Educating Young Children Volume 1 – Spring 2025 | Page 80

children turn to one another and begin speaking. As they talk, she listens to learn if and how they use vocabulary from the story and practice the same sentence structures.

Ana: Yo me pongo la chaqueta para salir.( I put on my jacket to go outside.)

Nicolás: Yo tengo botas.( I have boots.)

Isabel:( smiling) ¡ Muy bien! Te pones la chaqueta y las botas. ¡ Estás listo para el frío, igual que el lobo!( Very good! You put on your jacket and boots. You’ re ready for the cold, just like the wolf!)

Research highlights that meaningful conversation expands children’ s vocabulary and narrative skills and deepens their content knowledge. It also spurs deep thinking, academic language, and social and emotional skills. The children in the above vignette were able to connect an event described in the book( getting dressed) with one of their daily routines. Isabel also encouraged children to try out different vocabulary and sentence structures while they talked with one another.

Conversations among multilingual learners can add to an educator’ s understanding of their oral language growth. To extend and deepen multilingual learners’ conversations, educators can implement strategies such as modeling and scaffolding phrases(“ I think...,”“ Because...,” and“ Can you explain more?”). Additionally, through open-ended questions(“ What do you notice about this?” or“ Why do you think that happened?”), educators can stimulate learners’ thoughts and ideas to increase whole-group participation.( Click the lightbulb for additional ideas to scaffold learning during an interactive read aloud.)

Next, we explore approaches to address a specific learning goal within a small-group format.