Young Children’s Language Uses during Play and Implications for Classroom Assessment

This manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood.This paper reports on research examining children’s use of language in dramatic play and play with construction materials in kindergarten classrooms in three Indigenous and two non-Indigenous northern rural Canadian communities. Underpinned by sociolinguistic theory, the research involves inductive analysis of video-recorded play interactions of five-year-old children’s play. We found that children used language for 36 different purposes in the analyzed videos. Children’s construction play talk often involved purposes within the categories of Language for Learning and Language for Own Needs. Children often used language for purposes associated with the Language for Learning category in dramatic play, along with purposes within the Language for Imagining category that might be expected within dramatic play. As part of collaborative action research, teachers and researchers have been using these findings to develop a formative oral language observation framework to gather information for parent-teacher conferences and for speech-language pathologists working with identified children, in addition to using the information to inform practice