Allen, Nancy; Bouchard, Caroline et April, Johanne
(2019).
« Oral Microstructures in Multilingual and Monolingual Dyads of Children Aged 3-to-4 Years old in ECE ». Conference, Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore, États-Unis, mars 2019.
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Résumé
This study aims to describe and compare the evolution of the development of oral microstructures (verbal and nonverbal) that compose spontaneous narratives of 12 dyads (6 multilingual and 6 monolingual) of children enrolled in an Early Childhood Center (ECE). We also link the strategies used by their educator to facilitate the development of their communication to those of their oral microstructures.
The development of verbal and nonverbal microstructures including propositions, words, gestures, etc. may enhance skills that underlie communication in both types of dyads (Sabol, Bohlmann and Downer, 2018). The microstructure help measured children’s language growth, especially in terms of productivity and complexity of their narratives, whereas in previous study the focus was essentially put on the development of their macrostructure (Doyon and Fisher, 2010). However, the focus is often put on the productivity when seeking comparisons between children (i.e. this child is “talkative”), where in fact the complexity of their narratives may tell us more about their language development (Girolametto, Weitzman and Greenberg, 2003). And strategies used by educators to elicit and support their language development appeared different in multilingual and monolingual dyads (Gest, 2006).
The particularity here is to describe and compare the microstructures in their spontaneous narrative across two data collections time (T1: ages 36-40 months and T2: ages 42-47 months old), in order to identify similarities and differences between multilingual and monolingual dyads in the complexification of their spontaneous narratives across time. We used the Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN, MacWhinney, James, Schunn, Li and Schneider, 2001) to transcribe, code and analyze our corpora. Indicators were divided in two categories: verbal microstructures and nonverbal microstructures who were also refined in four categories (e.g. head nod, single or multiple turn of speech, etc.).
Our preliminary results show that in T1, for multilingual dyads, the growth of verbal microstructures is limited. These children mostly use nonverbal microstructures (gestures) to communicate with their educator but verbal microstructures with their peer (onomatopoeia and 1-2 single word clauses). For monolingual dyads, verbal and nonverbal used of microstructures are alike in T1. These children also use nonverbal microstructures similarly between T1 and T2.
One highlight, as observed in T2, is that multilingual dyads who made the largest gains in terms of verbal microstructures (vocabulary) are those in which educator elicit and extend their words. Therefore, the complexification of their observed narratives is limited when fewer strategies are used by the adult. In monolingual dyads, in T2, the complexification in their use of microstructures also seems linked to educational practices used by their educator (e.g. use of specific words).
Preliminary results also show that there is a link between the strategies use by the educator and the complexification of both dyads’ narratives (Cabell, Justice, McGinty, DeCoster and Forston, 2015), hence, their microstructures. Exposure to content rich situations and frequent conversations contexts seems to help monolingual dyads increase the length of their sentences whereas the use of explicit strategies by the adult tend to support verbal microstructures development for multilingual dyads.
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