Awareness Beliefs Practices

Children, especially preschool children, can often be observed engaging in private speech. Vygotsky studied children's private speech during problem solving. He thought it was speech spoken to oneself for communication, self-guidance and self-regulation of behavior. Besides, teachers are the "important others" who influence children's development. It is supposed that teacher can impact children's private speech, which may lead to influence children's development. So, the present study is to explore teacher's reaction toward children's private speech, including teacher's awareness, beliefs, practices.Eight preschool teachers from two kindergartens with different style participated in this qualitative study. Reseacher identifies teacher's awareness, beliefs, practices toward children's private speech through observation and interview.All of the teachers indicated their awareness of children's private speech, and can provide the examples. But only one of the examples belongs to the problem solving private speech. Then, during exploring teachers' awareness of problem solving private speech, only 4 teachers indicate they aware this kind of private speech. Teachers indicated that their teacher's role and their educational background influence their awareness of children's private speech.Teacher's beliefs partly reflected previous research findings. They thought children' developmental level, ability, character and circumstances impact their use of private speech. They also indicated the beliefs that children's speaking to themselves is normal and can be helpful and can be joyful.Teachers stated that they would stop children's private speech on the basis of the two beliefs: they thought private speech impact other children's learning and they thought lower academic ability children use more private speech. Besides, teacher indicatde they generally ignore children's private speech and sometime use it to instruct children. Only one teacher stated she would use it to scaffold children's learning.At the end of this paper, researsher provided some suggestions about teacher's professional development in private speech according to the result of this study.