| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
In the past years, more attention is directed towards science in kindergarten. Research suggests that science is a very important aspect of the development of children. The language people use in school is called academic language. The hypothesis is that scientific issues promote the use of cognitively demanding speech in children, which is created by predictions, comparisons, explanations and generalizations. In this thesis an investigation is executed about the differences in cognitively demanding speech between two tasks. One task has to do with a scientific object, the other task is a regular school task, like K'nexx. The interactions of 20 teachers with small groups of children were videotaped during the two tasks. Also investigators have controlled for language skills and cognitive capacities of the participating children. After that, analyses of variance repeated measures have been performed. Results indicate that the use of cognitively demanding speech is significantly higher during the scientific task. It is striking that this result is only significant for the teachers, not for the children. The only element of cognitively demanding speech that is not significantly different in the two tasks is 'prediction'. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm that academic speech of teachers, does influence the view of science in children. | |
