Do instructions overwhelm the preschool classroom? Early childhood educators’ use of instructional vs regulative directive commands
Do instructions overwhelm the preschool classroom? Early childhood educators’ use of instructional vs regulative directive commands

Summary/Abstract: Instructions are a fundamental part of early childhood educators’ verbal activities in a plethora of interactions, that constantly guide children to achieve a targeted educational goal. However, little attention has been devoted to identify their presence and relative proportions in early childhood educators’ daily speech. Underpinned by functional linguistic theory, this study’s purpose is to identify early childhood educators’ spoken directive commands from a large database to check their distribution and predominance, compared to other verbal modalities that are equally important for their pedagogical work, such as: commands, sayings, feedback, questions, etc. Through 20 participants’ daily audio–recordings from regular work–hours with preschool children, we selected a large number of sentences to later be classified according to their degree of belonging to a specific directive command’s category – ten in this study. The findings suggest that instructional directives are the first in order of frequency followed by the use of reformulations and singing, among others. We conclude that it is vital for early childhood educators’ professional practice to identify which types of linguistic styles they predominantly use in order to make effective decisions to pursuit an educational goal, and that way successfully support young children’s learning processes. The scope of these findings is briefly discussed taking into perspective future research and its contributions to early childhood education’s formative processes.

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