Teacher-child talk about learning stories in New Zealand: a strategy for eliciting children's complex language

Researchers and teachers explored a new form of teacher-child interactions in two early childhood settings as a means of eliciting complex language. The primary mode of assessment in New Zealand early childhood education takes the form of 'learning stories' that teachers write, with photos, and that are collected into a portfolio book. Eight teachers revisited 11 children's learning story portfolios in semi-naturalistic interactions in the early childhood setting. The resulting 20 interactions were first coded for whether teachers adopted a reminiscing orientation (11 interactions) or a book-reading orientation (9 interactions). Second, a linguistic analysis of the interactions revealed that in the reminiscing interactions, children talked more, used more complex utterances, and exhibited greater lexical diversity; in the book-reading interactions, teachers used longer conversational turns and more complex utterances. This paper discusses the potential of revisiting learning stories in early childhood settings within and beyond New Zealand.