The Research Of Childcare Center Teachers’s Mental State Language During Free Play

Mental state language,as a language that represents individual emotions,cognitions,perception,and desires,has been proven to have an important role on the interaction between caregivers and young children in psycholinguistic and educational scholars’ research.The output of adult mental state language has significant influence to children’s language,emotional understanding and social cognitive development.However,the current research of mental state language mainly focuses on the parentchild relationship and there is a lack of research on the interaction between educators and children,especially the interaction between educators and infants.The participates of this research are 30 infants’ educators in Hangzhou childcare centers.According to the theoretical basis of mental state language in Psycholinguistic,the teacher’s mental state language during 20 minutes of free play was statistically and analyzed.In the first step,the coding scheme in this study was constructed based on the coding of mental state language in domestic and foreign literature,the interpersonal function in system functional language,and the turn-taking in linguistic analysis;In the second step,according to the coding scheme,a quantitative analysis method is used to analyze the basic characteristics of mental state language and its influencing factors,the interpersonal function of mental state language,the turn-taking profile of mental state language respectively;The third step is to focus on the dynamic changes in the free play interaction between educators and infants in the real corpus,select highquality and low-quality cases respectively,and conduct an in-depth analysis based on the three dimensions of coding,particularly,it analyzes the appropriate use of mental state language;The fourth step is to discuss and analyze the research results.The fifth step is to draw the conclusion of this study and put forward educational suggestions for improving the quality of educators’ mental state language use.The study found that the use of mental state language by educators in infant room during free play is relatively scarce,with an average of 6.86%,and there are large differences between individual teachers.The four types of mental state languages are not very rich in the use of vocabulary types.The most numerous desire & preference language vocabulary types are the least.In the reference of mental state language,the teacher’s language mainly refers to the infant,and it rarely refers to teacher,the teacher and the child or the other.There is no significant difference in teachers’ use of mental state language in teachers’ profession,academic qualifications and educational experience,while group childcare centers were significantly higher than individual nurseries.There is a moderate correlation between the total amount of teachers’ language and the number of mental state language.The interpersonal functions of mental state language are mainly problem function,and few command function.In the infant room,teachers’ mental state language mostly occurs in the short turns and the long turns are relatively rare.The most important finding of this research is the "cognition + problem" and "perception + problem" patterns in the combination of mental state language and interpersonal function which could promote the extension of the dialogue between teachers and infant,and have a certain in-depth communication on a topic,thereby providing infants with rich language and cognitive learning opportunities.In order to make up for the deficiencies of quantitative analysis,this study found that teachers with high-quality mental state language output have the characteristics of a large number of high-quality mental state language output and rich long turns through the analysis of two types of teacher mental state language cases of different qualities.Teachers can use mental state language to describe or guess infant’s current thoughts,emotions and feelings.The low-quality mental state language output has the characteristics of small quantity,short turns,or infant’s unresponsiveness.Teachers mainly pay attention to the changes in infant’s behavior at the moment,use the teacher’s self-ideology to guide the infant’s play process,and even use negative emotional vocabulary to regulate infant’s behavior.Through the analysis of the results,the researcher tried to discuss the characteristics of the use of mental state language in the interaction between teachers and infants during free play.Based on the analysis of real corpus,it can be found that the bottleneck in the use of mental state language by teachers is that teachers have little understanding of this type of language,and under the influence of implicit and introverted Chinese cultural,teachers rarely use language to directly express emotional or perception changes.This is related to the lack of training in the language theory and language use of teachers in childcare centers,especially the training of mental state language.Finally,the researcher advised corresponding educational suggestions on how to improve teachers’ mental state language output level during free play: 1.Education and training should be organized to promote teachers’ understanding of mental state language 2 Teachers should internalize the differences of interpersonal functions and be able to construct the language meaning of mental state language;3 Teachers should learn to use different language models flexibly to promote information-based,in-depth dialogue and interaction between teachers and infants.