Abstract:

Infants (0-2 years) are at their critical time to acquire language skills. Research suggests that the quality of adults’ language use in their interactions with infants predict their consequent language proficiency with the implications to their long-term academic performance (Snow et al, 1998; Hoff, 2006). Majority of the existing knowledge regarding adults’ language practices with infants is derived from the research undertaken in home context, and little attention paid to the context of childcare centres, and even less in Chinese childcare centre. Mealtime in childcare centre is an important routine for involving educators and children sitting together that can be an ideal context for children’s language learning (Degotardi, Torr, & Nguyen, 2016). This study is designed to investigate Chinese educators’ language use in their interactions with infants during lunch time. The findings have the implications for cross-cultural understanding about educators’ language practices in Chinese infant room. It may enhance educators’ awareness about the pedagogical functions in their language that can be utilized at the lunch table.

This study focuses on the language used by six university qualified educators who work with infants (0-2 years) during lunch time. The educators’ table talk with the infants were video recorded and transcribed. The transcribed data was broken into messages, the smallest semantic unit that contains a subject (explicit or implicit) and verb (Hasan,1996). Totally 1763 messages were produced by the educators during lunch time.
Drawing on systemic functional linguistic theory, the messages were analyzed according to the experiential function that represents the basic experiences exchanged in interactions. According to Halliday and Mathiessen (2004), experiential function of language can be categorized with three dimensions:
a) process of doing-and-happening (material-outer world) - Miss Helen brought us potatoes and beef for the lunch;
b) process of sensing (mental-inner world) - I like potatoes and beef very much; and
c) process of being & having (relational) - our lunch is potatoes and beef (outer-world relation) / potatoes and beef is one of my favorites (inner-world relation).

These three processes provide children with different language learning opportunities in terms of various types of vocabulary and sentence structures. For example, in process of being & having, the subjects of the sentences tend to appear in the form of nominal groups that is different from pronouns frequnently used in process of sensing.

The results show that the quantity and quality of the six educators’ language used in interactions with the infants vary dramatically from case to case. The messages produced per minute diverge from 17.38 to 8.36, showing the gap between the educators who talked the most and the least is about twofold. Process of doing-and-happening is the dominant experience exchanged in the educators’ language, taking up 67.3% to 87.1% of the messages in the individual cases. The proportion of process of sensing and process of being & having varying between 5.8% to 16. 4% and 7.0% to 19.4% respectively, which indicate extensive differences among the cases. The pedagogical functions embedded in the variabeles of the educators’ language use were discussed.

Keywords:

Infant, educator-infant talk, Chinese childcare, mealtime talk.