The role of the environmental context in shaping teachers’ linguistic input

While decades of research have demonstrated that the quality of linguistic input children receive from adults has significant effects on their language development, more recent work suggests that the quality of that input is affected by the environmental context in which it is delivered. In the current study, six teachers were audio-recorded teaching four- and five-year-old children similar content in either a museum, their classroom with museum resources, or their classroom with typical classroom resources. Quality of input was measured in terms of the proportion of decontextualised talk, wh- questions, rare words and multi-clausal sentences produced. Teachers produced a significantly higher proportion of decontextualised talk when teaching in the museum compared to teaching in the classroom with regular classroom resources. However, teachers used the highest proportion of rare words when teaching with museum resources in the classroom compared to the other two contexts. These data demonstrate that different learning contexts lend themselves to different aspects of high-quality input, with implications for children’s language development.