Presence of Academic Language in Pre-school Educators and its Relation to Students Language Development.

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between pre-school teachers' language use in classrooms and students' language development. Specifically, this piece studies syntactic complexity, lexical diversity and the presence of sophisticated words in teachers' speech, in activities in which teachers tend to lead the conversation and to use language to transmit knowledge. The results indicate that controlling for socio-cultural variables of the child and variables of the classroom, such as the quality of the interactions and changing teachers from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten, the variables of the teacher's lexical diversity and use of sophisticated words significantly predict children's results on the identification of letters and words and emergent writing. Finally, this text discusses the importance of teacher language in reducing the gap between the language used in family contexts and the language required in school.