Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecresq

Review

A meta-analysis of teacher language practices in early childhood

classrooms
Elizabeth Burke Hadley a,∗, Erica M. Barnes b, Brenton M. Wiernik c, Mukhunth Raghavan c
a
Department of Language, Literacy, Ed.D., Exceptional Education, and Physical Education, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Ave, EDU 105,
Tampa, FL 33620
b
Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning, University at Albany, SUNY; Albany, NY, United States
c
Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the relationships between teacher language practices
Received 23 July 2021 in early childhood classrooms, using a systemic functional linguistic theoretical framework. We included
Revised 1 December 2021
studies with typically developing preschool or kindergarten-aged children that conducted 1 or more ob-
Accepted 9 December 2021
servations of teachers in which teachers’ talk was systematically coded for strategies that supported oral
Available online 6 January 2022
language development. Studies also had to present at least one correlation between types of teacher lan-
Keywords: guage practice variables (e.g., open-ended questions and use of rare vocabulary). In a meta-analysis of 30
early childhood studies and 539 correlations, we identified correlations between 11 key types of teacher language prac-
oral language development tices. We then conducted a factor analysis using the overall meta-analytic mean correlations, finding that
vocabulary teacher language practices loaded onto 2 factors: an Emergent Academic Language dimension character-
meta-analysis ized by abstract talk with a greater variety of word types, and a Bridge Language dimension characterized
by scaffolding practices. Last, we explored how teacher language practices varied by activity setting and
group size, finding that shared book-reading enhanced the use of more Emergent Academic Language
practices, and that small group time included fewer beneficial language practices as compared to other
settings.
© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
1.1. A meta-analysis of teacher language practices in early childhood
classrooms
Early childhood classrooms have a unique role to play in sup-
porting children’s language development. Positioned in between
the more formal schooling environment of elementary school and
children’s home language environments, early childhood teachers
can mediate children’s introduction into the kinds of language val-
ued in school, while also providing opportunities for the nurturing,
playful interactions that are more characteristic of home learning
environments (e.g., Authors, 2020; Justice, McGinty, Zucker, Cabell,
& Piasta, 2013; Tompkins, Zucker, Justice, & Binici, 2013; Toub et al.,
2018). Teachers’ talk in early childhood classrooms (ECCs) supports
children’s language development in multiple ways: building con-
ceptual knowledge about the world, encouraging children to grow
in their expressive language skills, responding to and affirming
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: hadleye@usf.edu (E. Burke Hadley).
child talk, providing models for complex sentence structure and
high-level vocabulary use, and familiarizing children with an emer-
gent academic language register (e.g., Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang,
2021; Bowne Yoshikawa, & Snow, 2017; Cabell, Justice, McGinty,
DeCoster, & Forston, 2015; Deshmukh et al., 2019; Dickinson, Hofer,
Barnes, & Grifenhagen, 2014; Farrow, Wasik, & Hindman, 2020).
Foundational research has confirmed the importance of certain
teacher language practices in early childhood for children’s aca-
demic language and literacy development (Cazden, 1988; Dickinson
& Smith, 1994; Dickinson & Tabors, 2001), finding that there
are long-term associations between a supportive preschool class-
room language environment and children’s language and reading
skills in kindergarten and fourth-grade (Dickinson & Porche, 2011).
Dozens of studies have grown from this early work, examining the
types and frequencies of teacher language practices in early child-
hood classrooms, as well as their relationships to children’s oral
language growth (e.g., Bratsch-Hines, Burchinal, Peisner-Feinberg,
& Franco, 2019; Cabell, DeCoster, LoCasale-Crouch, Hamre, & Pi-
anta, 2013; Gámez, 2015; Hindman, Connor, Jewkes, & Morrison,
2008; Justice, Mashburn, Hamre, & Pianta, 2008; Silverman & Cran-
dell, 2010). Considered together, these studies confirm the impor-
tance of teacher language practices for children’s oral language

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2021.12.002
0885-2006/© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
development, which in turn serves as the foundation for later read-
ing skills.
Although there is a large body of work on how EC teacher
language practices support oral language development, there have
been few systematic reviews or meta-analyses on this line of
work. There are several potential reasons for this lack of synthesis.
First, studies examining teacher language practices in early child-
hood classrooms (ECCs) are typically correlational and descrip-
tive in nature, which can be more difficult to synthesize statisti-
cally than interventional work. Second, the kinds of teacher lan-
guage practice variables typically coded for in these studies are,
on their face, fairly heterogenous, with a wide range of teacher
language practice types measured and inconsistent terminology
used across studies. Finally, the reporting of statistics needed for
meta-analysis is inconsistent, with few studies reporting the full
correlation matrices needed to calculate effect sizes. In previous
work (Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021), we have begun synthe-
sizing this body of research by conducting a systematic review
of teacher language practices and child outcomes, using the find-
ings to develop a theory of early childhood classroom language
development. The present study builds on this previous work
by using the theoretical framework developed in that paper, but
here we focus exclusively on teacher language practices, using
a meta-analytic approach to better understand how these prac-
tices cluster together and vary across typical classroom settings.
The correlational meta-analysis presented here has several pur-
poses: to further develop a theoretical framework for research on
early childhood teachers’ oral language practices, to identify pat-
terns across teacher language practices, and to inform future re-
search that measures the quality of classroom language environ-
ments.
Our approach here, which uses meta-analysis with correlational
data, is relatively uncommon in educational research, where meta-
analyses are typically conducted to synthesize effect sizes from ex-
perimental interventions. However, we use meta-analysis, rather
than more qualitative methods of synthesis, to summarize this area
of research for several reasons. First, the data we synthesize here
are well-suited to meta-analysis as this literature includes mea-
sures of a variety of teacher language practices which we can clas-
sify according to a taxonomy developed for the study. We can then
synthesize quantitative correlations among measures of different
language practice categories and apply meta-analytic factor anal-
ysis to identify empirically-grounded, higher-order dimensions of
teacher language practices. Importantly, most studies in this lit-
erature do not measure all of the language practice categories in
our taxonomy; meta-analysis allows us to integrate quantitative
findings from many studies to permit broader multivariate anal-
yses than would be possible from any single study (Viswesvaran &
Ones, 1995). Meta-analysis of this literature also has an advantage
in that it can avoid one of the major limitations of meta-analysis
as a research synthesis method—publication bias. In many litera-
tures, studies with small or no treatment effects can be judged
as “unsuccessful” and therefore remain unpublished or unreported
and unavailable for inclusion in meta-analyses. This leads to in-
flated effect sizes from meta-analytic models. However, the corre-
lations we use here are typically not the focal topic of the study
and are instead reported as descriptive information. This type of
incidentally-reported statistic is not subjected to the same selec-
tion pressure, and so meta-analyses of these data generally do not
suffer from publication bias (Mathur & VanderWeele, 2021). Thus,
quantitative synthesis can allow us to examine patterns of rela-
tionships among teacher language practices in a precise and trans-
parent way. In contrast, qualitative syntheses of these relationships
can be inaccurate due to their inability to capture the strength of
correlational relationships and/or account for differences in sample
sizes (e.g., Bushman & Wells, 2001).
187
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
The present review focuses on uncovering key types and pat-
terns of teacher language practices, and variation of those practices
across instructional settings, rather than examining how those
practices relate to child outcomes. We chose to focus on the re-
lationships between teacher language practices only in this study
for conceptual as well as practical reasons: many of the stud-
ies we synthesize here also report observational data on teachers
only, without linking those practices to children’s learning. We also
found that, in the studies that did correlate teacher language prac-
tices to children’s outcomes, there were very few studies that re-
ported the information necessary for calculating effect sizes for the
relationships between teacher language practices and child out-
comes.
We define early childhood classrooms in this review as those
that serve preschool and kindergarten-aged children (roughly 3 to
6 years old). Our primary interest here is in investigating teacher
language practices in pre-school, which we define as instruction
that takes place before the more formalized environment of el-
ementary school. Although kindergarten has become increasingly
academic in the last decade in the United States, and there-
fore is arguably more similar to first grade than preschool in its
structure and content (Bassok, Latham, & Rorem, 2016), kinder-
garten remains the first formalized schooling experience for many
young children in the United States and elsewhere (Friedman-
Krauss et al., 2020). Therefore, we cast a relatively wide net in our
search, looking for research conducted in classrooms described as
preschool, pre-k, pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, Head Start, child-
care/daycare or even simply “early childhood.”
2. Theoretical framework: early childhood classrooms as hybrid
language spaces
Our theoretical framework here is rooted in systemic functional
linguistics (SFL), which views language as inextricably tied to and
shaped by the purposes for which it is used, the places in which it
is used, and the participants with whom it is used (Hadley, Barnes,
& Hwang, 2021). Central to SFL is the notion of language regis-
ters, or constellations of co-occurring lexical and grammatical fea-
tures that serve different social purposes of language and vary
across contexts (Biber, 1995; Halliday, 1978; Schleppegrell, 2004).
Young children possess a toolkit of culturally-shaped home lan-
guage resources that have allowed them to effectively communi-
cate with their caregivers, family, and community members. Upon
school entry, children become members of a new language com-
munity that has its own set of expectations, norms, and valued
ways of speaking and listening, while also sharing their own indi-
vidual ways with words in the classroom space. The resulting “hy-
bridity,” or blend of home and school language practices present
in the preschool classroom (Authors, 2020; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-
López, & Tejeda, 1999), can create opportunities for further lan-
guage development. In the following section, we discuss some of
the key characteristics of home and school language practices, with
the understanding that these 2 registers are not dichotomous, but
rather exist on a continuum from more colloquial to more aca-
demic in nature (Snow & Uccelli, 2009).
Home language practices can be defined as the kinds of lan-
guage practices families use together at home to accomplish the
activities of everyday life, maintain relationships, and communi-
cate information (van Kleeck, 2006). Such practices are shaped
by the cultural, social, and socioeconomic backgrounds of fami-
lies and their beliefs about children’s development, learning, and
role in the family (Johnston & Wong, 2002; van Kleeck, 2007). De-
velopmental research on home language practices has often fo-
cused on variation in the linguistic features of caregiver speech,
as measured by variables such as the number of words, the
number of different words, and the mean length of caregiver
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
utterances (e.g., Vernon-Feagans et al., 2020). Ethnographic re-
search has found other discourse-level, culturally-shaped differ-
ences in caregiver speech, such as the extent to which parents
specifically direct their speech to children (Sperry et al., 2019),
the frequency with which they tell personal stories (Miller, Cho,
& Bracey, 2005), and the kinds of questions they ask children
(Scollon & Scollon, 1981). Certain socioculturally-shaped home
language practices, such as parents’ commenting practices dur-
ing shared book-reading, closely mirror school language practices
(Heath, 1982; Hindman et al., 2008; Hindman, Skibbe, & Foster,
2014), and the children whose home language practices align more
closely with the language practices valued in school may therefore
have an advantage in communicating and learning through school
language registers (Michaels, 1981; van Kleeck, 2014).
Academic language, as identified in the upper elementary and
middle school grades, involves the use of language that differs
from more conversational talk in terms of its lexical diversity and
structural complexity. Academic language typically includes the ar-
ticulation of precise meanings, use of rare vocabulary words, and
discussion topics beyond the here-and-now (Snow & Uccelli, 2009;
Uccelli, Galloway, Barr, Meneses, & Dobbs, 2015). While these
features of academic language have been observed in texts in-
tended for older children, researchers have identified emergent
academic language registers in preschool classrooms, including the
use of complex syntax, rare words, and talk about abstract con-
cepts (Dickinson et al., 2014). Recent longitudinal research has dis-
covered another important precursor of later academic language,
finding that caregiver-child conversations about decontextualized
topics, or those that focus on abstract ideas that are not physi-
cally present in children’s environment, are a significant predictor
of academic language proficiency in seventh grade (Uccelli, Demir-
Lira, Rowe, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2019). However, not all chil-
dren have equal opportunities at home to practice emergent aca-
demic language registers (Schleppegrell, 2004). Given that aca-
demic language can be either a gateway or gatekeeper to ac-
cessing the text children are expected to learn from in school
(Uccelli, Phillips Galloway, Aguilar, & Allen, 2020), it is of critical
importance that educators understand the linguistic demands of
the academic environment and are able to help all children gain
facility with school-valued language practices, beginning at chil-
dren’s school entry.
The extent to which school and home language practices over-
lap or diverge within different communities is still an open
question, but available research indicates several key areas in
which school language practices are distinct from many chil-
dren’s home language experiences. First, the content of conversa-
tions between children and caregivers at home typically focuses
on more concrete, literal, and “common-sense” topics (Halliday,
1993), in contrast to academic language, which is characterized
by abstract and generalized observations about the world com-
municated in specialized and technical language (Vygotsky, 1978;
Schleppegrell, 2004). The nature of participation structures at
home vs school also differ. Children often engage in more dyadic
language interactions with caregivers at home, therefore afford-
ing more opportunities for child talk (Hindman et al., 2008). In
contrast, classroom settings involve more time engaged in didactic
whole-group settings in which a teacher instructs many children
at once, and individual children may have less time to engage in
contingent conversations with an adult (Early et al., 2010). Finally,
running alongside these differences in participation structures is a
fundamental difference in the tenor (Halliday & Hasan, 1989), or
relationship between the speaker and audience, in home vs school
language registers, with home language interactions characterized
by warmth, references to shared knowledge and experiences, and
the growth of personal relationships, whereas academic language
relies on an impersonal stance and an assumption that the speaker
188
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
and audience do not share common knowledge (Michaels, 1981;
Schleppegrell, 2004; Snow & Uccelli, 2009).
ECCs are positioned “in between” home and the more formal
schooling environment of the upper elementary grades, and blend
many of the features of each setting. For example, the focus on de-
velopmentally appropriate practice in ECCs means that warm, re-
sponsive relationships between teachers and children are valued:
indeed, the first standard for high-quality EC programs set by the
National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
focuses on relationships, described as “teaching staff engag[ing]
in warm, friendly conversations with the children. . .encourag[ing]
and recogniz[ing] children’s work and accomplishments.” Academic
learning is also valued in ECCs, with the use of activities “designed
to help children get better at reasoning, solving problems, get-
ting along with others, using language, and developing other skills”
(NAEYC Standard 2).
Given the unique affordances of the ECC environment, we ar-
gue here that ECCs can function as a hybrid space in which mul-
tiple kinds of home and school language practices are employed
to apprentice children into the new language community of school
(Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021; Gutiérrez et al., 1999), and that,
rather than a problem to be solved, this hybridity can function
as a scaffold or springboard for young children into a new lan-
guage community. These practices might include the use of emer-
gent academic language by teachers (e.g., Dickinson et al., 2014),
children’s use of their own home language practices, especially in
settings such as play and mealtime that connect to home activities
for many children (e.g., Barnes, Grifenhagen, & Dickinson, 2020;
Leyva & Skorb, 2017) and the use of interactive language practices
by teachers that bridge or connect home and school language prac-
tices (Gort & Sembiante, 2015).
3. Dimensions of hybrid language spaces in early childhood
classrooms
In the present meta-analysis, we investigated and summarized
studies that examined the early childhood teacher language prac-
tices that were hypothesized to support children’s oral language
development. In our initial review, we found that a wide range of
terms were used to describe teacher language practices. Through
an iterative coding process (see details in the Method section be-
low), drawing on findings from our previous related systematic re-
view (Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021), as well as prior work in this
area (Rowe & Snow, 2020), we identified several major categories
of teacher language practices that we hypothesize support chil-
dren’s acquisition of school-valued oral language skills. We briefly
discuss each category below.
3.1. Linguistic features
Perhaps the most well-researched dimension of teacher lan-
guage in ECCs are the linguistic features of teacher language, also
described as the “data-providing” features of talk (Justice, Jiang, &
Strasser, 2018) or structural features of language (Dickinson et al.,
2014). While the study of linguistic features could theoretically in-
volve the study of any number of word-, sentence-, or discourse-
level features, the research to date has typically focused on linguis-
tic features that are characteristic of emergent academic language,
such as information about the complexity of teachers’ syntax, the
number of words used (tokens), number of different word types,
the number of rare words or academic vocabulary, and lexical di-
versity. Hearing the linguistic features associated with an emer-
gent academic language register, such as sentences with multiple
clauses, helps young children to learn the forms of language that
are valued in a school setting.
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
3.2. Conceptual talk
A second facet of an ECC hybrid language space concerns the
content or topics of conversation. While talk at home typically dis-
cusses topics that are immediate, including perceptually present
objects and personal or shared experiences, academic language
discusses abstract, general ideas that are further removed from
the present time and space (Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009;
van Kleeck, 2014). This includes inferential talk, or using informa-
tion that is not immediately present or directly stated to predict,
summarize, interpret, and explain (van Kleeck, 2014). For exam-
ple, a teacher might explain during a shared book-reading session,
“So now we know that fruits have seeds and they can grow on
trees.” We call this kind of language “conceptual talk” here be-
cause it is typically about concepts and ideas rather than physi-
cally present objects; it is often referred to as “decontextualized”
talk in the literature because of its removal from children’s imme-
diate, physical context (Rowe, 2012; Uccelli et al., 2019), although
some have argued that this term is imprecise because no lan-
guage is truly context-free (Schleppegrell, 2004). Other researchers
have referred to similar kinds of abstract talk as high-level
(Barnes & Dickinson, 2017a), conceptual (Rowe & Snow, 2020), an-
alytic (Dickinson, 2011), or inferential (Mascareño, Snow, Deunk, &
Bosker, 2016). One specific type of abstract talk involves the in-
struction and discussion of vocabulary words. This explicit focus
on teaching and learning word meanings is distinct from teachers’
largely unconscious use of sophisticated vocabulary as described
above in the section on linguistic features of talk. Rather, this vo-
cabulary talk involves the explicit teaching of new word mean-
ings, including definitions and examples of use in context (e.g.,
Silverman & Crandell, 2010). Words become the focus of discus-
sion and an object of thought, which may promote word con-
sciousness or metalinguistic awareness, both of which have been
associated with children’s language development (Nagy, 2007;
Neugebauer, Coyne, McCoach, & Ware, 2017).
3.3. Literal talk
Literal talk, sometimes described as low-level, concrete, or con-
textualized talk, exists on the opposite end of the spectrum from
conceptual talk, as it focuses on topics in the “here-and-now.” Lit-
eral talk provides a number of physical supports for interpret-
ing and understanding the messages that are communicated, such
as pointing, gestures, and people and objects that are present in
the immediate environment. Literal talk is also more familiar to
many children because of its use in most home language environ-
ments (e.g., Hindman et al., 2008). While literal talk has some-
times been dismissed as unhelpful for language development in
preschool as many children no longer need such explicit support
for understanding language, such talk can provide a means of ac-
cessing more conceptual, abstract language, particularly for chil-
dren who are still in an emergent stage of language acquisition
(Hindman, Wasik, & Erhart, 2012).
3.4. Interactive talk
The final dimension of a hybrid language space we discuss here
is the use of interactive language practices, or talk strategies that
both encourage child talk and extend or respond to children’s con-
versational offerings. Interactive talk practices are distinct from the
other language practices discussed here in that they are responsive
in nature and can help to “bridge” or scaffold children’s language
to align with school-valued language practices. In the context of
supportive interactions, teachers can encourage children to try out
new sentence structures, use complex words, and implicitly or ex-
plicitly teach them the kinds of talk that are valued in certain set-
189
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
tings. For example, during small group time when a child sees a
picture of a volcano and says, “It’s going to explode!,” a teacher
might affirm and scaffold their statement by replying, “Yes, that
volcano’s going to erupt!” Michaels (1981) identified sharing time
as a distinct discourse setting in which children were expected to
display their knowledge in a certain valued style. When teachers
were skilled at supporting children’s talk, and could help children
to use the expected style of “sharing time talk” by asking ques-
tions, sharing time messages were co-constructed by teachers and
children, giving children scaffolded practice in making their ideas
explicit and using complex syntax (Michaels, 1981), much as is ex-
pected in an academic language register.
Interactive talk includes 2 kinds of talk: modeling strategies,
in which a teacher builds on child talk to provide a model
for emergent academic language (e.g., extensions and expan-
sions), and strategies that encourage children to speak and to en-
gage in extended conversations (Justice, Jiang, & Strasser, 2018),
sometimes described as elicitations (Cabell et al., 2015). When
preschool teachers used more elicitation strategies such as ask-
ing open-ended questions (e.g., “Can you tell me about your pic-
ture?”) or waiting expectantly for children to speak, children talked
more, used longer sentences, and used a wider variety of words
(Girolametto & Weitzman, 2002). These child-driven conversations
help teachers to learn about children’s own individual language
practices and open up a space for socializing children into aca-
demic language practices through authentic engagement in talk
about topics that children are interested in.
4. Variation in teacher language based on activity setting and
group size
Academic language is setting specific, such that different
academic disciplines each have a distinct academic register
(Schleppegrell, 2004). For younger children, for whom content area
divisions are not as clear-cut, language practices have been found
to vary across different instructional settings, with the nature of
talk influenced by participants, materials, and topics of study, as
well as the size of the group (Dickinson et al., 2014). Studies de-
scribing adults’ use of emergent academic language practices re-
veal differences among instructional settings involving different
disciplines at the word and/or sentence level (Barnes & Dick-
inson, 2017b; Dickinson et al., 2014; Weizman & Snow, 2001),
and discourse level (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Language-
focused studies in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms
have largely focused on shared book reading settings, and have
found that this setting promotes the use of linguistic features
typical of emergent academic language, as well as many concep-
tual and interactive talk practices (Barnes & Dickinson, 2017b;
Dickinson & Porche, 2011; Mol, Bus, & de Jong, 2009). A more lim-
ited set of studies have evaluated teacher language across the day
in multiple activity settings (e.g., Cabell et al., 2013), including play
activities, science lessons, and circle or morning meeting time, al-
though consistent patterns of talk across those settings have not
yet been identified.
4.1. Previous meta-analyses and syntheses
To our knowledge, our recent systematic review on teacher lan-
guage and child outcomes (Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021) was
the first to systematically summarize this line of research to date.
In our previous systematic review, we identified the key strands
of teacher language practices that we describe above and analyzed
findings from previous studies to develop the theory of ECCs as
hybrid language spaces. We build on that work in the present pa-
per by using meta-analytic methods to examine the relationships
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
between these strands of teacher language practices and examine
how they vary across settings.
Other recent studies, while not meta-analyses or systematic re-
views, have provided conceptual overviews of the field that we
draw on here. For example, Rowe and Snow (2020) theorized that
3 strands of high-quality caregiver input were related to children’s
language development, including linguistic, conceptual, and inter-
active talk, then used a developmental framework to trace the
use of these talk features with children from birth to age 5. The
present study builds on Rowe and Snow’s (2020) work by extend-
ing it to a classroom context, employing systematic review meth-
ods to more comprehensively survey the existing research, and us-
ing meta-analysis to determine the correlational relationships be-
tween and among these strands.
4.2. Research questions
The present systematic review and meta-analysis asks the fol-
lowing questions:
What are the relationships between the different types of early
childhood teacher language practices across studies?
Which underlying factors, or clusters, of teacher language prac-
tices can be identified across studies?
Which patterns of teacher language practices are evident across
different activity settings and with different participants?
5. Method
5.1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria
We used the following inclusion criteria to select studies for
our sample: (1) child participants were typically developing chil-
dren in preschool, kindergarten, Head Start, daycare/childcare, or
early childhood classrooms; (2) the study primarily took place in
a classroom, rather than home, setting; (3) the study included one
or more observations of teachers in which teacher’s talk was sys-
tematically counted and/or coded for strategies that supported oral
language development; (4) the study presented at least one corre-
lation between teacher language variables, and 5) the study was
written in English. We did not exclude studies based on the ages
of children, but rather excluded only studies that took place in a
classroom setting outside of preschool, kindergarten, or early child-
hood (e.g., studies in first grade classrooms). We excluded articles
that examined teacher language practices by using a global ob-
servation system such as the Classroom Assessment Scoring Sys-
tem (CLASS, Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) or the Early Literacy
and Language Classroom Observation scale (ELLCO, Smith, Dickin-
son, Sangeorge, & Anastasopoulos, 2002), as results from these ob-
servational tools typically reported an aggregated score that char-
acterized the overall quality of the classroom language environ-
ment, rather than reporting the frequency of the more fine-grained
teacher language practices that are the focus of this review. We in-
cluded both published and unpublished studies in our sample to
limit potential publication bias.
5.2. Information sources
Articles for this meta-analysis were identified in 2 ways. First, a
literature search was conducted by searching the databases ERIC,
Education Source, and PsycInfo. We used the earliest possible
start date through June 2021. Titles, abstracts, and keywords were
searched using the following terms: syntax or grammar or vocab-
ulary or comprehension or “oral language” or “phon∗ awareness” or
discourse (oral language terms) AND preschool or pre-k or prekinder-
garten or kindergarten or “early childhood” or “Head Start” (chil-
dren’s age terms) AND language or talk or input or linguistic or
190
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
conversation∗ or “book reading” or instruction or speech (terms for
teacher’s language practices) AND classroom or teach∗ (terms about
setting). These searches yielded a total of 3,821 articles. Next, we
hand-searched the references of relevant articles from the initial
database search published in the last 2 years and searched for ad-
ditional articles by authors who had more than one article in our
sample after full-text screening, yielding an additional 26 articles.
In total, we had 2699 articles after duplicates were removed (see
Fig. 1).
5.3. Study selection
All titles and abstracts were reviewed by the first and second
author using the above inclusion and exclusion criteria. We had
high interrater reliability (92% agreement) as to whether studies
should be included. Disagreements were resolved through discus-
sion or by adding ambiguous studies to the full-text screening
pool.
After the initial screening of titles and abstracts, 231 articles re-
mained. The full-text of these articles was again screened for el-
igibility using the inclusion and exclusion criteria above. An ad-
ditional 201 articles were deemed ineligible during this second
round of full-text screening (see Fig. 1). We had high interrater
reliability for exclusion of articles (86% agreement), and we again
resolved disagreements through discussion.
After full-text screening, we were left with a pool of 60 stud-
ies that met inclusion and exclusion criteria. Twenty-five of these
studies met other inclusion and exclusion criteria but did not
report full descriptive or correlational information necessary for
computing effect sizes. We emailed corresponding authors to re-
quest data and received responses with data for 2 studies, meaning
that 23 studies in total were excluded based on missing or incom-
plete data.
In total, 30 studies met our inclusion and exclusion criteria and
were coded using the criteria described in the following section.
5.4. Coding procedure
We developed a detailed codebook to extract relevant informa-
tion from studies, including citation and study information. First,
we coded for citation information such as publication type, year of
publication, and authors. We then coded key features of the study
design, sample characteristics, teacher language variables, potential
moderator variables such as activity setting and group size, and
effect sizes. Table 1 summarizes the key characteristics of the arti-
cles; a table with a full summary of all characteristics of individual
studies are available upon request from the authors.
5.5. Study design
For the study design, we noted if each study was descrip-
tive/observational or whether data were drawn from larger inter-
ventions intended to support children’s oral language development
and/or teacher’s instructional practices. Studies were coded as ob-
servational if data were drawn from a larger intervention study
but were collapsed across treatment and control conditions (e.g.,
Barnes, Dickinson, & Grifenhagen, 2017; Bowne et al., 2017).
5.6. Sample characteristics
We coded the participant characteristics for both teachers and
children. Few child or teacher characteristics were reported consis-
tently across studies, but we coded for child age, child grade, gen-
der, race/ethnicity information, the number of low-socioeconomic
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202

Fig. 1. PRISMA flow diagram of study screening and selection.

Table 1
Characteristics of samples included in meta-analyses.

Characteristic N Mean SD Min Max

Included studies 30
Year 30 2015.93 3.48 2008.00 2021.00
Child sample size 28 304.89 154.49 70.00 592.00
Teacher sample size 30 41.33 20.72 13.00 122.00
Mean child age (months) 27 55.15 8.15 40.80 73.40
Mean teacher experience (years) 24 12.52 3.70 4.90 19.86
Country N %
USA 28 93%
Singapore 1 3%
Switzerland 1 3%
Study design
Observational 25 83%
Intervention 5 17%
Child grade
Pre-K 21 70%
Kindergarten 7 23%
Pre-K and kindergarten 2 7%
Low SES students
Mixed 10 45%
All 12 55%
Dual-language learner students
0%–1% 6 33%
9%–45% 9 50%
100% 3 17%

Note. N = for continuous variables, number of studies reporting information on sample

characteristic; for categorical variables, number of studies at each variable level.

status (SES) children in the sample, and the number of dual lan-
guage learners (DLLs) in the sample. To be coded as low-SES, chil-
dren had to be described in the sample as meeting specific cri-
teria for low-SES status, such as a family income below 150% of
the poverty line, receiving free or reduced-price lunch, or attending
Head Start or other publicly-funded preschools designated for fam-
ilies living in poverty. Children were coded as DLLs when the study
noted that children in their sample spoke a different language at
home, in addition to the language used at school. For teachers, we
coded for their race/ethnicity, gender, highest level of education at-
tained, and their years of experience.
5.7. Activity setting and group size
We coded for the activity setting by examining the instructional
context for the teacher language practices that were observed. For
example, some studies recorded and coded teacher talk within
shared book-reading, while others recorded talk during mealtime,

191
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202

Table 2
Teacher language practice codes, descriptions, and examples.

Macro Code Description Examples of variables included

Literal talk Questions or comments that focus on topics in the here-and-now Literal questions,
Concrete talk
Management talk Talk designed to manage children’s behavior or describe rules and Directions,
procedures Procedural talk,
Behavior-disapproving talk
Conceptual talk Questions or comments that focus on topics beyond the Abstract talk,
here-and-now and/or seeks to build knowledge of concepts. Topic-focused talk,
Includes talk about vocabulary words. Vocabulary talk
Vocabulary talk Talk about vocabulary words, their meanings, and examples of usage Definitions of words,
Examples of word use,
Word consciousness talk
Questions and Elicitations All questions or prompts in which a child response is expected or Open or closed-ended questions, Literal questions,
desired Inferential questions, Communication-facilitating talk
High-level questions Questions that ask for abstract thinking or extended responses Inferential questions,
Open-ended questions,
Vocabulary-related questions
Linguistic Features Lexical and grammatical features of teacher speech Types and tokens.
Syntactic complexity,
Use of rare vocabulary
Word Types and Tokens Count of the number of words and unique word types in teacher Total number of words,
speech Number of different word types, Type/token ratio
Syntax Measure of the complexity of teacher speech Mean length of utterance (MLU),
Number of clauses per T-unit
Modeling Talk that provides a model of school-valued language Modeling the use of new vocabulary,
Orally narrating child’s actions,
Modeling use of new materials
Responsive talk Talk that responds to a child’s utterance or overture Responding to child talk,
Repeating or confirming,
Active listening

and still others recorded talk throughout the school day without
specifying the settings. We developed a list of common activity
settings from the studies, then coded each teacher language vari-
able with the setting in which it was observed. Activity setting
codes included (1) shared book-reading, (2) language/literacy in-
struction, which comprised explicit instruction on literacy skills
such as letter names and sounds, (3) play activities such as socio-
dramatic play or play with manipulatives such as playdough, (4)
mealtimes, (5) science, or (6) not reported.
Group size codes reflected how many children were present at
the time the teacher talk was recorded and included (1) whole
class, (2) small group, (3) mixed (observations that included both
whole class and smaller group time), and (4) not reported.
5.8. Teacher language variables
Teacher language variables were described in various ways
across studies, with little consistency in terminology even for sim-
ilar constructs. In an iterative, inductive process, we developed a
coding scheme to group together similar variables using macro
codes. First, we copied all teacher language variable names and
verbatim descriptions into a spreadsheet. After reviewing variables,
we identified several common types of teacher language practices
across studies, then independently coded all variables applying
those codes. After discussion, we added additional codes for vari-
ables that were not well-represented by existing codes and com-
bined other codes that were overly specific. We then coded all
teacher language variables again with the finalized set of codes.
Table 2 gives a list of final teacher language codes and descrip-
tions. Note that these codes are not mutually exclusive and that
more than one code was often applied to a variable (e.g., open-
ended questions were coded using both the abstract talk and the
question codes).
In addition to the type of teaching language, we also coded
other information about the teacher language measures, including
the reliability of coding for that talk, number and duration of ob-
servations, and means and standard deviations.
5.9. Effect sizes and sample sizes
For each study, we coded correlations among the teacher lan-
guage variables measured, as well as the teacher sample sizes asso-
ciated with these correlations. All eligible studies reported teacher
sample sizes; however, 30 studies did not report correlations be-
tween teacher language variables or statistics that could be trans-
formed into correlations and were therefore excluded from our fi-
nal sample.
5.10. Reliability of coding
Both the first and second author coded all studies individually
and met weekly throughout the coding process to resolve disagree-
ments and minimize coding drift. Across all variables, the mean in-
terrater agreement was 89%, with values of 85% for participant and
demographic variables and 90% for variable characteristics. Dis-
agreements were resolved through discussion and consulting the
original article.
5.11. Data analysis
5.11.1. Meta-analysis
We estimated separate meta-analysis models for each pair of
teacher language practice codes. For each pair of teacher lan-
guage practice codes, we fit multilevel random effects meta-
analysis models to account for effect size dependency within
studies, with random intercepts for each study. We computed
estimated sampling error variances for each study using the
sample-size weighted mean correlation for the construct pair
(Bakbergenuly et al., 2019; Schmidt & Hunter, 2015). We es-
timated the amount of heterogeneity (i.e., τ ) using the re-
stricted maximum-likelihood estimator (Viechtbauer, 2005). We
computed confidence intervals for meta-regression coefficients and
mean treatment effects using the Knapp and Hartung (2003) t-
distribution method and for random effects variance components

192
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
using profile likelihood (Viechtbauer, 2007). For all analyses, we re-
port results when the number of studies was k ≥ 2.
5.11.2. Moderator analyses
We used the subgroup analysis approach to test moderator ef-
fects, estimating a separate meta-analysis model for each level of
a moderator variable (Schmidt & Hunter, 2015). Our primary mod-
erator analyses focused on group size (whole class, small group,
mixed) and activity setting (book reading, literacy instruction, play,
circle time, meal time, group activity). As exploratory analyses, we
also examined moderating effects of the percentage of students in
the sample that were low SES or dual-language learners (DLL). Al-
though these percentage variables are continuous, the range of val-
ues in the included samples was limited, so we grouped studies
according to whether all students were low SES/DLL, no students
were low SES/DLL, or students had a mixture of SES/DLL statuses.
5.11.3. Meta-analytic factor analyses
We used the overall meta-analytic mean correlation matrix as
input to exploratory factor analysis models to examine patterns of
relationships across teacher language variable types. We used max-
imum likelihood factor analysis with direct oblimin rotation. We
used several methods to determine the number of factors to retain.
First, we examined a scree plot using parallel analysis (Horn, 1965,
using the harmonic mean sample size across the meta-analyses as
the sample size for the simulated data (Viswesvaran & Ones, 1995).
In parallel analysis, eigenvalues for the observed correlation matrix
are compared to eigenvalues for randomly simulated uncorrelated
data; the number of factors with eigenvalues larger than those for
random data is taken as an upper bound on the number of fac-
tors to retain. Parallel analysis is similar to the “eigenvalue > 1”
Kaiser criterion, but is more stable at smaller sample sizes and in
the presence of minor factors.
In addition to parallel analysis, we also compared Bayesian
information criterion (BIC), Revelle and Tonkin’s Very Simple
Structure (VSS) criterion, and Velicer’s minimum average par-
tials (MAP) values for solutions with varying numbers of factors
(Revelle, 2009). BIC estimates the cross-validated log-likelihood
factor models, penalizing models for increasing complexity (lower
values are better, ࢞BIC > 6 is generally taken to indicate noticeably
better fit). VSS and MAP aim to identify the most interpretable fac-
tor solutions. VSS identifies the number of factors where each in-
dicator most clearly shows a strong loading on a single factor and
very weak loadings on other factors. MAP finds the number of fac-
tors where the average squared residual correlation among indica-
tors after extracting factors is minimized. Each of these methods
has advantages and disadvantages, so consensus among methods
and interpretability of the final factor solution are used to choose
among possible solutions (Revelle, 2009).
Eight of the 55 remaining correlations were not reported in any
included study. Plausible values for these correlations were im-
puted using nuclear norm optimization (Candès & Recht, 2009).
This approach relies on the same assumption as factor analysis—
that the correlation matrix has an underlying low-dimensional
structure—so it is an appropriate imputation method for factor
analysis. The imputed complete correlation matrix is available
upon request from the authors. For the factor analyses, we ex-
tracted factors using maximum likelihood and rotated them using
direct oblimin.
5.11.4. Publication bias and selective reporting
Typical methods for assessing potential for publication bias in
meta-analysis (e.g., the PET-PEESE test for funnel plot asymme-
try, cumulative meta-analysis; cf. Carter, Schönbrodt, Gervais, &
Hilgard, 2019) have not yet been extended for use in multilevel
meta-analysis. However, publication bias is unlikely to be a major
193
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
concern for the current meta-analyses. Correlations among teacher
language variables are rarely the central focus of the study. In-
stead, these correlations are reported incidentally as part of stud-
ies focused on testing other hypotheses (e.g., the relationships of
teacher language variables with child outcomes), or are part of
larger observational studies aimed at capturing typical practice in
early childhood classrooms. Accordingly, the correlations that are
the focus of the current study are unlikely to have been subject to
selective reporting or similar biases.
5.11.5. Analysis software
We fit models using R (version 4.1.0; R Core Team, 2021). We
computed sampling error variances using the psychmeta package
(version 2.6.0.90 0 0; Dahlke & Wiernik, 2017/2021, 2019) and es-
timated meta-analyses with the metafor package (version 3.1-3;
Viechtbauer, 2010, 2021). We imputed missing correlations for fac-
tor analyses with the filling package (version 0.2.2; You, 2020)
and estimated factor analyses using the psych package (ver-
sion 2.1.6; Revelle, 2021). We used the readxl (version 1.3.1;
Wickham & Bryan, 2019), readr (version 1.4.0; Wickham & Hes-
ter, 2020), here (version 1.0.1; Müller, 2020), and dplyr (version
1.0.7; Wickham, François, Henry, & Müller, 2021) packages for data
management, and the ggplot2 (version 3.3.5; Wickham, 2016), see
(version 0.6.5; Lüdecke, Patil, et al., 2021), and ggtext (version 0.1.1;
Wilke, 2020) packages for plotting.
6. Results
6.1. Correlations among teacher language practice types
Overall meta-analysis results among teacher variables are illus-
trated in Fig. 2, which reports the overall correlations for each pair
of teacher language practices. Full meta-analytic results tables, in-
cluding the confidence intervals and number of studies for each
pair of correlations, are available upon request from the authors.
For overall analyses, the number of studies reporting between each
pair of teacher language variables ranged from k = 2 to 23, with
total teacher sample sizes ranging from N = 56 to 911. In general,
correlations among different teacher language practice types were
small to moderate in magnitude (|r̄|ranged 0.03 to 0.47). Correla-
tions with other language variables were strongest for Vocabulary
Talk (r̅ = 0.30 across language variables) and Modeling (r̅ = 0.27)
and weakest for Types and Tokens (r̅ = 0.14) and High-Level Ques-
tions (r̅ = 0.15). These patterns of correlations indicate that al-
though many aspects of teacher language are related, each of the
variables we consider captures unique aspects of teacher language.
When examining convergent correlations among alternative
measures of a single teacher language variable, we see that some
aspects of teacher language are more homogenous than others.
Complex Syntax (r̅ = 0.63 [95% CI 0.44, 0.83]), Linguistic Features
(r̅ = 0.48 [95% CI 0.29, 0.66]), and Types and Tokens (r̅ = 0.44 [95%
CI 0.15, 0.73]) were the most homogeneous categories, showing the
highest convergent correlations within-category. Responsive Talk
(r̅ = −0.06 [95% CI −0.22, 0.11]) and Conceptual Talk (r̅ = 0.13 [95%
CI −0.01, 0.28]) were the most heterogeneous, with measures in
these groups converging only weakly. Low within-category conver-
gent correlations may reflect poor measure reliability, as well as
variation in measurement modalities and variable conceptualiza-
tion across measures.
Correlations among teacher language variables were generally
quite heterogeneous across studies (mean τ = 0.24 across meta-
analyses), suggesting the presence of moderators. Some pairs of
teacher language variables were not measured together in any sin-
gle study (e.g., Complex Syntax and Management Talk), and other
pairs were measured together in relatively few studies, leading to
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202

Fig. 2. Overall mean correlations among teacher language practices. Note. Darkness of shading indicates the magnitude of the correlation. Positive correlations in blue.
Negative correlations in red.

Table 3 Table 4
Criterion values for determining the number of factors to retain in meta-analytic Meta-analytic factor loadings for teacher language practices for 2-factor solution
factor analysis.
Macro code Emergent academic Bridge h2
Number of Eigenvalue Median Random VSS MAP BIC language language
factors Eigenvalue
Literal talk .12 0.38 0.17
1 2.35 0.77 0.50 0.037 −13 Management talk −0.15 0.89 0.77
2 0.95 0.30 0.54 0.036 −77 Conceptual talk 0.30 0.19 0.15
3 0.36 0.23 0.52 0.053 −67 Vocabulary talk 0.36 0.63 0.59
4 0.12 0.15 0.56 0.080 −56 Questions and Elicitations 0.13 0.51 0.29
5 0.07 0.08 0.50 0.102 −38 High-level questions −0.09 0.43 0.18
6 0.02 0.02 0.51 0.132 −19 Linguistic Features 0.62 −0.04 0.38
Word Types and Tokens 0.63 −0.13 0.38
Note. Values computed using harmonic mean n = 192 as the sample size. Paral- Syntax 0.51 −0.02 0.26
lel analysis indicates to retain only factors whose eigenvalue is larger than the Modeling 0.45 0.25 0.30
corresponding median eigenvalue for simulated random data. VSS indicates to Responsive talk 0.26 0.30 0.18
retain the first solution where the criterion value is larger than the criterion Proportion of variance accounted for 0.15 0.18
value for the next larger solution. MAP indicates to retain the solution with the Factor intercorrelation 0.15
smallest criterion value. BIC indicates to retain the solution with the smallest
criterion value (࢞BIC > 6 is generally taken as indicating a substantial differ- Note. Factors extracted using maximum likelihood and rotated using direct oblimin.
ence in fit). Indicated numbers of factors for each criterion highlighted in bold. Factor loadings ≥ .30 highlighted in bold. h2 = communality.

wide confidence intervals (e.g., Questions/Elicitations and Manage-

ment Talk, k = 3, r̅ = 0.47 [95% CI −0.12, 1.00]). These patterns
indicate a need for further research exploring patterns of covari-
ation across these aspects of teacher language, as well as factors
that moderate these relationships.
6.2. Factor analysis of teacher language variable intercorrelations
To aid in interpreting patterns of correlations across teacher
language variables, we conducted a factor analysis using the overall
meta-analytic mean correlations. Criterion statistics used to deter-
mine the number of factors to retain are shown in Table 3. The
parallel analysis scree plot is shown in Fig. 3. Parallel analysis sug-
gested 2 or 3 factors. VSS, MAP, and BIC each suggested 2 factors.
Examination of the loading’s matrix showed that a third factor was
defined by a single variable (Literal Talk), so the 2-factor solution
was retained. Factor loadings are shown in Table 4.
The first factor was defined by Conceptual Talk, Types and To-
kens, Complex Syntax, Linguistic Features, and Modeling Talk. This
factor represents teachers’ use of school-valued language practices
that reflect the discussion of abstract ideas and concepts and the
use of certain linguistic features such as longer sentences and a
greater variety of word types. Therefore, we labeled this factor the
Emergent Academic Language register. This second factor was de-
fined by Questions and Elicitations, High-Level Questions, Respon-
sive Talk, Literal Talk, and Management Talk. This factor represents
interactive language practices that encourage child talk, support
and extend child talk, and use more concrete language practices
to scaffold children’s emergent language. We labeled this factor
the Bridge Language register because of its role in helping chil-
dren make connections between their own individual language
practices and those valued in a school setting. Vocabulary Talk
showed strong loadings onto both factors, with a stronger load-
ing onto Bridge Language. The 2 broad teacher language factors
were only weakly correlated (r = 0.15), indicating that teachers’
frequencies of Emergent Academic Language and Bridge Language
reflect largely independent aspects of their language use. Impor-
tantly, these 2 factors account for only 33% of the total variance

194
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
Fig. 3. Parallel analysis screen plot.
in the teacher language variables, and teacher language variables
generally retained substantial amounts of unique variance separate
from that shared with the broad factors. This means that, although
the 2 broad registers of Emergent Academic Language and Bridge
Language are useful for describing certain patterns of teachers’ lan-
guage use, there is also value in considering more specific variables
and their unique antecedents and impacts.
6.3. Moderation of teacher language variable correlations across
contexts
We examined setting and group size as potential moderators of
teacher language variable intercorrelations. These results are illus-
trated in Figs. 4A and 4B.
6.3.1. Activity settings and group size
Direct comparison of teacher language variable correlations was
possible between book reading and literacy instruction settings for
several pairs of language variables. In general, correlations were
similar across these settings, with correlations among most vari-
ables being somewhat to moderately higher in literacy instruction
settings than in book-reading. However, correlations were generally
higher in book-reading than literacy instruction for 2 key elements
of Emergent Academic Language: Conceptual Talk and Vocabulary
Talk. Importantly, many pairs of variables were only assessed in
book reading contexts or in play contexts. Thus, more research is
needed to understand the impact of setting, particularly play vs
more structured settings, on patterns of teacher language usage.
The empty cells in Fig. 4A provide a visual indication of areas most
in need of future research.
Direct comparison of teacher language variable correlations
across group sizes was possible for most variables. For most lan-
guage variable pairs, correlations were smaller or even negative
in small group settings compared to whole class or mixed set-
tings (e.g., for Conceptual Talk and High-Level Questions, r̅ = 0.60
[95% CI 0.05, 1.00] in whole class settings, but r̅ = −0.15 [95% CI
195
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
−0.37, +0.06] in small group settings). This pattern may reflect that
teacher’s tend to use fewer beneficial language practices in small
groups than in other, larger group settings, but may also mean
that teachers use more individualized language practices that are
tailored to children’s needs when working directly with smaller
groups, but more general speech patterns when addressing the
class as a whole. As with the activity setting analysis, many cells in
this moderator analysis were empty, and more research is needed
to understand the process through which teachers modify their
language practices to address different configurations of children.
6.3.2. Student sample composition
In addition to the above moderator variables, as exploratory
analyses, we also considered whether teacher language variable in-
tercorrelations were moderated by the student sample composition
in terms of low SES students or dual-language learner students.
The number of studies contributing to these moderator analyses is
small, so results should be viewed as suggestive. Figure S1 (in the
online supplemental materials) depicts the correlations between
pairs of teacher language practices for 100% low-SES vs mixed-SES
samples (in panel A) and for 100% DLL vs mixed-DLL samples (in
panel B). For SES, correlations were overall similar across 100% low
SES vs mixed SES samples. However, most variable pairs were only
studied in 100% low SES samples, so the impact of SES as a mod-
erator variable could not be studied for most relationships.
For dual-language learner composition, correlations were gen-
erally similar across sample composition. Most correlations were
somewhat higher in mixed dual-language learner samples com-
pared to 100% DLL samples. This pattern may reflect a similar pro-
cess as posited for group size above—when working with 100% DLL
groups, teachers may use more individualized speech tailored to
specific student needs than they use when working with commin-
gled student samples. One exception to this pattern was the cor-
relation between Conceptual Talk with Questions and Elicitations,
which were more highly correlated in 100% DLL samples (r̅ = 0.41
[95% CI 0.28, 0.54]) vs mixed DLL samples (r̅ = −0.05 [95% CI
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202

Fig. 4. Comparison across book reading literacy instruction and play setting. Note. Darkness of shading indicates the magnitude of the correlation. Positive correlations in
blue. Negative correlations in red.

196
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
−0.37, +0.27]). As with the other moderators, many cells for these
analyses were empty, so more research is needed to understand
how teachers tailor their speech patterns for students with differ-
ent language backgrounds.
7. Discussion
The aim of the present systematic review and meta-analysis
was to categorize and identify relationships between the EC
teacher language practices related to children’s oral language de-
velopment, then track the variation of these practices across con-
texts. In this review, we use an SFL perspective as an organizing
framework to examine how a wide variety of individual teacher
language practices supportive of oral language development may
cohere into patterns of use, or registers. This perspective helps us
to understand individual teacher language practices not as unre-
lated, discrete skills, but as "ways with words" (Heath, 1982) that
cluster together in characteristic language registers and vary across
contexts of use. This paper contributes to the field by synthesizing
the vast literature on EC teacher language, distilling a heterogenous
set of variables into several key strands of teacher language prac-
tices, and then examining whether those strands further intertwine
into registers of use. We discuss detailed findings below.
7.1. Relationships between types of teacher language practices
Our first research question examined the relationships among
all the different types of EC teacher language practices. Using prior
research (Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021; Rowe & Snow, 2020;
Justice, Jiang, & Strasser, 2018), and iterative coding of the teacher
language variables, we developed 11 different macro codes for
types of teacher language. The patterns of correlations revealed
small to moderate associations between different teacher language
types, indicating that the macro codes captured related but unique
aspects of teacher language. We discuss several of these correla-
tions here, focusing on the relationships replicated at least 5 times
in our sample (k ≥ 5) and those that showed strong positive cor-
relations with one another (r̅ ≥ 0.40). One consistent pattern was
the strong relationships between different kinds of complex Lin-
guistic Features. For example, the Types/Tokens code and the Lin-
guistic Features code were highly correlated (k = 8, r̅ = 0.43), in-
dicating that teachers who used more linguistically complex talk
also tended to talk more and use a greater variety of word types.
In other words, several markers of more complex speech (use of
rare vocabulary, more diversity in word types, longer sentences)
appeared to cluster together. Next, teachers’ use of Questions and
Elicitations was highly related to Responsive Talk (k = 5, r̅ = 0.41),
indicating that teachers who followed up on and responded to
child talk also tended to ask more questions, suggesting an over-
all characteristic pattern of interactive conversation with children.
We also examined the correlations between variables within
the same category (e.g., the relationships between different vari-
ables coded as “Complex Syntax” across studies). These relation-
ships allow us to see which teacher language types were mea-
sured more reliably across studies and also which were conceptu-
ally more homogeneous within a single category. Variables within
the Complex Syntax category were highly related to one another
(r̅ = 0.63), likely because this variable was typically measured
the same way across studies and used objective measures, such
as calculating the mean length of utterances using the Comput-
erized Language Analysis (CLAN) program (MacWhinney, 20 0 0).
The Complex Syntax category was also conceptually quite nar-
row, incorporating a very specific dimension of teacher language
(i.e., the average length of their sentences). The Linguistic Fea-
tures and Types/Tokens variables showed similarly high relation-
ships between variables within each category, which also reflected
197
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
the more objective nature of the measures. Like syntactic complex-
ity, the amount and diversity of teacher language can also be auto-
matically calculated using CLAN. These results suggest that the Lin-
guistic Features variables are likely more comparable across studies
than some of the more subjective and conceptually broad measures
such as Responsive Talk (r̅ = 0.24) and Literal Talk (r̅ = 0.22).
However, even some of the teacher language categories that
were more subjective (in that they required judgment and
decision-making by coders) showed strong relationships with other
variables of the same type. For example, there were relatively high
correlations for variables within the Vocabulary (r̅ = 0.37) and
Conceptual Talk (r̅ = 0.36) categories across studies. Vocabulary
Talk was a tightly defined category that included definitions of new
words, examples of word use, and word consciousness talk. Simi-
larly, Conceptual Talk included vocabulary talk, talk about the con-
tent areas such as science, and abstract talk that focused on topics
beyond the here-and-now. Because these types of teacher language
practices were focused on discussing a particular, readily identifi-
able topic area, they may have been easier to identify and code re-
liably than more diffuse language support strategies such as those
included in the Responsive Talk category (e.g., active listening, re-
sponding to child talk, repeating or confirming).
7.2. Registers of use in the EC classroom
Our second research question sought to identify potential clus-
ters of teacher language practices from the 11 macro codes, with
the goal of highlighting registers of use in the EC language environ-
ment. The factor analysis yielded a 2-dimensional model of teacher
language in EC classrooms. The first dimension, which we call an
Emergent Academic Language register (Dickinson et al., 2014) be-
cause it contains many features characteristic of the language of
schooling, included the Conceptual Talk, Types and Tokens, Com-
plex Syntax, Linguistic Features, and Modeling Talk variables. The
second dimension, which we call the Bridge Language register be-
cause it includes language practices that help children connect
their home and school language practices, includes Questions and
Elicitations, High-Level Questions, Responsive Talk, Literal Talk, and
Management Talk. Vocabulary Talk evenly loaded on to both di-
mensions.
Each of these registers contains a constellation of lexical, gram-
matical, and discourse-level features that constitute a variety of
talk customized for a specific purpose and with specific partici-
pants. The Emergent Academic Language register included the dis-
cussion of abstract ideas (e.g., new vocabulary words, science talk,
talk about character motivations during book-reading), and as part
of this conceptual talk, certain linguistic features naturally arise
– longer sentences, more rare vocabulary, and greater variety in
word types. It is important to note here that the Linguistic Fea-
tures category here typically only included linguistic features that
are associated with more academic talk. In other words, linguis-
tic features that might serve as markers of other kinds of registers
(e.g., the use of active voice, the use of contractions) were typ-
ically not measured by these studies. Interestingly, the Emergent
Academic Language register also included Modeling Talk, such as
teachers modeling the use of new vocabulary or emotion words,
orally narrating their own or children’s actions, and commenting
on child talk. Such talk may be an important feature of an emer-
gent academic language register in that teachers explicitly demon-
strate and encourage children in the use of the language practices
that are most suited to the setting and activity at hand.
The Bridge Language register contains elements that encour-
ages child talk (Questions, High-Level Questions), builds on that
talk (Responsive Talk), and builds gateways into more advanced
talk (Literal and Management talk). We call this register “Bridge
Language” because we see one of the central functions of this
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
register as “bridging to make connections between the known [e.g.,
children’s individual ways with words] and the new [e.g., school-
valued language practices]” (Rogoff et al., 1993, p. 8). Teacher Ques-
tions and Elicitations are one key variable in this register, although
the use of teacher questions can vary widely in their nature, from
quick, closed-ended prompts (e.g., “do you think Corduroy felt
sad?”) that elicit only one-word answers from children, to more
demanding, abstract requests to make predictions or infer cause
and effect (e.g., “What do you think Corduroy will do after the
toy store closes?”). Both kinds of questions may serve a purpose in
the EC classroom, in that they open a space for child talk and for
teachers to learn about that talk, although closed-ended prompts
may be most appropriate for children at an earlier stage of lan-
guage development. For example, Deshmukh et al. (2019) found
that teachers who used closed-ended prompts during large group
shared book-reading were more likely to receive a one-word re-
sponse from children, but these responses were also nearly always
accurate. In contrast, teachers who asked more challenging wh-
and why questions were more likely to receive a multi-word re-
sponse, but these responses were also more likely to be inaccurate.
Because children’s responses to high-level questions are longer,
they give teachers a more sustained opportunity to learn about
and fine-tune their speech to children’s individual language prac-
tices (e.g., Justice et al., 2013), which is valuable even if children’s
responses are unconventional. These inaccurate responses in turn
give teachers the opportunity to use responsive language practices
such as scaffolding, recasting, and expanding on children’s utter-
ances in the moment, providing proximal feedback on the kind of
language that is most useful, clear, and helpful in the setting at
hand. A recent study’s findings suggests that interactive talk prac-
tices, as compared to other kinds of teacher talk, may be espe-
cially helpful for children’s language development. Justice, Jiang, &
Strasser, 2018 examined several dimensions of the preschool class-
room language environment, including teachers’ interactive talk,
the linguistic features of teacher talk, and global classroom qual-
ity as measured by the CLASS, and found that only interactive talk
was significantly associated with growth in children’s vocabulary.
This indicates the importance of teacher language practices that
not only provide a model for emergent academic language use, but
that also actively engage children in conversations.
Literal talk and management talk also loaded on to the Bridge
Language dimension. Literal talk is a necessity in the classroom
in that teachers and children must talk about the here-and-now
of the classroom world to accomplish tasks and build comprehen-
sion (e.g., Kleeck et al., 2006), but too often, such talk dominates
in EC classrooms at the expense of more challenging conceptual
talk (e.g., Justice et al., 2008). However, conceptualizing literal talk
as part of an overall orientation to bridging children’s home and
school language practices may help teachers to use literal talk in a
more fruitful manner, such as using literal talk as a gateway into
school-valued language. For example, Hindman et al. (2012) found
that, for children with lower standardized vocabulary scores, teach-
ers’ use of more literal, contextualized talk during book-reading
was especially beneficial for their vocabulary development, as
compared to their peers. These children also, however, benefited
from teachers’ use of decontextualized talk, indicating that pair-
ing both literal and abstract talk about books may help to facilitate
children’s ability to discuss the more conceptual topics. The provi-
sion of multiple kinds of talk offers multiple entry points into the
conversation, thereby allowing greater access for children with a
wide variety of language repertoires.
The results for the vocabulary talk variable, which loaded on
to both factors, merits further unpacking. Vocabulary talk is well-
aligned with an Emergent Academic Language register in that it
is a subset of the conceptual talk category and involves the dis-
cussion of ideas (and words) that are removed from the here-and-
198
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
now. However, the vocabulary talk in our sample of studies typ-
ically involved explicit instruction of new vocabulary words (e.g.,
Gerde & Powell, 2009; Silverman & Crandell, 2010), a practice that
is in keeping with bridging children into school-valued language
practices in that such instruction equips children with the vocab-
ulary necessary for accessing complex texts and precisely commu-
nicating ideas within content areas. Therefore, vocabulary talk is
likely a practice that crosses over and connects both registers, in
that it pairs Emergent Academic Language practices (e.g., the use
of rare words, discussion of abstract ideas) with Bridge Language
practices (e.g., explicit support for learning and mastering new lan-
guage forms).
The results of this factor analysis help to support our theo-
retical framework for language learning in EC classrooms, which
views the hybridity, or blend between home and school language
practices in ECs, as beneficial for children’s language learning
(Hadley, Barnes, & Hwang, 2021a; Authors, 2020). In our previous
systematic review, we identified 3 primary strands of EC teacher
language practices that were positively related to children’s oral
language development: (1) conceptual talk, (2) interactive talk,
and (3) linguistic features. The present meta-analysis and factor
analysis further confirms and builds on this work by identifying
2 main registers of talk emerging from the broad literature on
EC teacher language and oral language development, namely the
Emergent Academic Language and Bridge Language registers. The
Emergent Academic Language register is characterized by teacher-
led, school-valued forms of talk that focus on abstract topics, use
longer sentences, more rare vocabulary. In the Bridge Language
register, teachers use a variety of interactive, supportive language
practices to encourage child talk (e.g., questions and prompts), use
talk that meets children where they are (literal talk), and scaffolds
them into a new language community (responsive talk). Future re-
search should identify the characteristic linguistic features associ-
ated with Bridge Language to further aid in the identification and
measurement of this register.
Of course, as the present meta-analysis only examines teacher
language practices, rather than tracing these practices’ relation-
ships with child outcomes, it is possible that one or the other talk
register may not actually be facilitative of children’s oral language
skills, or that different strands may support different aspects of
oral language (e.g., syntax, discourse, vocabulary). Future research
should investigate potential relationships with child outcomes in
different settings and with children with varied language resources
and family backgrounds.
7.3. Variation in teacher language practices across places
Next, in keeping with our theoretical perspective on language
as contextually situated and shaped by the participants, places,
and purposes for talk, we examined how teacher language var-
ied across classroom activity settings and group sizes. Our inten-
tion was to also examine variation in language use with chil-
dren from different demographic backgrounds, but because of the
limited information reported about participants and the relatively
small number of studies, our findings on participants should be
considered only as preliminary. We discuss our results for activity
settings and group sizes below.
7.4. Activity settings
A small but growing number of studies have examined mean
differences in teacher language practices across classroom settings,
such as book-reading, play, or literacy instruction time (Bratsch-
Hines et al., 2019; Cabell et al., 2013; Dickinson et al., 2014; Kook
& Greenfield, 2020). The moderator analyses in the present pa-
per take a slightly different approach. Rather than examining mean
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
differences, we examine differences in correlations among types of
teacher language variables across settings. That is, we examined
whether a particular setting influenced various kinds of teacher
langauge to be more strongly linked with each other than another
setting. When a pair of teacher language variables have a higher
correlation in one setting vs another, we interpret the setting with
the higher correlation as enhancing or promoting both kinds of
talk, as compared to the other setting.
Several key patterns emerge from Fig. 4A, which shows a com-
parison of teacher language correlations across book reading, liter-
acy instruction, and play settings (each setting is represented by a
different color of circle). Examining the correlations between Vo-
cabulary Talk and other kinds of teacher language practices for the
book-reading vs the literacy instruction setting reveals a pattern in
which 2 key elements of Emergent Academic Language, Vocabulary
Talk and Conceptual Talk, both appear to be enhanced more within
a book-reading setting, as contrasted with the literacy instruction
setting. In the studies in our sample, shared book-reading typi-
cally involved a teacher reading out loud, and discussing, a narra-
tive text with children. In contrast, literacy instruction consisted of
more skills-based activities such as identifying letters. These find-
ings accord with Dickinson et al. (2014), who found evidence of
an emergent language register during shared book-reading in Head
Start classrooms, but found that skills-based literacy instruction in-
volved fewer markers of academic speech.
Fig. 4A also provides a look at gaps in the field in terms
of settings that have and have not been examined in EC lan-
guage research. In our sample, book-reading was far and away the
most commonly investigated setting in terms of teacher language
use. Indeed, for certain kinds of teacher language practices, book-
reading was the only setting within which these types of talk were
examined. For example, Management Talk and High-Level Ques-
tions have exclusively been examined within a book-reading set-
ting, and Literal Talk and Questions and Elicitations have mostly
been examined only within book-reading. The field’s strong fo-
cus on teacher language during the book-reading setting is war-
ranted in that book-reading has been repeatedly found to exert
a strong influence on children’s oral language development (e.g.,
Flack, Field, & Horst, 2018; Hindman et al., 2008). However, book-
reading occupies only about 5% of the school day for preschool-
ers (Early et al., 2010), and about 10 minutes per school day for
kindergarteners (Wright, 2011). Understanding the language affor-
dances of other settings, such as free choice time, play or recess,
mealtimes, and art, are important in gaining a more comprehen-
sive picture of the classroom language environment. For example,
previous research has indicated the promise of science activities
and other content-area instruction for promoting language devel-
opment (Cabell et al., 2013), and more work in this area is needed
to more fully explore whether, as some studies suggest, talking
about content-area topics drives the use of meta-level talk and
emergent academic language registers by teachers (Barnes & Dick-
inson, 2018). Newer studies have also suggested that settings that
are more characteristic of home activities, such as play or meal-
times, may also afford unique opportunities for leveraging chil-
dren’s home language practices (e.g., Barnes et al., 2020; Leyva &
Skorb, 2017).
7.5. Group sizes
We examined correlations between teacher language types
across 3 group sizes: whole class, small group, and mixed (i.e.,
studies that aggregated findings across a variety of group sizes).
Fig. 4B shows a big picture view of how the 3 settings compare
to one another. Overall, our pattern of findings revealed smaller or
negative correlations in small group as compared to whole class
or mixed settings for several beneficial practices, such as Con-
199
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
ceptual Talk and High-Level Questions. These results suggest that
small group time as currently implemented may not positively en-
hance teacher language practices as much as other settings, and
that certain beneficial language practices, such as requesting lan-
guage from children or repeating their utterances, tend to happen
more frequently in large group time than in small group (Bratsch-
Hines et al., 2019) or other settings (Cabell et al., 2013). There-
fore, the small group space appears to represent a missed op-
portunity for language development, as this participation struc-
ture is one of the few classroom spaces in which teachers and
children can engage in the kinds of extended, scaffolded conver-
sations that help children to acquire the language of schooling.
For example, previous studies have found that children and teach-
ers appear to “mirror” the structure and conceptual complexity of
other’s use of language in small group play settings (Justice et al.,
2013; Tompkins, Zucker, Justice, & Binici, 2013). However, small
group instruction as it is often implemented typically involves
more skills-based instruction with fewer opportunities for conver-
sation (Dickinson et al., 2014).
A possible alternative explanation for the smaller correlations
with small group sizes as opposed to whole group or mixed set-
tings is that teachers tend to talk more, and in more character-
istic and consistent patterns, in larger groups, whereas their talk
within small group settings may be more variable, better individ-
ualized to the children in the small groups, and involve more lis-
tening to child talk. More research is needed to understand the
affordances of small vs. larger groups for shaping teacher language
practices, and how these affordances can be further leveraged to
support child language development.
7.6. Limitations
One major limitation of the present review is that the studies
we reviewed chiefly focused on teacher language, with few stud-
ies reporting details about child language. Many studies were un-
able to report detailed information about child language given the
methodological limitations involved with understanding and tran-
scribing child language in the noisy classroom environment. How-
ever, gaining a full understanding of how teachers can leverage in-
dividual children’s home language practices is an important goal
for future research.
The present meta-analysis was also limited by the relatively
small number of studies that reported the information necessary
to calculate effect sizes. We urge all authors to report complete
correlation matrices so that statistical summaries of this area of
research are possible.
Additionally, many studies reported only minimal details about
child and teacher participants and did not clearly describe the ob-
servational contexts or report findings by setting or group size. We
argue that these contextual features are essential to understand-
ing results, given the variation in talk reported across contexts and
with different participants in previous research (Dickinson, Darrow,
& Tinubu, 2008; Hadley & Dickinson, 2019; Pelatti, Piasta, Justice,
& O’Connell, A., 2014).
While we did not exclude international studies from our search,
the majority of the studies in our final sample took place in the
United States. Therefore, our results are primarily generalizable
only to early childhood classrooms in a U.S. context.
7.7. Educational implications
Our findings here have several implications for practice. First,
our theoretical framework and results suggest the potential
promise of professional development efforts that have more holis-
tic understandings of language use in the classroom. While pre-
vious approaches often have focused on using certain beneficial
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
practices in isolation (e.g., asking open-ended questions, defin-
ing vocabulary words), a focus on registers asks teachers to think
about the purpose of their talk, the place or setting in which it is
used, and the participants at hand, when planning a language-rich
activity. Teachers can then adopt clusters of language practices that
are suited for the task at hand. For example, a teacher might plan
to communicate ideas about light and shadow through a hands-on
science activity, and therefore plan to use precise, technical lan-
guage to define key words, discuss abstract ideas, and ask ques-
tions that help children to build their knowledge of new concepts
(i.e., all practices within an academic language register). Another
important implication for practice that can be drawn from this re-
view is the idea of ECCs as a hybrid space, where a diverse range
of home and school language practices can serve as an engine of
development and a source of growth. In this view, responsive, nur-
turing language practices, such as listening to children and learn-
ing about their own ways with words, are valued and prioritized
alongside more traditional academic language learning.
8. Conclusion
The results from this meta-analysis are a first step in identify-
ing patterns of teacher language that may support children’s learn-
ing of school-valued language registers. From the settings and lan-
guage practices studied to date, we found evidence of 2 teacher
language registers in EC classrooms, namely Emergent Academic
Language and Bridge Language registers. We also found some
emerging indicators of teacher language variation across classroom
activity settings, suggesting that particular settings may facilitate
the use of certain kinds of talk. However, much more work is
needed in this complex line of research, particularly work that at-
tends to the constellation of contextual factors that shape the con-
versations between teachers and children.
Author Note
Erica M. Barnes https://orcid.org/0 0 0 0-0 0 03-0818-9285
Elizabeth Burke Hadley https://orcid.org/0 0 0 0-0 0 02-2880-6175
Brenton M. Wiernik https://orcid.org/0 0 0 0-0 0 01-9560-6336
Mukhunth Raghavan https://orcid.org/0 0 0 0-0 0 02-4785-9387
ncited References
Binici, 2014, Wasik and Hindman, 2014, Yu and Smith, 2012,
Zhang, 2014, Dahlke and Wiernik, 2019, Dahlke and Wiernik, 2021,
Gámez et al., 2017, Hindman et al., 2019, Kassambara, 2019,
Lipsky, 2013, Neugebauer et al., 2017, Neuman et al., 2018,
Pentimonti et al., 2017, Phillips et al., 2017, La Paro and
Hamre, 2008, Piasta et al., 2012, Rojas, 2021, Saffran, 2003,
Sun et al., 2020, Studhalter et al., 2021, Turnbull et al., 2009,
Uccelli et al., 2013,
References
Bakbergenuly, I., Hoaglin, D. C., & Kulinskaya, E. (2019). Simulation study of esti-
mating between-study variance and overall effect in meta-analysis of standardized
mean difference (1903.01362 [stat.ME]). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01362 .
Barnes, E. M., & Dickinson, D. K. (2017a). The impact of teachers’ commenting
strategies on children’s vocabulary growth. Exceptionality, 25(3), 186–206. https:
//doi.org/10.1080/09362835.2016.1196447.
Barnes, E. M., & Dickinson, D. K. (2017b). The relationship of Head Start teachers’
academic language use and children’s receptive vocabulary. Early Education and
Development, 28(7), 794–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2017.1340069.
Barnes, E. M., & Dickinson, D. K. (2018). Relationships among teachers’ use of mental
state verbs and children’s vocabulary growth. Early Education and Development,
29(3), 307–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2018.1440844.
Barnes, E. M., Dickinson, D. K., & Grifenhagen, J. F. (2017). The role of teachers’
comments during book reading in children’s vocabulary growth. The Journal
of Educational Research, 110(5), 515–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2015.
1134422.
200
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
Barnes, E. M., Grifenhagen, J. F., & Dickinson, D. K. (2020). Mealtimes in Head
Start pre-k classrooms: Examining language-promoting opportunities in a hy-
brid space. Journal of Child Language, 47(2), 337–357. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S03050 0 09190 0 0199.
Bassok, D., Latham, S., & Rorem, A. (2016). Is kindergarten the new first grade? AERA
Open, 2(1), 2332858415616358. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858415616358.
Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519871.
Binici, S. (2014). Preschool teachers’ inferential questions during shared reading and
their relation to low-income children’s reading comprehension at kindergarten and
first grade [Doctoral dissertation. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University].
Bowne, J. B., Yoshikawa, H., & Snow, C. E. (2017). Relationships of teachers’ language
and explicit vocabulary instruction to students’ vocabulary growth in kinder-
garten. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(1), 7–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.151.
Bratsch-Hines, M. E., Burchinal, M., Peisner-Feinberg, E., & Franco, X (2019). Fre-
quency of instructional practices in rural prekindergarten classrooms and asso-
ciations with child language and literacy skills. Early Childhood Research Quar-
terly, 47, 74–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.10.001.
Bushman, B. J., & Wells, G. L. (2001). Narrative impressions of literature: The avail-
ability bias and the corrective properties of meta-analytic approaches. Person-
ality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(9), 1123–1130. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0146167201279005.
Cabell, S. Q., DeCoster, J., LoCasale-Crouch, J., Hamre, B. K., & Pianta, R. C. (2013).
Variation in the effectiveness of instructional interactions across preschool
classroom settings and learning activities. Early Childhood Research Quarterly,
28(4), 820–830. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.07.007.
Cabell, S. Q., Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., DeCoster, J., & Forston, L. D. (2015).
Teacher–child conversations in preschool classrooms: Contributions to chil-
dren’s vocabulary development. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 30(Part A),
80–92. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.09.004
Candès, E. J., & Recht, B. (2009). Exact matrix completion via convex optimiza-
tion. Foundations of Computational Mathematics, 9(6), 717–772. https://doi.org/
10.1007/s10208- 009- 9045- 5.
Carter, E. C., Schönbrodt, F. D., Gervais, W. M., & Hilgard, J. (2019). Cor-
recting for bias in psychology: A comparison of meta-analytic methods.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 2(2), 115–144.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919847196
Cazden, C. B. (1988). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning.
Heinemann. https://archive.org/details/classroomdiscour0 0 0 0cazd.
Dahlke, J. A., & Wiernik, B. M. (2019). psychmeta: An R package for psychomet-
ric meta-analysis. Applied Psychological Measurement, 43(5), 415–416. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0146621618795933.
Dahlke, J. A., & Wiernik, B. M. (2021). psychmeta: Psychometric meta-
analysis toolkit (2.6.0.90 0 0) [R package]. https://github.com/psychmeta/
psychmeta (Original work published 2017)
Deshmukh, R. S., Zucker, T. A., Tambyraja, S. R., Pentimonti, J. M., Bowles, R. P.,
& Justice, L. M. (2019). Teachers’ use of questions during shared book read-
ing: Relations to child responses. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 49, 59–68.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2019.05.006.
Dickinson, D. K. (2011). Teachers’ language practices and academic outcomes of
preschool children. Science, 333(6045), 964–967. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.
1204526.
Dickinson, D. K., Darrow, C. L., & Tinubu, T. A. (2008). Patterns of teacher-child con-
versations in Head Start classrooms: Implications for an empirically grounded
approach to professional dvelopment. Early Education and Development, 19(3),
396–429. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409280802065403.
Dickinson, D. K., Hofer, K. G., Barnes, E. M., & Grifenhagen, J. F. (2014). Examin-
ing teachers’ language in Head Start classrooms from a Systemic Linguistics
Approach. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(3), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.
1016/j.ecresq.2014.02.006.
Dickinson, D. K., & Porche, M. V. (2011). Relation between language experiences
in preschool classrooms and children’s kindergarten and fourth-grade language
and reading abilities. Child Development, 82(3), 870–886. https://doi.org/10.1111/
j.1467-8624.2011.01576.x.
Dickinson, D. K., & Smith, M. W. (1994). Long-term effects of preschool teachers’
book readings on low-income children’s vocabulary and story comprehension.
Reading Research Quarterly, 29(2), 105–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/747807.
Dickinson, D. K., & Tabors, P. O. (2001). Putting the pieces together: The impact
of preschool on children’s language and literacy development in kindergarten.
In Beginning literacy with language: Young children learning at home and school
(pp. 257–287). Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
Early, D. M., Iruka, I. U., Ritchie, S., Barbarin, O. A., Winn, D.-M. C., Crawford,
G. M., Frome, P. M., Clifford, R. M., Burchinal, M., Howes, C., Bryant, D. M.,
& Pianta, R. C. (2010). How do pre-kindergarteners spend their time? Gen-
der, ethnicity, and income as predictors of experiences in pre-kindergarten
classrooms. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 25(2), 177–193. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.ecresq.2009.10.003.
Farrow, J., Wasik, B. A., & Hindman, A. H. (2020). In Exploring the unique contribu-
tions of teachers’ syntax to preschoolers’ and kindergarteners’ vocabulary learning:
51 (pp. 178–190). Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
Flack, Z. M., Field, A. P., & Horst, J. S. (2018). The effects of shared storybook reading
on word learning: A meta-analysis. Developmental Psychology, 54(7), 1334–1346.
https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0 0 0 0512.
Friedman-Krauss, A., Barnett, W. S., Garver, K. A., Hodges, K. S., Weisenfeld, G. G., &
Gardiner, B. A. (2020). The State of Preschool 2020. https://nieer.org/wp-content/
uploads/2021/04/YB2020_Full_Report.pdf.
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
Gámez, P. B. (2015). Classroom-based English exposure and English Language Learn-
ers’ expressive language skills. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 31, 135–146.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2015.01.007.
Gámez, P. B., Neugebauer, S. R., Coyne, M. D., McCoach, D. B., & Ware, S. (2017).
Linguistic and social cues for vocabulary learning in Dual Language Learners and
their English-only peers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 40, 25–37. https:
//doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2017.01.003.
Gerde, H. K., & Powell, D. R. (2009). Teacher education, book-reading practices, and
children’s language growth across one year of head start. Early Education and
Development, 20(2), 211–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409280802595417.
Girolametto, L., & Weitzman, E. (2002). Responsiveness of child care providers in
interactions with toddlers and preschoolers [Article]. Language, Speech & Hear-
ing Services in Schools, 33(4), 268–290. https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2002/
022).
Gort, M., & Sembiante, S. F. (2015). Navigating hybridized language learning spaces
through translanguaging pedagogy: Dual language preschool teachers’ languag-
ing practices in support of emergent bilingual children’s performance of aca-
demic discourse. International Multilingual Research Journal, 9(1), 7–25. https:
//doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2014.981775.
Gutiérrez, K. D., Baquedano-López, P., & Tejeda, C. (1999). Rethinking diversity: Hy-
bridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture, and Ac-
tivity, 6(4), 286–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039909524733.
Hadley, E. B., & Dickinson, D. K. (2019). Cues for word-learning during shared book-
reading and guided play in preschool. Journal of Child Language, 46(6), 1202–
1227. https://doi.org/10.1017/S03050 0 09190 0 0552.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of
language and meaning. Edward Arnold. https://1lib.us/book/3046653/a369a8.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics
and Education, 5(2), 93–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/0898-5898(93)90026-7.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language
in a social-semiotic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/
10.1044/1092-4388(2002/074).
Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at
home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0047404500009039.
Hindman, A. H., Connor, C. M., Jewkes, A. M., & Morrison, F. J. (2008). Untangling
the effects of shared book reading: Multiple factors and their associations with
preschool literacy outcomes. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(3), 330–350.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2008.01.005.
Hindman, A. H., Skibbe, L., & Foster, T. (2014). Exploring the variety of parental talk
during shared book reading and its contributions to preschool language and
literacy: evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort.
Reading & Writing, 27(2), 287-313. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11145-013-9445-4.
Hindman, A. H., Wasik, B. A., & Bradley, D. E. (2019). How classroom conversations
unfold: Exploring teacher–child exchanges during shared book reading. Early
Education and Development, 30(4), 478–495. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.
2018.1556009.
Hindman, A. H., Wasik, B. A., & Erhart, A. C. (2012). Shared book reading and Head
Start preschoolers’ vocabulary learning: The role of book-related discussion and
curricular connections. Early Education & Development, 23(4), 451–474. https://
doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2010.537250.
Horn, J. L. (1965). A rationale and test for the numbers of factors in factor analysis.
Psychometrika, 30(2), 179–185. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02289447.
Johnston, J. R., & Wong, M.-Y. A. (2002). Cultural Differences in Beliefs and Practices
Concerning Talk to Children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research,
45(5), 916–926.
Justice, L. M., Jiang, H., & Strasser, K. (2018). Linguistic environment of preschool
classrooms: What dimensions support children’s language growth? Early Child-
hood Research Quarterly, 42, 79–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2017.09.003.
Justice, L. M., Mashburn, A. J., Hamre, B. K., & Pianta, R. C. (2008). Quality of lan-
guage and literacy instruction in preschool classrooms serving at-risk pupils.
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(1), 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.
20 07.09.0 04.
Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., Zucker, T., Cabell, S. Q., & Piasta, S. B. (2013). Bi-
directional dynamics underlie the complexity of talk in teacher–child play-
based conversations in classrooms serving at-risk pupils. Early Childhood Re-
search Quarterly, 28(3), 496–508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.02.005.
Kassambara, A. (2019). ggcorrplot: Visualization of a correlation matrix using “ggplot2”
(0.1.3) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggcorrplot.
Knapp, G., & Hartung, J. (2003). Improved tests for a random effects meta-regression
with a single covariate. Statistics in Medicine, 22(17), 2693–2710. https://doi.org/
10.1002/sim.1482.
Kook, J. F., & Greenfield, D. B. (2020). Examining variation in the quality of in-
structional interaction across teacher-directed activities in head start class-
rooms. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 19(2), 128–144. https://doi.org/10.
1177/2F1476718X20942956.
Leyva, D., & Skorb, L. (2017). Food for thought: Family food routines and literacy in
Latino kindergarteners. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 52, 80–90.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2017.07.001.
Lipsky, M. G. (2013). Head Start teachers’ vocabulary instruction and language com-
plexity during storybook reading: Predicting vocabulary outcomes of students
in linguistically diverse classrooms. Early Education & Development, 24(5), 640–
667. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2012.721112.
Lüdecke, D., Patil, I., Ben-Shachar, M. S., Wiernik, B. M., Waggoner, P., &
Makowski, D. (2021). see: An R package for visualizing statistical mod-
201
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
els. [Manuscript submitted for publication] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/
openjournals/joss-papers/joss.03393/joss.03393/10.21105.joss.03393.pdf.
MacWhinney, B. (20 0 0). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.).
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 10.4324/9781315805672.
Mascareño, M., Snow, C. E., Deunk, M. I., & Bosker, R. J. (2016). Language complexity
during read-alouds and kindergartners’ vocabulary and symbolic understanding.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 44, 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
appdev.2016.02.001.
Mathur, M. B., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2021). Estimating publication bias in meta-
analyses of peer-reviewed studies: A meta-meta-analysis across disciplines and
journal tiers. Research Synthesis Methods, 12(2), 176–191. https://doi.org/10.1002/
jrsm.1464.
Michaels, S. (1981). Sharing time”: Children’s narrative styles and differential ac-
cess to literacy. Language in Society, 10(3), 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0047404500008861.
Miller, P. J., Cho, G. E., & Bracey, J. R. (2005). Working-class children’s experience
through the prism of personal storytelling. Human Development, 48(3), 115–135.
Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., & de Jong, M. T. (2009). Interactive book reading in
early education: A tool to stimulate print knowledge as well as oral lan-
guage. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 979–1007. https://doi.org/10.3102/
0034654309332561.
Müller, K. (2020). here: A simpler way to find your files (1.0.1) [R package]. https:
//CRAN.R-project.org/package=here.
Nagy, W. (2007). Metalinguistic awareness and the vocabulary-comprehension
connection. In Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension
(pp. 52–77). Guilford Press.
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as
language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(1), 91–108. https://doi.org/
10.1002/rrq.011.
Neugebauer, S., Coyne, M., McCoach, B., & Ware, S. (2017). Teaching beyond the
intervention: the contribution of teacher language extensions to vocabulary
learning in urban kindergarten classrooms. Reading and Writing, 30(3), 543–567.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145- 016- 9689- x.
Neugebauer, S. R., Gámez, P. B., Coyne, M. D., McCoach, D. B., Cólon, I. T., &
Ware, S. (2017). Promoting word consciousness to close the vocabulary gap in
young word learners. Elementary School Journal, 118(1), 28–54. https://doi.org/
10.1086/692986.
Neuman, S. B., Kaefer, T., & Pinkham, A. M (2018). A double dose of disadvantage:
Language experiences for low-income children in home and school. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 110(1), 102–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0 0 0 0201.
Pelatti, C. Y., Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., & O’Connell, A. (2014). Language- and
literacy-learning opportunities in early childhood classrooms: Children’s typical
experiences and within-classroom variability. Early Childhood Research Quarterly,
29(4), 445–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.05.004.
Pentimonti, J. M., Justice, L. M., Yeomans-Maldonado, G., McGinty, A. S., Slocum, L.,
& O’Connell, A (2017). Teachers’ use of high-and low-support scaffolding strate-
gies to differentiate language instruction in high-risk/economically disadvan-
taged settings. Journal of Early Intervention, 39(2), 125–146. https://doi.org/10.
1177/1053815117700865.
Phillips, B. M., Zhao, Y., & Weekley, M. J. (2017). Teacher language in the preschool
classroom: Initial validation of a classroom environment observation tool.
Early Education and Development, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2017.
1408371.
Pianta, R., La Paro, K. M., & Hamre, B. (2008). Classroom assessment scoring system
(CLASS) manual. Pre-K. Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., Cabell, S. Q., Wiggins, A. K., Turnbull, K. P., & Curen-
ton, S. M. (2012). Impact of professional development on preschool teachers’
conversational responsivity and children’s linguistic productivity and complex-
ity. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(3), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
ecresq.2012.01.001.
R Core Team. (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing
(4.1.0) [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing http://www.
r-project.org/.
Revelle, W. (2009). An introduction to psychometric theory with applications in R.
http://www.personality-project.org/r/book.
Revelle, W. (2021). psych: Procedures for psychological, psychometric, and personal-
ity research (2.1.6) [R package]. Northwestern University https://CRAN.R-project.
org/package=psych.
Rogoff, B., Mistry, J., Göncü, A., Mosier, C., Chavajay, P., & Heath, S. B. (2002). Guided
participation in cultural activity by toddlers and caregivers p. i-179. Monographs
of the Society for Research in Child development.
Rojas, N. M. (2021). Patterns of preschool teachers’ use of discourse strategies with
individual Spanish-speaking dual language learners. Journal of Educational Psy-
chology. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0 0 0 0481.
Rowe, M. L. (2012). A longitudinal investigation of the role of quantity and quality
of child-directed speech in vocabulary development. Child Development, 83(5),
1762–1774. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01805.x.
Rowe, M. L., & Snow, C. E. (2020). Analyzing input quality along three dimensions:
Interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. Journal of Child Language, 47(1), 5–21.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S03050 0 09190 0 0655.
Saffran, J. R. (2003). Statistical language learning: Mechanisms and constraints. Cur-
rent Directions in Psychological Science, 12(4), 110–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/
1467-8721.01243.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspec-
tive. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610317.
E. Burke Hadley, E.M. Barnes, B.M. Wiernik et al.
Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (2015). Methods of meta-analysis: Correcting error and
bias in research findings (3rd ed.). Sage 10.4135/9781483398105..
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communi-
cation. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Silverman, R., & Crandell, J. D. (2010). Vocabulary practices in prekindergarten
and kindergarten classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(3), 318–340.
https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.45.3.3.
Smith, M., Dickinson, D., Sangeorge, A., & Anastasopoulos, L. (2002). Early literacy
and language classroom observation scale (ELLCO). Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2019). Reexamining the Verbal Environ-
ments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds. Child Develop-
ment, 90(4), 1303–1318. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13072.
Snow, C. E., Lawrence, J. F., & White, C. (2009). Generating knowledge of academic
language among urban middle school students. Journal of Research on Educa-
tional Effectiveness, 2(4), 325–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345740903167042.
Snow, C. E., & Uccelli, P. (2009). The challenge of academic language. In D. R. Olson,
& N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (pp. 112–133). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609664.
008.
Sun, H., Toh, W., & Steinkrauss, R (2020). Instructional strategies and lin-
guistic features of kindergarten teachers’ shared book reading: The case
of Singapore. Applied Psycholinguistics, 41(2), 427–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0142716420 0 0 0 053.
Studhalter, U. T., Leuchter, M., Tettenborn, A., Elmer, A., Edelsbrunner, P. A., & Saal-
bach, H. (2021). Early science learning: The effects of teacher talk. Learning and
Instruction, 71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2020.101371.
Tompkins, V., Zucker, T. A., Justice, L. M., & Binici, S. (2013). Inferential talk during
teacher–child interactions in small-group play. Early Childhood Research Quar-
terly, 28(2), 424–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.11.001.
Toub, T. S., Hassinger-Das, B., Nesbitt, K. T., Ilgaz, H., Weisberg, D. S., Hirsh-Pasek, K.,
Golinkoff, R. M., Nicolopoulou, A., & Dickinson, D. K. (2018). The language of
play: Developing preschool vocabulary through play following shared book-
reading. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 45, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
ecresq.2018.01.010.
Turnbull, K. P., Anthony, A. B., Justice, L., & Bowles, R. (2009). Preschoolers’ exposure
to language stimulation in classrooms serving at-risk children: The contribution
of group size and activity context. Early Education & Development, 20(1), 53–79.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10409280802206601.
Uccelli, P., Demir-Lira, Ö. E., Rowe, M. L., Levine, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2019).
Children’s early decontextualized talk predicts academic language proficiency
in midadolescence. Child Development, 90(5), 1650–1663. https://doi.org/10.1111/
cdev.13034.
Uccelli, P., Dobbs, C. L., & Scott, J. (2013). Mastering academic language: Organization
and stance in the persuasive writing of high school students. Written Communi-
cation, 30(1), 36–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312469013.
Uccelli, P., Galloway, E. P., Barr, C. D., Meneses, A., & Dobbs, C. L. (2015). Beyond
vocabulary: Exploring cross-disciplinary academic-language proficiency and its
association with reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(3), 337–
356. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.104.
Hadley, E. B., Barnes, E. M., & Hwang, H. J. (2021). A systematic review of teacher
language practices and child oral language outcomes in early childhood class-
rooms. Under review.
Uccelli, P., Phillips Galloway, E., Aguilar, G., & Allen, M. (2020). Amplifying and af-
firming students’ voices through CALS-informed instruction. Theory Into Practice,
59(1), 75–88. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00405841.2019.1665413
van Kleeck, A. (2007). Home talk and school talk: Helping teachers recognize cul-
tural mismatch. The ASHA Leader, 12(13), 23–24.
202
Early Childhood Research Quarterly 59 (2022) 186–202
van Kleeck, A. (2014). Distinguishing between casual talk and academic talk begin-
ning in the preschool years: An important consideration for speech-language
pathologists. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 23(4), 724–741.
https://doi.org/10.1044/2014_AJSLP-14-0032.
van Kleeck, A., Vander Woude, J., & Hammett, L. (2006). Fostering literal and infer-
ential skills in head start preschoolers with language impairment using scripted
book-sharing discussions. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 15, 85–
95. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(20 06/0 09).
Vernon-Feagans, L., Bratsch-Hines, M., Reynolds, E., & Willoughby, M. (2019). How
Early Maternal Language Input Varies by Race and Education and Predicts Later
Child Language. Child Development, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13281.
Viechtbauer, W. (2005). Bias and efficiency of meta-analytic variance estimators in
the random-effects model. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 30(3),
261–293. https://doi.org/10.3102/10769986030 0 03261.
Viechtbauer, W. (2007). Confidence intervals for the amount of heterogeneity in
meta-analysis. Statistics in Medicine, 26(1), 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.
2514.
Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package.
Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v036.i03.
Viechtbauer, W. (2021). metafor: Meta-analysis package for R (3.1-3) [R package].
https://github.com/wviechtb/metafor
Viswesvaran, C., & Ones, D. S. (1995). Theory testing: Combining psychometric
meta-analysis and structural equations modeling. Personnel Psychology, 48(4),
865–885. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1995.tb01784.x.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society Development of Higher Psychological Processes.
Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjf9vz4.
Wasik, B. A., & Hindman, A. H. (2014). Understanding the active ingredients in an
effective preschool vocabulary intervention: An exploratory study of teacher
and child talk during book reading. Early Education and Development, 1–22.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2014.896064.
Weizman, Z. O., & Snow, C. E. (2001). Lexical input as related to children’s vocab-
ulary acquisition: Effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning.
Developmental Psychology, 37(2), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.37.
2.265.
Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis (2nd ed.). Springer
International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3- 319- 24277- 4.
Wickham, H., & Bryan, J. (2019). readxl: Read Excel files (1.3.1) [R package]. https:
//readxl.tidyverse.org.
Wickham, H., François, R., Henry, L., & Müller, K. (2021). dplyr: A grammar of data
manipulation (1.0.7) [R package]. https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/.
Wickham, H., & Hester, J. (2020). readr: Read rectangular text data (1.4.0) [R package].
https://readr.tidyverse.org/.
Wilke, C. O. (2020). ggtext: Improved text rendering support for “ggplot2” (0.1.1) [R
package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggtext.
Wright, T. S. (2011). What classroom observations reveal about oral vocabulary in-
struction in kindergarten [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Michigan http:
//hdl.handle.net/2027.42/84619.
You, K. (2020). filling: Matrix completion, imputation, and inpainting methods (0.2.2)
[R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=filling.
Yu, C., & Smith, L. B. (2012). Modeling cross-situational word–referent learn-
ing: Prior questions. Psychological Review, 119(1), 21–39. https://doi.org/10.1037/
a0026182.
Zhang, C. (2014). Understanding the relations between dimensions of literacy teaching
and preschool children’s literacy skills. West Lafayette, Indiana: [Doctoral disser-
tation, Purdue University].