Academic oral language development in Spanish-speaking English Language Learners: The effect of teacher talk

This dissertation was designed to investigate teacher talk in Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) kindergarten classrooms and its impact on young English Language Learners' (ELL) second language (L2) learning and continued first language (L1) development. To capture teacher talk, we observed naturalistic classroom practices in 21 TBE classrooms and audiotaped teachers' speech. The speech was transcribed and coded to obtain measures of total amount of talk, vocabulary diversity and use of complex syntax in Spanish and English. The Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised (WLPB-R) was administered to 106 children at the beginning and end of the school year to obtain measures of academic oral language proficiency in Spanish and English.;Results indicated that children performed significantly below the normative sample on the WLPB-R at both time points; however, Spanish skills were significantly higher than English skills. Results also showed substantial variation in teacher speech input across classrooms. Teachers varied in terms of the amount of input provided in L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English), as well as, the vocabulary diversity and the syntactic complexity of their speech. Of primary interest, HLM analyses revealed that the 1 syntactic complexity of teacher speech was positively related to the growth in ELLs' academic oral language proficiency, whereas other characteristics of teacher speech, the classroom environment, and home language exposure were not. Our results suggest that syntactic complexity may play a critical role in ELLs' language development both in Spanish, which is at a later stage of development and in English, which is at an earlier stage of development. These findings suggest that qualitative aspects of the language input provided in school, not just quantitative aspects, play a significant role in the language learning trajectories of ELL children.