The article focuses on a study, which compares the teachers' instructional discourse in two curricula, by asking some questions to discourse samples taken from Large Group Time in each of the Head Start classrooms from the previous study. The original study was conducted in five Head Start classrooms located in five different schools in a large metropolitan area in the South-west United States, including two schools with predominantly English-speaking children, two with predominantly Spanish-speaking children, and one school with a mix of English and Spanish-speaking children. First, the quantitative analysis of teacher talk showed no significant differences between teacher discourse in the two curricula, Doors and Creative Curriculum. However, children in the Doors program displayed significantly more talk than their counterparts in the Creative Curriculum classrooms. Second, the qualitative analyzes revealed that the teachers using Doors used more sophisticated strategies to introduce new vocabulary words, such as pointing out orthographic features of words, offering definitions, and providing explanations.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kathleen_roskos/33/