A positive language environment that adults created is important for infants(0-2 years) to acquire multiple language skills in comprehension and expression (Sandra et al.,2020). Research in early child education and care (ECEC) settings indicates that high quality of language environment may predict children’s consequent academic performance and cognitive development (Rescorla, 2009). A series of impacting factors were identified by researchers in literatures, including educator’s individual background, activity types and communicative contexts. One study explored educators’ reasoning talk found that educators produced more social reasoning when directing children’s behaviors and more logical reasoning when they discussed non-regulatory topics (e.g. the apple tastes nice) (Hu et al., 2019). At present, most of the existing research is carried out in the Western environment, while little attention was paid to Chinese or other Asian cultures. This study is designed to explore 30 Chinese educators’ language use when they interact with infants during free play from the perspective of ideational functions in educators’ language, which refers to the types of experiences of the realistic world that are reflected in language. The potential pedagogical values of educators’ use of language will be discussed.

Authors: Xiaoya Wang, Ling Sheng, Jiangbo Hu

Published in: Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2022)

• Date of Conference: 18-20 October 2022
• DOI: 10.20533/IICE.2022.10.0015
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-47-1
• Conference Location: Virtual (Dún Laoghaire, Ireland)