Video Observation of Kindergarten Teachers’ Use of Questions in Picture-Book Reading with Quiet Multilingual Children: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Teacher questions asked during picture-book reading may stimulate the child’s practice of new vocabulary. However, there is great variation in children’s amount of verbal expression, and little knowledge exists about what level of openness in the questions elicits a response. We use video observation and pilot a set of digital picture-book dialog materials that are under development. The analysis included 234 questions asked during picture-book reading in the Norwegian language between three quiet multilingual children and their kindergarten teachers. The analysis was partly qualitative evaluating the types of questions and subsequent responses and partly quantitative in summarizing the occurrence of the types of questions and responses. The results show that between 75% and 97% of the half-open questions, between 60% and 80% of the closed questions, and between 14% and 60% of the open-ended questions elicited a response from the children. Overall, the results indicated that the frequency of responses varied both within and between question types. The fact that open-ended questions generated a limited number of responses among multilingual children may challenge the use of such questions as the gold standard in adult–child dialogs, regardless of child factors and context. Keywords: dialogs; question types; vocabulary; multilingual children