Do instructions overwhelm the preschool classroom? Early childhood educators’ use of instructional vs regulative directive commands

Instructions are a fundamental part of early childhood educators’ verbal activities in a plethora of interactions, that constantly guide children to achieve a targeted educational goal. However, little attention has been devoted to identify their presence and relative proportions in early childhood educators’ daily speech. Underpinned by functional linguistic theory, this study’s purpose is to identify early childhood educators’ spoken directive commands from a large database to check their distribution and predominance, compared to other verbal modalities that are equally important for their pedagogical work, such as: commands, sayings, feedback, questions, etc. Th rough 20 participants’ daily audio–recordings from regular work–hours with preschool children, we selected a large number of sentences to later be classifi ed according to their degree of belonging to a specifi c directive command’s category – ten in this study. Th e fi ndings suggest that instructional directives are the fi rst in order of frequency followed by the use of reformulations and singing, among others. We conclude that it is vital for early childhood educators’ professional practice to identify which types of linguistic styles they predominantly use in order to make eff ective decisions to pursuit an educational goal, and that way successfully support young children’s learning processes. Th e scope of these fi ndings is briefl y discussed taking into perspective future research and its contributions to early childhood education’s formative processes. – deset u ovom studiju. Na temelju dobivenih podataka, uočeno je da su najučestalije zapovjedi i upute, a nakon njih slijede uporabe reformulacije i pjevanje, među drugim direktivama. Zaključujemo da je odgajateljicama rane i predškolske dobi ključno imati uvid u jezični stil koji najčešće koriste u svrsi donošenja učinkovitih odluka kako bi se postigao željeni odgojni cilj, i na taj način, podržavao proces učenja. Kratki osvrt na opseg ovih rezultata je predstavljen uvažavajući buduća istraživanja i njihov doprinos visokoškolskom obrazovanju odgajateljica rane i predškolske dobi.