The current study examines the verbs used by pre-service primary school teachers in everyday language in the context of the hierarchy of needs using the SOM-Ward clustering method. The study group of this survey research consists of 271 pre-service primary school teachers studying at a public university in Turkey. In this research, pre-service…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

Research Findings: This study examined 34 Head Start teachers' use of four categories of mental state talk (verbalizations of mental processes using emotion terms, cognition terms, desire terms, and perception terms) during naturally occurring classroom interactions. Transcriptions from classroom videos were coded for mental state talk…

In contemporary kindergarten classrooms, children's literacy abilities are often assessed by tests used to determine a child's "readiness" for school. Readiness often means letter identification, phonemic awareness, letter-writing, and other functions related to language mechanics. This paper investigates the assessment tools (both…

The paper studies the forms that are used in planning for a child's early childhood education and care in Finnish day care from the perspectives of social constructionism and discourse analysis. It asks how childhood is conceptualised in these forms and what are the social functions of early childhood education and care as implied in the…

Heteronormativity, the concept that heterosexual sexuality is an institutionalized norm and a superior and privileged standard, is held firm when discourses of gender, sexualities and family form converge. In a study of heteronormative discourses in the context of early childhood education, teachers shared accounts of practices where genders,…

Our research aims to identify children's communicative strategies when faced with the task of solving a geometric puzzle in CSCL contexts. We investigated how to identify and trace "distributed cognition" in problem-solving interactions based on discursive cohesion to objects, participants, and prior discursive content, and geometric and…

Purpose: To examine the functional impact of specific language impairment (SLI). Specific goals were to determine whether (a) subjective ratings of narrative quality differentiate children with SLI from their normally developing (ND) age-mates, (b) laypersons and teachers differ in their ratings of narrative quality, (c) objective measures confirm…