Interactions between children and their early childhood educators: The effect of cultural match on communication

Abstract

This paper describes the findings of research into children's interactions with educators who were of the same or different culture from that of the children. The research investigated the effect of cultural context on the children's communication and the quality of their interactions in one mainstream early childhood setting. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators were videorecorded interacting with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children in an early childhood education and care setting. The interactions between the children and their educators were categorised according to whether the culture of the educator matched that of the child (cultural match), or not (cultural non-match). The interactions were transcribed and the children's communication analysed across a variety of linguistic measures. Results indicated that the children's communication with their educators differed in qualitative but not quantitative measures in response to cultural match. These findings support the need for further research in this area.

Cultural connections in early childhood: Learning through conversations between educators and children

“…Knowing, being and doing in Aboriginal ways and non-Aboriginal ways can be explored and modelled or demonstrated best by Aboriginal educators, who are themselves bi-dialectal. Aboriginal children in the early childhood years may not yet be adjusting their dialect according to cultural context (Webb & Williams, 2019). However, the presence of Aboriginal early childhood educators exposes children to the use of bi-dialectal communication by competent communicators.…”

“…In the ECEC context, literature provides some guidance about AE characteristics in terms of the structure and sounds of the language, and, to a lesser degree, the social interactional features of language (Ellis et al, 2010;Webb & Williams, 2019). With these perspectives in mind, this paper considers the semantics, that is, the meanings conveyed in interactions between a sample of children (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) and their educators in an urban ECEC setting.…”