Talking the talk: enriching language interactions with infants and toddlers.

Children’s language development in the first three years is critical to their later learning and academic achievement. In Australia, increasing numbers of infants and toddlers attend early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, yet these classrooms are predominantly staffed by entry-level qualified educators while university-trained teachers tend to work with the older pre-school groups. My recent Master of Research study (Redman, 2019) revealed that a high percentage of educators feel ill-prepared to support language-learning with infants and toddlers upon graduation of their qualification. Professional development (PD) opportunities, therefore, play a pivotal role in upskilling educators. However, PD research literature reports varying degrees of success, and many studies fail to report the systematic steps of the PD and ongoing benefits to educators’ language supporting practices.

To address these gaps, this study designed, implemented, and evaluated an evidence-based PD program to enrich the language interactions of infant and toddler educators. Workshop content was underpinned by the social interactionist approach to language development, which emphasised the importance of reciprocal contextually meaningful language interactions. The design and delivery of this PD program was informed by the theoretical frameworks of implementation science, which provided a systematic approach to plan, deliver, and evaluate the program’s process, and practitioner enquiry, used to implement a participant-driven, research-informed program. Importantly, this study also sought to ascertain if potentially enhanced language interactions resulting from engagement with PD would be sustained over time.

A total of 16 infant/toddler educators with a diverse range of qualifications and EC experience from three centres in and around Sydney Australia participated in this study. Data was generated via 3-hour audio-recordings of educators interacting with infants and toddlers during their normal daily activities. These recordings were gathered across three time points; at the commencement of the study to provide a baseline measure of educator’s pedagogical practice in language interactions, three months later after educators had engaged with the PD workshops, and in month 10 of the study to ascertain whether or not enhanced language practices had been sustained. Extracts from recordings were transcribed verbatim, coded, and quantitatively analysed to track change for six measures of language input derived from the linguistic, conceptual, and interactive dimensions of language. Classrooms were also assessed using the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS-3). Qualitative about educators’ perceptions of the PD program were collected through questionnaires, interviews, and professional conversations throughout the project. These data were analysed to identify the motivation for patterns of change, and the enabling or constraining components of the PD.

Findings revealed that the PD program enhanced the language interactions of educators with their groups of infants and toddlers, with educators embedding new language-rich practices and strategies into their pedagogy and environments. Overall, improvements were sustained and, in some areas, continued to improve after the PD sessions had concluded. In particular, educator’s conversational turns and conceptual language use significantly increased over time, suggesting the potential of the implemented PD model to contribute to the language learning and conceptual development of young children during their critical years.

Elements of the PD found to contribute to the success of the PD included educators and a leader participating together as a team, educator and team goal setting and reflection, and educators being provided with individual critical feedback on observed changes in practices. Accordingly, this study has important implications for the design and delivery of PD in particular, and also demonstrates that educators of any qualification or experience level can be guided to enhance their language interactions and capitalise on opportunities throughout the day to contribute to the young child’s language learning.