Developing the communication skills of early childhood teacher candidates: The case of advice

Abstract

Teachers in their professional roles are often called upon to give advice, whether to their students, to their colleagues, to their administrators, or to parents of their students. In this article, we investigate advice giving by teacher candidates to parents of young preschool children and consider the implications of this research for early childhood education. This article is of importance in that it demonstrates the use of applied linguistics research in the classroom. Our purpose is twofold: First, we explore the discursive moves and patterns apparent in the major patterns that emerge from the data to understand how the advice giving is constructed and how this aligns with other similar research. Second, we consider how such information can be incorporated into early childhood education courses. We suggest that teacher educators can exploit research such as that presented here to combine content knowledge instruction with a focus on communication skills, skills important for teachers to be successful communicators within the school community. We explore directions for future research and recommend collegial partnerships between applied linguists and early childhood educators.

Usos del lenguaje por parte del asesor en procesos de asesoramiento psicoeducativo: una revisión de alcance de dos décadas

“…Los estudios de Garbacz et al (2008) y Rarieya (2005 destacan la conveniencia de plantear alternativas en la discusión. Estas alternativas sugeridas pueden apoyarse en las propuestas del asesorado (Haneda et al, 2017;Sharples Reichenberg & Boyd, 2019), y pueden combinarse con elaboración (justificación del consejo), empatía (intervenciones mostrando que el problema interesa al asesor) o experticia (referencias a las fuentes del conocimiento) (DeCapua & Tian, 2015). Inclusive, se ha identificado la utilidad de plantear contrapuntos (Soto et al, 2017).…”

What prompts early childhood professionals to proffer advice to multilingual families? Investigating the association between language policy and perceived self-efficacy

“…The resulting expansion of multilingual families (Soler & Roberts, 2019;Wei, 2012) may prompt questions from parents on how to best foster children's multilingual development (Grosjean, 2009). In their quest for answers, some parents seek advice from Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) professionals (DeCapua & Lingshan, 2015), as they are often the first external party families are confronted with. Research shows that often-heard preoccupations among parents are that a hodgepodge of different languages at home will cause children to mix languages higgledy-piggledy (Baker, 2014), or that speaking the minority language at home will go at the expense of acquiring the dominant language of their speech community (Puig, 2010).…”