Interactional style of teachers and parents during bilingual instruction: Linguistic and cognitive attributes
Spanish/English bilingual kindergarten teachers and parents serving as instructional aides in these same bilingual education classrooms served as subjects. Audio‐video recordings of small group instruction for teachers and parents were subjected to a lesson discourse analysis. Of interest was the qualitative character of teacher/parent interaction with specific attention to linguistic and cognitive attributes. Results indicate that both teacher and parent interaction is highly “teacher” oriented with both dominating lesson discourse and keeping children to the topic. However, parents were much more flexible in allowing child oriented topics. Such a mismatch between teachers and parents is discussed with regard to language development needs of language minority students in early childhood.