Promoting bilingualism and children’s co-participation in Singapore language classrooms: Preschool teacher strategies and children’s responses in Show-and-Tell

Abstract

Show-and-Tell is one of many activities recommended for encouraging children’s oral language production in classrooms across the world, but there is little research on the topic. From existing studies, teacher facilitation is posited as key to shaping children’s oral language production. This paper explores teacher strategies for facilitating children’s oral language production during Show-and-Tell, in the case studies of four Singapore preschool language teachers (English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil) sampled from a larger nationwide longitudinal study, with 47 children observed across the four classrooms. Using a coding scheme with high reliability ( d = 0.80), a total of 1192 teacher utterances and 539 children’s utterances were coded to capture teacher strategies and types of children’s responses across the classrooms. Findings showed that the English teacher employed language modelling most frequently, while all other teachers most frequently facilitated through questioning. The potential of Show-and-Tell in encouraging children’s language output is observed in how self-initiated talk is among the most frequent form of child participation, especially in the English-language classroom, which was expected given the context of English-dominance among bilingual Singapore children. In response to teacher facilitation, children were more likely to respond with verbal responses and gestures, as compared to not responding. It was, however, noted that a lack of wait-time provided by teachers hampered children’s opportunities to express themselves during the activity. Our findings have implications on the need for different types of teacher strategies required to ensure the effectiveness of Show-and-Tell for promoting children’s oral language production.