Introduction

Teaching is an intense interpersonal profession that requires a complex set of cognitive and socio-emotional skills, and language is one of the main means to deliver it to students. Five decades of well-documented research highlights the role of teacher’s language on learning and student’s psychosocial development (Kalinowski et al., 2020), from which various characteristic features have been recognized. One of them embraces its academic properties, characterized by a more complex syntax, precise vocabulary, greater words number, more sophisticated sentences, and a larger lexical variety (Schleppegrell, 2004). Recent studies have moved toward describing disciplinary language in the early childhood classroom (Dickinson et al., 2014), mostly showing that early childhood educators’ (hereinafter ECEs) verbal competencies are an important factor to be associated to a variety of children’s learning outcomes. In other words, their ability to contingently give a verbal response has a deep influence on children behavior. For instance, such influence is portrayed in a meta-analytic study that summarize research on ECEs’ verbal competence and quality literacy-focused practices, broadly supporting children language development (Markussen-Brown et al., 2017). ECEs’ verbal responsiveness to children has a crucial role in their teaching efficacy (Justice et al., 2018), and studies that approach children language development advocate for the relevant role of educators’ complex syntax as a source of linguistic information for new word learners (Farrow et al., 2020). Similarly, posing questions during shared reading forecast children's expressive, receptive, and pragmatic language skills (Muhinyi & Rowe, 2019), and/or playful and verbally explicit interactions with children predict greater language ability and expressive language already from 12 months of age (Cuellar & Farkas, 2018). Specific cognitive abilities are as well stimulated by ECEs’ verbal competence and teaching ability, such as print concept, letter naming, and/or phonological abilities, indicating greater levels of ECEs’ knowledge are associated to more desirable classroom language and literacy practices (Ciesielski & Creaghead, 2020). All these examples are a good reflection of their role in children learning by the use of disciplinary language as an essential professional competence.

Despite the manifold research on teachers’ language, ECEs verbal competence had been approached by far more formal linguistic aspects, than through noncognitive ones. Thus, searching for evidence has to undertake an indirect approach to identify studies that, from their methodological scope, reach the affective dimension. For instance, it is argued that ECEs instructional ability is consistently associated to their professional qualifications, as well as with a large specter of influence on children behavior (Hu et al., 2017). Evidence in this regard suggests preschoolers adapt their exploratory strategies to the task structure verbally given by their ECEs (Ruggeri et al., 2019), and accordingly, questions asked about other’s emotions may involve later prosocial behavior (Brownell et al., 2012). Likewise, ECEs’ affective minimalizing linguistic behavior, a kind that purposefully distances ECEs from child’s current emotions, discourages the child to express them, identifying its detrimental influence on social and emotional competence development (King & La Paro, 2018).

The specific state of affairs in Latin-American countries is not far from what is currently known about ECEs linguistic competency, but with a lesser number of available studies which makes this topic an attractive research line to follow. Exemplary studies that can be highlighted show formal linguistic variables had been equally examined, as for instance, quantity, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity of ECEs’ speech to children (Pizarro et al., 2019). Also, children have greater opportunities for verbally interacting with ECEs in activities that include dancing, and imply fewer verbal commands to address children (Strasser et al., 2018), and on the contrary, in ECEs’ reads-aloud and the expansion of the number of words, complexity and lexical diversity that they use and children learn (Rosemberg, 2013, as cited in Pizzaro et al., 2019). The above research line offers interesting evidence to follow on the characteristics and modulatory effect of ECEs’ language on children’s learning processes and behavioral outcomes.

Study context

According to the Subsecretaria de Educación Parvularia [SEP] - Undersecretary of Preschool Education, the regions where this study was undertaken (Atacama and Antofagasta, northern regions of Chile), had, until august of 2020 a number of 1,588 ECEs working in establishments which are government dependent, yet another considerable number in private centres with official state recognition. In recent years various documents have tried to guarantee quality educational standards, within which a number of technical-pedagogical recommendations have been set down that imply professional competencies to be developed by ECEs – such as the use of disciplinary language (SEP, 2019). Along that, the newest Chilean curricular guidelines for early childhood education (SEP, 2018), a recent document that sets up the core elements in curriculum design, explicitly expresses the relevance of the affective domain, through the consideration of dimensions such as personal development, identity, and autonomy developing, all dimensions that require from these professionals an adequate and effective verbal approximation to children.

The well-recognized role of ECEs professional’s verbal competencies and the need of alignment with above-mentioned educational policies, prompted the researchers’ interest to expand a prior study on a quantitative characterization of ECEs socio-affective words production (Lería Dulčić et al., in press). The present research was conceived then to explore from the same data-base, the affective domain through the recognition of ECEs’ recursive qualitative contents and characteristic verbal referencing and phrasings, along the degree of expertise when addressing those contents. Although cited studies throughout this article well-accept the influence of teachers’ language on children’s learning, giving many hints about the influence of ECEs’ language on their teaching quality and children’s learning outcomes, it does not clarify yet which linguistic strategies are predominantly used, particularly when using affective connoted language. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap and become a contribution to the understanding of the intersection between ECEs’ affective-speech and the verbal competencies that are implied in addressing children with affective signifying content. Moreover, there are no available studies that had specifically scrutinized this topic in Latin-American countries, a point from which this study starts.

Research questions

Two research questions are posed to address the above-mentioned inquiry: (1) Do cross-semantic spoken regularities in ECEs daily inside-classroom activities arise, that are susceptible to be differentially classified as groups of affective-speech by its contents, meanings, phrasing, and connotations? (2) Can the emerged groups be understood as reflecting differential degrees of affective-speech’ language-responsiveness?

Method

Findings

This section firstly exposes the quantitative results from which the qualitative information was built up to give a context to the qualitative data, and then list the emerging nodes associated to the affective domain. Secondly, the identification of teachers’ predominant skills according to Prediger’s model is presented.

Discussion

We detected a large number of cross-semantic regularities in ECEs speech that allowed us to positively answer the first research question. This leads to the final recognition of 8 general nodes of affective-related speech, through associations of convergence and divergence within a certain degree of feasibility that the a priori affective semantic categories made possible. These nodes can be also understood as a network of communicational paths that could serve as “anchor points” for the further exploration of ECEs’ affective-speech. Although in some cases sentences were scattered all across the transcriptions, making difficult to pinpoint them out into a hierarchy of predominance, a few characteristics can be marked out by their relevance for ECEs pedagogical work.

The highest number of sentences was clearly related to positive nuances, which mirrors a well-known ECEs communicational style that may be understood as a desirable professional ability, that purposely enriches children’s learning environment mostly drenched into positive experiences, stimulating their cognitive exploration, group cohesion, feelings of safety, and – generally speaking – well-being. This can be contextualized under the suggestions given by Decker-Woodrow (2018), which claims that greater emotional support, classroom management abilities, and quality interactions are characteristics of efficacious facilitators in prekindergarten environments. Another relevant observation highlights the characteristic ECES temporal use of emotion-related words before or after a meaningful educative situation occurs, as for example in a quick verbal intervention after a child’s fall, which suggests some ideas about the effect of this kind of linguistic punctuation on children socio-affective learning. More specifically, phoneme awareness is the strongest predictor of reading development (Melby-Lervåg, 2012), confirmed also by newer studies and meta-analytic reviews (e.g.: D’Alessio et al., 2019; Duncan, 2018). Thus, ECEs use of affective close-related morphemes or simple affective-connoting words may provide to children access to a wider semantic and syntactic information by means of expanding children vocabulary and conscious accessibility to their use. This also follows the observations presented by Ren and coresearchers (2016), on how learning of grammatical morphemes might be associated with emotion regulation among bilingual preschoolers, and the role of child language to express their needs with words rather than with emotions. In this vein, studies shown that toddlers’ and preschoolers’ language skills are positively associated with self-regulation of emotions such as anger and frustration (Roben et al., 2013). Furthermore, the relatively high use of words regarding the body aligns with the well-accepted importance of embodied-words in ECEs pedagogical work, as argued by Cekaite and Bergnehr (2018). Also, the node addressing the specific use of language when increasing, decreasing and normalizing a child’s verbal utterance may give some insights on ECEs coping skills when dealing with children situational and pressing demands, which may likewise inspire new research following the line proposed by King and La Paro’s work (2018). Additionally, we were particularly interested in higher order emotion-referencing such as love, compassion, empathy, and teaching values, thus, such sentences were traced back to the source-transcriptions to get any hint for further exploration. Two of the ECEs who participated in this study belong to a Cristian school, and most referred words belong to them by expressing spiritual topics that connote verbal references in third person plural over first and second person singular. This could give an exemplary hint on ECEs’ own emotions and personal experiences (node 8), when sharing a common socio-cultural framework with children and the significance of working with them. Besides that, compassion and forgiveness are emotions of a higher order that imply more complex cognitive processes, and little is known on ECEs compassionate behavior and their ability to teach it to children, as recently argued by Vuorinen and co-researches (2020).

Despite these confirmatory findings, in our judgment the second research question was only partially accepted due to the low observed agreement between experts. We consider these identified values may simultaneously respond to the multi-layered nature of gathered information and low case number, but also to the quality of expert judgments. However, we decided not to reject the experts that reached the lowest observed nominal correlations. Nonetheless, we recommend future studies include at least five expert-raters to ensure a good reliability score in case of such possible rejections. Moving ahead into this discussion, the relative predominance of Noticing and – up to a certain degree – Demanding, may suggest an alignment that responds to the progressive complexity that underlies what Prediger’s theoretical model proposes, and may be strongly related to other theoretical proposals that argue in favor of progressive and escalated models of competencies development, such as is - for example - proposed by Marzano and Kendall (2008), widely addressed in competence-based education. Our findings suggest that most ECEs affective-talk relies on noticing or spotting children’s affective issues and classroom contingencies alongside the educative daily flow. Although, other verbal abilities are weakly recognized by our experts, this may be likewise aligned again to a developmental progressive factor to be considered when working with preschool children (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009), but also to the spectrum of competencies that ECEs who participated in this study may have, and could develop. Due to it exploratory nature, the future exploration of this specific finding demands an expanded methodological approach that could otherwise recall specific characteristics of the instructional language, that may give ECEs’ the ability to develop each dimension of the five core’s abilities of the language-responsiveness framework taken into consideration in our study.

Some limitations can be highlighted to improve future studies within this research line. ECEs’ speech was short, fast spoken, and many times expressed in a “volatile” manner, depending on very changeable class contingencies, which could be addressed in future studies. In our concern, this is an attractive research line to follow due to the role of quality instructions in pedagogical work, as recently emphasized by Brown and coresearchers (2020). Also, future studies necessarily must incorporate children’s speech, giving these exploratory findings a more overall scope, and similarly adding the correlation with teachers’ affective talk in primary school. Moreover, words that were used for detecting the qualitative nodes were approached from a general linguistic background provided by the software, which gave us the opportunity to situate our findings in a wider and linguistic standardized framework, but also alerts us to further consider the specific disciplinary, socio-cultural and idiosyncratic linguistic context in which our ECEs work.

Conclusion

This study was designed to empirically identify ECEs common phrasings that refer upon different degrees, to an affective content or meaning from which was possible to address the extent of their professional competence when answering to children learning demands that require or imply and affective connotation. We were able to tentatively acknowledge many distinguishable nodes of ECEs’ affective-speech, and identify one predominant linguistic approximation or verbal strategy to children learning demands. Despite of the fact that by the methodological scope of this study it is not possible to characterize these findings as a generalizable use of ECEs affective-speech, they give some preliminary insights into an attractive direction worth following. Thus, this study’ contribute to moving forward the study of the gradation of ECEs’ verbal competencies or coping-verbal strategies with children and specially suggest some contents to stress when follow affective-related contents in their communications interaction with children. This may also help to guide curricular policies in higher education on pivotal dimensions for ECEs’ professional development, especially regarding the relevance of the affective factors in ECE’s professional speech. Further studies in this regard could expand their research topics to close-related lines such as, for example, ECEs’ technical vocabulary growth; appropriate lexical choices; suitable meanings usage; and/or developmentally proper sense-making to teach associated to the affective domain.

We hope these findings will invigorate this research line in order to foster ECEs’ language proficiency and strengthen their formative experience and professional efficacy.

Transference

The findings provided contribute to a program for socio-affective competences acquisition, aimed to students of early childhood education from the University of Atacama, northern Chile (Lería Dulčić et al., 2019).