Spanish-English Emergent Bilingual Children’s Classroom Language Interactions: A Latent Profile Approach

Abstract

Despite the importance of classroom language interactions for children’s school readiness skills and the school readiness gaps faced by Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals (EBs), the field knows little about their classroom language interactions in early childhood education (ECE) classrooms. Expanding upon traditional approaches of observing classroom interactions, this study applies a child-centered analytic method to identify profiles of EBs classroom language interactions, characterized by their vocalizations and conversational turn-taking with teachers and peers, based on audio recordings. Data were drawn from 20 ECE classrooms and 171 EB children (ages 3 to 4) during the 2020–2021 school year. Latent profile analysis using variables from all-day recordings of EB children’s language environment identified three profiles: (1) limited classroom language interactions (58%); (2) engaging in conversations with teachers (14%); and (3) vocalizing and engaging conversations with peers (28%). EB children categorized to the second profile were less likely to speak Spanish and have teachers who spoke Spanish but were more likely to hear more words than EBs in profile 1. EBs children in profile 3 were likelier to be older than EBs in profile 1. Given that most EBs were in a profile of limited language interactions, the findings suggest the importance of improving opportunities and providing more support for EBs to engage in conversational turn-taking with their teachers and peers.