respond in Spanish. However, empirical studies have yet to confirm this relationship.

5. The Current Study

The present study explored micro-level dynamics between teachers’ interactive strategies and emergent bilingual children’s responses during shared book reading within ECE classrooms serving Spanish–English emergent bilingual children. This study focused specifically on teacher–emergent bilingual children’s interactions during a shared book reading of wordless picture books, as past literature has suggested that, when used in ECE classroom settings, teachers encourage children’s participation and engage them more in co-construction of the study when using wordless picture books compared to text-based book reading [38,39]. Our sequential analysis aimed to understand better whether teachers’ interactive strategies in Spanish or English might lead to or facilitate children’s responses in Spanish and English. Specifically, we addressed six research questions: (1) How frequently do bilingual teachers ask questions and extend emergent bilingual children’s language during shared book reading? (2) What is the distribution of Spanish versus English in bilingual teachers’ questions and language extensions during shared book reading? (3) What is the length and complexity of emergent bilinguals’ responses to bilingual teachers’ questions and language extensions? (4) What is the distribution of Spanish versus English in emergent bilingual children’s responses to bilingual teachers’ questions and language extensions? (5) How does the bilingual teachers’ choice of language (Spanish or English) relate to the length/complexity of emergent bilingual children’s responses (across questions and extensions)? (6) How do emergent bilingual children’s choice of language (Spanish or English) and language complexity relate to the bilingual teacher’s language choice and interactive strategy?
Given the limited research regarding whether the teacher–classroom language dynamic may be bidirectional, the following exploratory hypotheses were formed: First, we expected the sequential associations between teachers’ interactive strategies and emergent bilingual children’s length of utterance to be significant in both directions. Teachers’ interactive strategies would predict emergent bilingual children’s responses and vice versa. Second, we expected that there might be evidence of teachers and emergent bilinguals mirroring each other’s language use, such that we would find significant sequential associations in both directions. Third, we posited that interactive strategies in Spanish might result in shorter responses from emergent bilingual children, while interactive strategies in English may result in longer responses from emergent bilingual children.

6. Methods

6.1. Participants

Participants included 19 ECE lead teachers from 8 schools predominantly serving children from low-income Latine families (We chose to use the gender-inclusive "e" ending adopted in Spanish-speaking countries to refer to teachers with a background originated in Latin America.). Teachers ranged in age from 27 to 71 years old (M = 40.76; SD = 12.13), and all but one participating teacher identified as female. Most teachers identified as Latine (88%), with one teacher identifying as Black and one selecting “other” for their race/ethnicity. Most teachers (71%) were born in the mainland United States, two teachers were from Puerto Rico, and the remaining three were from other Latin American countries. On average, teachers had about 8.88 years of experience as lead teachers (SD = 7.91, range = 1–23). Fifty-nine percent of teachers had at least a master’s degree or higher, 35% had earned a bachelor’s degree, and one teacher had earned an associate’s degree.
Sixty-three percent of classrooms were in Head Start centers, 32% were in a non-Head Start community-based preschool, and one classroom was in a public school. This study drew upon a set of classrooms with various official language policies. Approximately 12 of the classrooms (63%) were designated as English–Spanish bilingual classrooms (i.e., instruction took place in both English and Spanish), and seven classrooms (37%) were designated as mainstream English-instruction classrooms. Most classrooms were full-day (68%), with the remaining classrooms (32%) operating on a half-day schedule. Each classroom served an average of 17 children (SD = 2.09), aged 3 to 5 years old. At least 65% of children enrolled in each participating Head Start center were Latine and from Spanish-speaking families.

6.2. Procedure

Teachers were visited in the late fall during their regularly scheduled circle time. They were audio and video recorded as they shared the wordless picture book “A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog” [40], which has been previously used as a measure of naturalistic language in classrooms serving children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds [27,39]. Teachers were encouraged to share the book as usual, and no time or other limitations were placed on their book sharing. Teachers’ storytelling interactions were later transcribed and verified at the utterance level by trained native speakers of Spanish and English using CHAT conventions [41]. The transcribers and verifiers completed training in using the CHAT conventions. Then, they demonstrated knowledge of and adherence to the CHAT conventions by completing several practice transcripts before being cleared by a senior member of the team.

6.3. Coding

A mutually exclusive and exhaustive coding system was developed to code teachers’ questions, extensions of children’s language, and children’s contributions (see Table 1). The unit of analysis was the utterance; utterances were identified at the time of transcription using grammatical closure, intonation contour, or prolonged pausing—a convention used by other studies [42]. Exclusions of teacher utterances occurred when the utterances focused on behavior management (e.g., are you paying attention?), statements providing information about the story (storytelling), and praise. Exclusions of child utterances occurred when utterances were brief (i.e., filler words) and were unintelligible. Spanish–English bilingual researchers coded the transcriptions. Five (26%) transcripts were randomly selected to be double-coded. Good inter-rater reliability was achieved on coding with an average agreement of 86% (SD = 0.23). Disagreements were resolved through discussions between coders.

6.4. Teacher Interactive Strategies

Teachers’ interactive strategies were coded into four categories: (a) questions, (b) extensions of children’s languages, (c) combinations of questions and extensions, and (d) translations and codeswitching. Teachers’ questions were coded, including open-ended (e.g., what was your favorite part of the story?) and closed-ended questions (e.g., did the boy catch the frog?) directed at the classroom or individual children. An extension was coded when the teacher produced an utterance that repeated and expanded on what a child said or provided additional information about a topic. Extensions were only coded when a child’s conversational turn directly preceded the teacher’s utterance. For example, an utterance could be coded as both a question and an extension if the teacher asked a question following a child’s turn that simultaneously extended what the child said (e.g., the child says “there”, the teacher responds, “he’s there but where?”). Teachers’ translations were coded when an utterance was restating in one language what had just been said in another language in the preceding utterance or an utterance containing two or more languages. Teachers’ interactive utterances were also coded for the language used: Spanish, English, and bilingual.

6.5. Child Responses

Children’s responses to teachers’ utterances were coded for complexity and language. Non-verbal utterances included nodding, shaking their head, or shrugging. We reviewed videos of shared book reading to determine whether children were providing non-verbal responses to a discourse strategy. Single-word utterance was applied to any child utterance that was only one word long, including one-verb utterances, or an article + one word (e.g., the child says “la rana”, “frog”), even if it included false starts (e.g., the child says “The, the, the frog”). An utterance that contained more than one word but did not include a verb was classified as a phrasal utterance (e.g., the child says “To the house”). Utterances that included at least two words and a verb (i.e., subject + verb, verb + predicate, or subject + verb + predicate) were coded as a complex utterance (e.g., the child says “He was scared”) to capture their grammatical complexity. The language of each child’s utterance was coded as English, Spanish, or bilingual.

6.6. Analytic Strategy

Descriptive statistics were calculated to address our first and second research questions and provide context to subsequent sequential analyses to answer research questions 3 and 4. This study used sequential analysis to determine whether teacher questions and extensions in Spanish and English had a positive and immediate sequential dependency on the complexity of emergent bilingual responses in Spanish and English during shared book reading. Sequential analysis is a methodology used to examine potential dependencies between behaviors that unfold sequentially over time [43,44]. In addition, we tested the extent to which this pattern was evident in the opposite direction. Positive sequential values suggest a facilitative relation (e.g., teachers’ use of questions evokes children’s complex responses; children’s use of complex responses evokes teachers’ use of questions). In contrast, negative sequential values might suggest an inhibitory relation (i.e., teachers’ use of questions inhibited children’s complex responses or vice versa). Data were analyzed with the Generalized Sequential Querier (GSEQ) [43] to examine this relation using a lag 1 sequential method. Lag 1 sequential analysis asks whether the presence of one code increases the probability of the “target” code occurring immediately after. Data from all 19 classrooms were pooled to calculate the probability of event sequences (We conducted two sensitivity analyses to assess the validity of our results and ensure that classrooms with certain characteristics were not skewing the results. The first sensitivity analysis removed the English–Spanish bilingual classroom observed on a Spanish-only instruction day from the full sample. The second sensitivity analysis removed the mainstream English-instruction classrooms from the full sample. In both sensitivity analyses, the pattern of results remained the same compared to the results with the full sample of classrooms. Therefore, we report results from the entire sample of 19 classrooms, including the classroom observed on a Spanish-only instruction day and the mainstream English-instruction classrooms.).
To determine whether emergent bilinguals’ responses followed teachers’ questions and extensions more often than would be expected by chance (research question 5) and whether teachers’ questions and extensions followed emergent bilinguals’ responses more often than would be expected by chance (research question 6), we examined transitional probabilities of pooled data across classrooms using two sequential analysis test statistics: the adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q [43]. Adjusted residuals (z score) show how an observed joint frequency differs from chance, but underlying assumptions are normality and independence. However, these sequential pairs of behaviors are not independent when social interactions are analyzed. Therefore, we also considered the magnitude of Yule’s Q statistic, a measure of effect size that is more robust in response to the non-independent sequences of events analyzed [45]. The alpha level was set at 0.05; adjusted residuals of ±1.96 were considered significant. Like a correlation coefficient, Yule’s Q values range from −1.0 to +1.0, with values closer to zero indicating no meaningful relation. The guidelines for interpreting the strength of Yule’s Q are as follows: 0 to ±0.29, small; ±0.30 to ±0.49, moderate; ±0.50 to ±0.69, substantial; and ±0.70, very strong. Some of the Yule’s Q data were missing because the quantity of events of interest was insufficient to provide an estimate. When a row or column sum for a given contingency table is less than 5, GSEQ 5 software regards Yule’s Q as undefined.

7. Results

We analyzed 5317 utterances for this study: 3143 utterances produced by teachers and 2174 by emergent bilingual children. Thus, inferences derived are based on a large set of teachers and emergent bilingual children’s language productions. Twenty-two percent of teachers spoke only English during the shared book reading, 68% spoke in both languages, and 10% spoke only in Spanish.
The first and second research questions concerned how often teachers produced interactive utterances and the distribution of Spanish and English in bilingual teachers’ questions and language extensions. To account for the possibility that the length of shared book reading contributed to the frequency of interactive strategies and emergent bilinguals’ responses, we examined the correlations. The correlations revealed no statistically significant relationships between the length of the shared book reading and the teacher’s use of interactive strategies or emergent bilinguals’ responses, suggesting that the amount of time spent reading did not influence the frequency of strategies or responses. As shown in Table 2, the most frequent interactive strategy used by teachers was questions (58%), followed by extensions (26%), a combination of questions and extensions (2%), and translation (4%). More coded teachers’ utterances were in English (89%) than in Spanish (11%). In English, teachers most frequently asked questions (55%), followed by extensions (21%). In Spanish, teachers asked questions and extended emergent bilingual language at about the same frequency (5% questions; 4% extensions). The combination of questions and extensions in English and Spanish infrequently occurred (1% in English; 0% in Spanish). Similarly, teachers’ use of translation and codeswitching rarely occurred (1% in English; 2% in Spanish).
The third and fourth research questions explored the length/complexity of emergent bilinguals’ responses and the distribution of Spanish and English in their responses. Emergent bilinguals tended to respond most often with single words (46%), followed by complex responses (40%), and phrasal utterances (11%). More emergent bilinguals’ utterances were in English (83%) than in Spanish (15%) or non-verbal (2%). Emergent bilinguals responded most frequently with single words (39% in English and 7% in Spanish). Thirty-five percent of emergent bilingual utterances were English complex responses, and 5% were Spanish complex responses. Finally, 9% of emergent bilinguals’ responses were English phrasal, and 3% were Spanish phrasal responses.
The fifth research question concerned how bilingual teachers’ choice of language (Spanish or English) related to the length/complexity of emergent bilingual children’s responses (across questions and extensions). Teachers’ use of translation and children’s non-verbal responses were dropped from the sequential analysis due to the low frequencies. Similarly, teachers’ and children’s bilingual utterances were omitted. The adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q from the sequential analysis of teachers’ interactive utterances and emergent bilinguals’ responses are summarized in Table 3, with a significant deviation from the chance for the overall contingency table χ2 (63) = 1124.46, p < 0.01. Adjusted residuals showed a statistically significant association between teachers’ English questions and emergent bilingual English responses. When asked questions in English, emergent bilinguals responded in English with single-word (Yule’s Q = 0.42), phrasal (Yule’s Q = 0.20), and complex responses (Yule’s Q = 0.30). When teachers extended emergent bilinguals’ language in English, emergent bilinguals responded in English with phrasal (Yule’s Q = 0.29) and complex responses (Yule’s Q = 0.24). When teachers extended emergent bilinguals’ language and asked a question in English, emergent bilinguals responded in English with a complex response (Yule’s Q = 0.41). For example, the emergent bilingual said “Sad”, and the teacher responded, “he feels sad because the boy maybe boy go home. Do you think that his house is far away?”, and the emergent bilingual responded, “Home is far away.” These were considered small to moderate effects.
When teachers asked questions in Spanish, emergent bilinguals responded in Spanish with single-word (Yule’s Q = 0.93), phrasal (Yule’s Q = 0.94), and complex responses (Yule’s Q = 0.81; e.g., teacher asks “¿tú crees que el niño se quiere llevar a la rana a la casa?/do you think the boy wants to take the frog home?” and the emergent bilingual responds “sí/yes”). When teachers extended emergent bilinguals’ language in Spanish, emergent bilinguals responded in Spanish with single words (Yule’s Q = 0.78) and complex responses (Yule’s Q = 0.81). These were very strong effects.
The sixth research question explored how emergent bilinguals’ choice of language (Spanish or English) and language complexity related to the bilingual teacher’s language choice and interactive strategy. The adjusted residuals and Yule’s Q from the sequential analysis of emergent bilinguals’ responses and teachers’ interactive utterances are summarized in Table 4, with a significant deviation from the chance for the overall contingency table χ2 (72) = 1111.72, p < 0.01. Teachers followed emergent bilinguals English single-word (Yule’s Q = 0.47) and complex utterances (Yule’s Q = 0.34) with English questions. Teachers responded to emergent bilingual children’s English phrasal (Yule’s Q = 0.27) and complex utterances (Yule’s Q = 0.24) with extensions in English (e.g., the child said “green”, and the teacher responded, “The grass is green”). These effects were small to moderate.
Teachers responded to emergent bilinguals’ Spanish single-word (Yule’s Q = 0.94), phrasal (Yule’s Q = 0.95), and complex utterances (Yule’s Q = 0.84) with Spanish questions. In addition, teachers responded to emergent bilingual children’s single-word (Yule’s Q = 0.78) and complex utterances (Yule’s Q = 0.82) with Spanish extensions (e.g., the child said “va a casa la rana/the frog goes home”, and the teacher responded “el niño quiere agarrar a la rana/the boy wants to catch the frog”). These were very strong effects.

8. Discussion

The primary goals of this study were to examine the different types of English and Spanish interactive utterances teachers used during shared book reading and investigate the sequential relation between the types of interactive utterances produced by teachers and the complexity of emergent bilingual responses across Spanish and English. The present study addresses two gaps in this field. First, although many studies explore transactional utterances in parent–child interactions, there is a dearth of studies investigating back-and-forth exchanges between teachers and children, particularly with emergent bilinguals. Second, there is a lack of studies investigating the languaging practices of teachers and emergent bilinguals during shared book reading. Therefore, this study contributes to the existing literature by exploring the rate, proportion, and language of interactive strategies that ECE teachers use during shared book reading and, perhaps more importantly, by analyzing emergent bilingual children’s responses to those interactive strategies.
Questions were the most frequently used interactive strategy by teachers. Extant research has shown that teachers’ use of questions during shared book reading positively influences children’s language and literacy outcomes and provides children with opportunities to be directly involved in the activity [12,17]. This study also found that teachers naturally expand upon emergent bilingual children’s language in an intentionally facilitative way. The results showed that extensions comprised approximately 26% of teachers’ interactive utterances. Given that prior studies examined teacher expansions of children’s language within one-on-one classroom interactions, this study illustrates that teachers used this interactive strategy even within group settings, like shared book reading [46].
Few studies have specifically explored teachers’ language use during shared book reading with emergent bilingual children. Although many teachers in this study were bilingual and some classrooms used a dual language model, 89% of teacher utterances were in English. This finding highlights that teachers’ interactive strategies are rarely in Spanish during shared book reading despite their ability to use Spanish and the overarching bilingual goal of many of the ECE programs. These results align with previous work demonstrating that teachers infrequently use Spanish for instructional purposes in classrooms serving emergent bilinguals within English-dominant policy contexts [47,48]. Yet prior studies suggest that combining English and Spanish during shared book reading was equally or more effective for gaining more vocabulary than a similar amount of limited English-only shared book reading [10,49]. Given extant research demonstrating that using Spanish in the classroom supports emergent bilingual children’s academic learning and acquisition of English, our results suggest that the potential to use Spanish is unrealized in these classrooms.
Encouragingly, emergent bilingual children spoke in various lengths of utterances during shared book reading. While emergent bilingual children often spoke in single-word utterances, they also frequently responded to teachers’ interactive strategies with complex utterances. In contrast to other studies that found emergent bilingual children tend to speak in Spanish more than in English, in our study, emergent bilinguals’ utterances were most often in English (83%) as compared to Spanish (15%) [47,50]. Notably, the complexity of the utterances produced was similar across languages. This suggests that emergent bilinguals had the language skills and competence to produce complex utterances (i.e., complex utterances) in both languages. That is, the complexity of their produced utterances might not necessarily reflect their linguistic competence in either Spanish or English.

9. Patterns of Sequential Findings Suggest a Transactional Dynamic in the Classroom

Of the children who contributed linguistically to discussions during shared book reading, the patterns of sequential dependency revealed a transactional interdependence in the interactive utterances of teachers and emergent bilingual children’s complexity of responses. These results indicated that teachers’ interactive utterances, on a moment-by-moment basis, might influence and be influenced by the complexity of emergent bilingual children’s talk. The novel finding of this study was the bidirectional relation of teachers’ languaging. In other words, the sequential analyses illustrated that emergent bilinguals and teachers followed the lead of one another in terms of their use of language; that is, if a teacher spoke in English, emergent bilinguals responded in English, and vice versa. Importantly, this means that teachers did not demand that the child perform in one language or the other but instead accepted and responded to all forms of the emergent bilingual child’s communication [51]. That is, teachers could focus on the content of the discussion, rather than the language spoken, indicating teachers are juggling various goals during these interactions. In fact, we found no evidence of a cross-language association (e.g., the teacher talks in English, and the child responds in Spanish), suggesting that when teachers spoke in one language, they were potentially setting the tone for emergent bilinguals regarding what language should be used. Alternatively, this null finding could mean that teachers were attuned and followed the lead of emergent bilinguals by responding to them in the language used, suggesting that emergent bilinguals shape the conversation as well. Therefore, we need to better understand teachers’ beliefs about languaging during large group classroom contexts, such as shared book reading.
Notably, the effect sizes were larger for the sequential relations in Spanish (e.g., between the teacher’s interactive utterances and children’s responses in Spanish compared to the teacher’s interactive utterances and children’s responses in English). Although utterances in Spanish occurred less often, our finding suggests that follow-up responses were likely to occur when emergent bilinguals spoke or when teachers used interactive utterances in Spanish. While prior studies have found that English is used most often, even when teachers speak Spanish [47,52], our results align with previous studies that found Spanish tends to be used more often by children to talk to teachers [50] and that teachers tend to speak Spanish when a child speaks Spanish first [36]. Therefore, the tendency to respond in Spanish to a Spanish utterance indicates that teachers and emergent bilinguals might be more attuned to one another when speaking Spanish, even if Spanish is not used often. Another study has documented similar findings showing that when more Spanish is used in classrooms, emergent bilinguals display more positive approaches to learning, and teacher–child interactions are rated as more emotionally supportive [53].
The current study makes an essential contribution to the education and language literature: teachers’ questions in English and Spanish were related to emergent bilinguals’ responses across a wide range of language complexity. In other words, emergent bilinguals responded to teachers’ questions with single-word, phrasal, and complex utterances regardless of the language of teachers’ questions. If the goal of asking questions during shared book reading is to give children an opportunity to practice their language skills and promote child talk in whole group settings, these findings are promising because they suggest that emergent bilingual children respond, with a range of lengths, to questions regardless of the language spoken. However, given research regarding the importance of asking more complex questions that result in higher-level responses, future research could explore the effect of the type of question and language on the length of emergent bilingual responses.
Our study also found that the language a teacher uses to extend emergent bilingual children’s language is related to differences in the length of emergent bilinguals’ responses. Specifically, when teachers extended emergent bilinguals’ utterances in English, children tended to respond with more multi-word answers (i.e., phrasal or complex utterances). But, when teachers extended emergent bilingual children’s language in Spanish, children tended to respond with single-word and complex utterances. This could be due to the linguistic structure or the types of extensions that the teacher provided. Nonetheless, teachers’ use of expansions is essential for increasing emergent bilingual children’s participation in conversations and their vocabulary growth within conversational contexts [22]. Given that expansions are a positive predictor of children’s vocabulary growth, future research might seek to understand better why teachers’ Spanish extensions often result in a one-word response for emergent bilingual children.
Language did play a role in the sequential dependencies between the complexity of children’s responses and teachers’ interactive utterances. Only emergent bilingual children’s complex utterances in English tended to be followed by an extension or a question in English from the teacher. Teachers elaborated emergent bilingual children’s multi-word utterances in English but did not extend emergent bilingual children’s single-word or phrasal utterances. In contrast, teachers responded to both emergent bilingual children’s single-word and complex utterances in Spanish with extensions and questions. Regardless of the length, emergent bilingual children’s utterances in Spanish had an immediate and positive relation to teachers’ use of interactive utterances. Despite the English-dominant context, perhaps teachers are more attuned to emergent bilingual children’s speech when spoken in Spanish. This aligns with another study that found the use of Spanish by emergent bilingual children was significantly correlated with teachers’ closed-response and single-word-response questioning strategies [13]. Although teachers’ responses to emergent bilingual children’s utterances in Spanish are essential for their overall language development, teachers should also respond to speech in English, particularly as children may be developing proficiency in English [35].
Taken together, this study’s findings suggest teachers’ current practices with emergent bilingual children during shared book reading might reflect a degree of reciprocity, with teachers and children being sensitively attuned to the contributions of one another in real time. The complexity of emergent bilinguals’ responses to teachers’ strategies tended to follow expectations (e.g., phrasal and complex responses to a question). Similarly, emergent bilinguals responded in the language spoken by the teachers, suggesting that how teachers engage with emergent bilingual children in terms of strategy and language contributes to the response teachers receive from children. Therefore, our study illuminates a few ways teachers can better support emergent bilingual children’s language development. First, teachers could use more Spanish when asking questions and responding and extending children’s responses. Our results demonstrate that emergent bilinguals tend to follow the lead of the teacher in terms of the language spoken; thus, without teachers also using Spanish in the classroom, emergent bilinguals may not be obtaining as many opportunities to practice their Spanish language skills despite the extant evidence indicating the importance of ECE programs supporting their Spanish language skills in addition to English [4]. Second, although questions are essential for sparking conversations, they are only one part of the back-and-forth dialogue. Equally important is the feedback teachers provide on children’s responses. The results from this study suggest that teachers could provide more recasts and expansions of children’s utterances, which has been shown to increase children’s language and vocabulary skills [54].
Examining the association between teachers’ interactive strategies and emergent bilingual children’s responses within ECE has practical educational applications in terms of developing interventions to improve the linguistic quality of teacher–child interactions given that the quality of the ECE classroom language environment is often low [55,56]. There is evidence to suggest that for teachers to engage in conversations that scaffold children’s language effectively, they often need guidance and support, particularly where feedback is concerned [54,57]; this may be particularly important for teachers of emergent bilinguals. Yet, few existing interventions focus on how teachers can facilitate teacher–child interactions during book reading in classrooms that serve large populations of emergent bilingual children.

10. Limitations and Future Directions

Several limitations of this study are worth noting. First, the present study only examined teachers’ use of questions and extensions and the length of emergent bilingual children’s language. Other aspects of shared book reading interactions, such as the types of questions (e.g., open vs. closed), teachers’ statements, and the accuracy of emergent bilingual children’s contributions, may play a role in book reading dynamics. Second, the current study was based on one time point using a wordless picture book. Future research should examine how the nature and function of language interactions generalize or change across the school year. Third, we examined the sequential relation between teachers’ interactive utterances and children’s responses at the classroom level. Therefore, we cannot explore how teachers are potentially modifying the types of interactive utterances and language based on emergent bilingual children’s individual skills. Relatedly, because our analysis is at the classroom level, we do not know the home language of children who responded to teachers’ interactive utterances. Therefore, we do not know if children only respond in their heritage language. Finally, future research should examine whether emergent bilingual children’s language skills moderate sequential relationships.
Taken together, this study’s results highlight the value of studying immediate, moment-by-moment dependencies in teachers’ and children’s language during interactions, especially with emergent bilingual children during classroom group interactions. Although teacher–child interactions are often theorized as the locus of learning for children, these bidirectional interactions are only sometimes studied directly in detail with emergent bilingual children within ECE classrooms. The findings of the present study also encourage teachers to use Spanish in their classrooms. It remains concerning that most utterances occurred in English, as instruction in Spanish is a crucial feature of high-quality language environments for young emergent bilinguals from Spanish-speaking homes [58,59]. By examining teacher–child dynamics within ECE classrooms, particularly in classrooms serving emergent bilingual children, this study generated knowledge that can address issues that may have direct, translatable implications for ECE practice and intervention efforts.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, N.M.R.; methodology, N.M.R.; software, N.M.R.; validation, formal analysis, N.M.R.; data curation, G.M. and A.S.; writing—original draft preparation, N.M.R.; writing—review and editing, N.M.R., G.M. and A.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted in and approved by the Institutional Review Board of New York University (IRB-FY2016-1272; 07-08-2019).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the second and third authors upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Table 1. Summary of sequential analysis codes and definitions.
Table 1. Summary of sequential analysis codes and definitions.
Teacher CodesDescription Examples
ExtensionThis code involves elaborating on child utterances by teachers recasting what a child says by providing a more complete/complex grammatical/syntactic model and/or more accurate meaning/semantics. Extensions also include when a teacher adds an idea or complexity to the child’s idea. Adult’s extensions can move from literal to inferential topics by explaining the how/why of something the child observed/stated.Child: He tripped.
Teacher: He tripped over the tree branch and fell upside down into the water.
QuestionThis code includes questions related to the book (e.g., closed-ended or open-ended). Comments that ended with a question and were relatively balanced such as “He went into the house, and then what happened?” were coded as questions. Utterances that were primarily declarative but ended with a tag question such as “This is a stethoscope, okay?” were not coded as questions as the emphasis was on providing information.Teacher: why do you say yes Emily?
Child: pero se vayan a la casa [but they go to the house]
Teacher: porque tu crees que se va ir a la casa? [Why do you think that they went to go to the house?]
Extension and questionComments that built upon child utterances and ended with a question and were relatively balanced were coded as extensions and questions.Teacher: He went into the house, and then what happened?
Child codesDescription Examples
Non-verbal responseRefer back to the video in order to determine whether children are providing non-verbal responses to a discourse strategy. Non-verbal responses might include, nodding, shaking their head, shrug.
Single word Any child utterance that was only one word long or an article and one word. This can include utterances with false starts. Sometimes teachers have children point to an answer and children do so without saying any words; if they perform the action but do not say any words, it should be coded as a single word/basic utterance. Single-verb utterances were coded as single-word responses.Child: Sad.
Phrasal responsePhrasal utterance with at least two words that was not grammatically complete (i.e., did not contain a verb), such as a prepositional phrase.Child: Back home.
Complex responseMulti-word utterance with at least two words, one of which was a verb. A complex response included subject + verb, verb + predicate, or subject + verb + predicate. These responses, for the most part, were grammatically complete.Child: Um he’s sad too.
Table 2. Occurrence of teacher utterances and emergent bilinguals’ utterances.
Table 2. Occurrence of teacher utterances and emergent bilinguals’ utterances.
TotalEnglishSpanish
Total Frequencies% of Coded Utterances Total Frequencies% of Coded Utterances Total Frequencies% of Coded Utterances
Teachers’ utterances
Extensions 80626%66721%1194%
Questions 212958%170355%1595%
Extensions, Questions 562%341%50%
Translations, Codeswitching1304%361%492%
Emergent bilinguals’ responses
Single words 101046%85739%1537%
Phrasal responses 24611%1909%563%
Complex responses 86440%75335%1115%
Table 3. Sequential associations between teacher discourse strategies and child responses (target events: teacher discourse strategies).
Table 3. Sequential associations between teacher discourse strategies and child responses (target events: teacher discourse strategies).
English—Child ResponsesSpanish—Child Responses
Single-WordPhrasalComplexSingle-WordPhrasalComplex
Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score
English—Teacher discourse strategies
Extensions −0.11−1.390.29 *2.640.24 **3.21−0.88 **−3.62−0.66−1.73−0.55 *−2.2
Questions 0.42 **8.590.2 *2.250.30 **5.94−0.88 **−15.11−0.88 **−8.96−0.77 **−10.38
Extensions + Questions −0.11−0.69−0.16−0.540.42 **3.1−1.00−1.88−1.00−1.07−0.41−0.88
Spanish—Teacher discourse strategies
Extensions −0.56−2.14−0.27−0.54−0.64 *−2.250.78 **5.11−1.00−0.680.81 **5.37
Questions −0.65 **−9.44−0.53 **−3.56−0.85 **−11.380.93 **22.270.94 **14.320.81 **12.63
Extensions + Questions Undef −0.81Undef −0.31Undef −0.73Undef 3.64Undef−0.16Undef −0.23
Note: ** p < 0.01; * p < 0.05.
Table 4. Sequential associations between child responses and teacher discourse strategies (target events: child responses).
Table 4. Sequential associations between child responses and teacher discourse strategies (target events: child responses).
English—Teacher Discourse StrategiesSpanish—Teacher Discourse Strategies
Single-WordPhrasalComplexSingle-WordPhrasalComplex
Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score Yule’s Q Adj Z-Score
English—Child responses
Extensions −0.11−1.400.27 *2.470.24 *3.22−0.88 **−3.61−0.66−1.74−0.52−2.04
Questions 0.47 *9.110.151.630.34 *6.34−0.89 **−15.97−0.90 **−9.58−0.77 **−10.16
Extensions + Questions −0.11−0.69−0.18−0.600.423.1−1.00−1.88−1.00−1.08−0.38−0.80
Spanish—Child Responses
Extensions −0.56 *−2.14−0.28−0.57−0.64−2.240.78 **5.14−1.00−0.690.82 **5.63
Questions −0.65 **−9.48−0.54 **−3.70−0.85 **−11.410.94 **22.470.95 **14.300.84 **13.43
Extensions + Questions Undef −1.30Undef −0.32Undef −0.73Undef 3.66Undef−0.16Undef −0.22
Note: ** p < 0.01; * p < 0.05.
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Rojas, N.M.; Melzi, G.; Schick, A. Teacher’s Use of English and Spanish Interactive Strategies during Wordless Shared Book Reading: Relations to Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses. Educ. Sci. 2024, 14, 1096. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14101096

AMA Style

Rojas NM, Melzi G, Schick A. Teacher’s Use of English and Spanish Interactive Strategies during Wordless Shared Book Reading: Relations to Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses. Education Sciences. 2024; 14(10):1096. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14101096

Chicago/Turabian Style

Rojas, Natalia M., Gigliana Melzi, and Adina Schick. 2024. "Teacher’s Use of English and Spanish Interactive Strategies during Wordless Shared Book Reading: Relations to Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses" Education Sciences 14, no. 10: 1096. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14101096

APA Style

Rojas, N. M., Melzi, G., & Schick, A. (2024). Teacher’s Use of English and Spanish Interactive Strategies during Wordless Shared Book Reading: Relations to Emergent Bilingual Children’s Responses. Education Sciences, 14(10), 1096. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14101096

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