This study examined how teachers' communication strategies affect developmental aspects of young children's group communication in the early childhood education and care within the framework of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; Giles, 2016).CAT proposes that people in interaction will either converge to, diverge from, or maintain their distance from their interlocutors based on their social and psychological characteristics.
The present study investigated infants and toddlers in nursery in Japan. Our longitudinal study started in August 2014 and lasted until November 2016. We video-taped picture book reading sessions in two two-year-old groups, five one-year-old groups, and one infant group. Their shared book reading sessions usually started with the teacher-initiated class discourses followed by book reading. We analyzed the data in terms of the duration of group communication, the number of utterances by children and teachers, accommodation patterns of children and teachers in each session.
First, we categorized the teachers into two groups based on their communication styles: structured (Type A) or semi-structured styles (Type B) based on the teachers’ accommodation behaviors in groups communication with young children. Type-A teachers directed a classroom discourse in a predetermined way; they were unwilling to allow divergence from the topic by children. Type-B teachers, on the other hand, converged to children and allowed them to control their interactions. Therefore, we regarded Type-B teachers as more accommodative than Type-A.
Next, we examined how class discourses developed in each age group and how teachers’ communication styles could determine children’s accommodation patterns. We calculated instances of converging, divergent, maintenance behaviors, and found that children in all age groups showed some adjustment behaviors, depending upon the accommodative type of their teachers. With Type-B teachers, children talked more and even redirected the discourse. One-year-olds showed divergent behaviors in a shared book reading session where another group of unfamiliar children and a teacher was present. In addition, prelinguisitic infants responded nonverbally in their Type-B classes more often than those in Type-A classes. In short, infants and toddlers are competent accommodators. Teachers’ converging behaviors do help young children develop their own ability in group.
