Area of Investigation

This efficacy study investigated the impact of the Learning Language and Loving It™ Program on educators’ use of responsive interaction strategies and on concomitant changes in the children’s verbal participation.

Participants

• Experimental group

  8 educators – randomly assigned by child care centre to participate in a 14 week Learning Language and Loving It Program 
  (8 group training sessions, 6 individual video feedback sessions).
  
  

• Control group

  8 educators – randomly assigned by child care centre to a no treatment control group and who received the Learning Language and Loving It Program after the posttest.

Results & Key Findings

Following their participation in the Learning Language and Loving It Program, educators’ talkativeness, language complexity and interactive behaviour were analyzed in two contexts (book reading and play dough) and compared with that of the control group.

Results of these analyses are as follows:

• In the book reading activity, educators in the experimental group were significantly more talkative than the control group. In addition, they read the text less often, using the book as a means of facilitating conversation. They waited for children to initiate conversation and encouraged more conversational turn-taking than did the educators in the control group.
• During the play dough activity, educators in the experimental group engaged in more face-to-face interaction and used the “SSCAN” strategy more often than the control group.
• These changes were maintained over the 9-month follow -up period without any further training.

The changes in the educators’ interactive behaviour after participating in the Learning Language and Loving It Program had a significant and positive effect on the children’s language productivity. A posttest comparison between children in the control group and the experimental group showed that, in both play dough and book reading activities, the experimental group used more utterances and more multiword combinations and engaged in more peer interaction than children in the control group.

Implications

The increased verbal productivity of the children in the experimental group is an important finding because it shows that, when educators learn to facilitate conversation, children increase their spontaneous output not only to their teachers, but also to their peers. In addition, because the children in the experimental group used more multiword utterances, it can be assumed that responsive teachers enable children to participate more fully in conversations and to demonstrate the kind of language complexity of which they are capable. According to the social interactionist theory of language acquisition, increased verbal productivity on the part of the child creates the ideal context for language growth because it elicits more feedback and conversation from others, thereby allowing the child to engage in more practice in the use of language and to obtain more feedback on their language use from both adults and peers (Mihai & Classen, 2023).