Motif detection and teacher-child interaction in bilingual children's Mandarin learning

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Abstract Summary

Purpose: In Western contexts and languages, teacher's comments and questions during shared book reading have been found to facilitate children's vocabulary development. It is unclear to what extent such findings can be replicated in other contexts and languages, and the mechanisms of the possible impact of teacher-child interaction are largely unknown.

Method: The current study examines the relationship between teachers' (n = 31) discoures-sequences of questions and comments-and children's (n = 505) receptive vocabulary growth across two years of Singaporean kindergarten with mixed-effects models. Additionally, this study sought to consider the structure of classroom discourse on a deeper scale. Using motif detection analysis, we explored multi-turn sequences of conversations to understand the associations between teacher's strategies and student's responses.

Results: We discovered that low-level questions and comments, such as utterances during classroom routines, were associated with children's faster vocabulary development. Questions and comments, such as asking children to describe an object in the picture book, could significantly result in more responses from children and maintain them in the conversation.

Conclusion: The findings enable us to pinpoint the conversational moves associated with stronger language development and offer possible suggestions for Chinese language teaching in early bilingual programs.

Submission ID :

AILA649

Submission Type

Oral Presentation

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Argument :

He Sun is a research scientist at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/He_Sun6). Her research is about how cognition and environment (i.e., individual differences) co-shape the developmental rate and route of early bilingualism, and how the bilingual experience, book reading and language use in particular, influences children's social-emotional skills and executive function. Her work has appeared in many renowned journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Child Development, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She serves as an associate editor for Journal of Child Language and Journal for the Study of Education and Development.

Marjolijn Verspoor is a professor of English language and English as a second language at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is known for her work on second language development and Complex Dynamic Systems Theory. Her publications have appeared in various edited books and journals.

Siew Ann Cheong is an associate professor at School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He is interested in understanding the dynamics of complex systems with very many degrees of freedom, from both modeling and data perspectives. His goal is to develop a computational theory of complex systems, by treating their dynamics as information processing, and discover the underlying logic. In particular, he would like to how understand evolutionary processes geared towards information processing shape the complex network topologies and dynamics of complex systems.