Dialoge und Sprachlehrstrategien: Alternative Ansätze zur Erklärung frühkindlicher Sprachentwicklung – Ergebnisse einer Interventionsstudie

This study investigates the impact of two aspects of educational processes—the use of language support strategies (input strategies, modeling and corrective feedback, output strategies) and the dialogical quality of the conversation—on the language development of children from about 3 to 5. Process quality is examined both as an independent predictor of children’s language progress and as a potential mediator of an intervention that guides preschool teachers on how to initiate sustained verbal exchanges with children and how to apply language support strategies across various pedagogical settings (e.g., mealtimes and shared book reading). Data were raised in a three-wave (pre, post, follow-up) intervention-control group design. Children’s language competencies were tested in a comprehensive range of measures, covering vocabulary, sentence comprehension, grammar and working memory. Group-level indicators of the process quality were derived from videotapes of teacher-child interaction. Multilevel mediation analysis reveals a beneficial impact of the dialogical quality of conversations (pretest) on the formation of morphological rules (posttest), short-term sentence memory (posttest) and sentence comprehension (posttest and follow-up test). Pre-post-changes in dialogical quality are related to parallel changes in the phonological working memory and the memory span for word sequences. Changes in the quantity of input strategies positively predict (parallel and/or long-term) changes in the expressive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, formation of morphological rules and in the short-term sentence memory. Modeling or corrective feedback has a significant, but negative impact on the development of children’s language abilities in many of those dimensions that are positively affected by input strategies. Output strategies do not cause any change in children’s language development. The results are discussed under a methodological perspective. Mediation analysis confirms that improvements of the dialogical quality and use of input strategies are potential transmission routes of in-service trainings on children’s language development.