Everyday talk in Kindergarten classrooms: Informal opportunities for academic language acquisition

Abstract

High quality preschool education can contribute to the reduction of social inequality in education. The project ProSpiK therefore explores processes of language promotion and acquisition in Swiss Kindergarten classrooms. The focus is set on teachers actions during formal and informal talk with children. Videotaped interactions are scrutinized using sequential analysis procedures in order to reconstruct «communicative forms» (i.e. patterns) and the processes of their production. The article first presents the foundation and the design of the project. In addition, the procedure of sequential analysis and the conceptualisation of findings are exemplified with respect to the concept «change between referential spaces». The results emphasize the occurrence of both formal and informal processes of language promotion and acquisition during everyday talk in Kindergarten classrooms.