The Current Situation And Influencing Factors Of Teachers’ Mental State Language Use In Three Kindergarten Activity Contexts

Mental state language refers to the language that describes one’s own or others’ inner mental state,which usually is categorized as perception,cognition,desire and emotion.Preschool teachers’ frequent use of mental state language in teacher-child interactions plays an important role in promoting the development of young children in theory of mind,vocabulary and sociality.In this study,corpus analysis and non-participant observation were mainly used to investigate the feature of preschool teachers’ use of mental state language in three different activity contexts(group teaching,free play and mealtime)and further identify its influencing factors.30 video clips of 15 minutes’ continuous teacher-child interactions generated in group teaching,free play and mealtime were cut out from the half-day preschool videos of 30 teachers(10 each in primary,middle and senior classes),and then all the clips were transcribed verbatim into texts as the data for corpus analysis.Totally,1350 minutes’ video clips,240 thousand words of text and 18366 clauses were analyzed in the study.The results showed that the overall frequency of mental state language use was not high(9.09%).Teachers significantly used more mental state language in group teaching than in free play and in mealtime.In terms of the use of the four types of mental state language,perception was the most frequently used,followed by cognition and desire,and emotion was the least.No matter in which one of the three activity contexts,emotion was the least used.In mealtime,desire and perception were the most used mental state language,while perception and cognition were the most used in group teaching and free play.Teachers’ qualification and child age had no significant effect on teachers’ use of mental state language,but the effect of teachers’ experience was identified with the evidence that teachers with abundant experience(10 years or more)used more mental state language.Referent and communication context were important influencing factors as well as.There were more desire with the referent of children(e.g.what vegetables do you want?),more perception with the referent of teachers(e.g.I saw you raised your hand.)and more emotion with the referent of others(e.g.,How happy the princess is!),while there was rare mental state language used when refer to both(e.g.We both think this is true!).Teachers’ mental state language mainly focused on here-&-now context.Desire was the most frequently used type in this context,while there was no significant difference between the other three types of mental state language in here-&-now context and in there-&-then context.There were interactive effects among activity context,referent and communication context.The referent of children,others and both were the most in group teaching,and the referent of teachers was the most in mealtime.In group teaching,more present topics were discussed,while this gap was not found in free play and mealtime.The findings have pedagogical implications.The findings have pedagogical implications.First,relevant language programme can be carried out for teachers to enhance knowledge of mental state language thus fully extort its educational function.Furthermore,pay attention to the multiple opportunities for the use of mental state language in group teaching.In addition,it is important for teachers to consciously enrich the variety of referent and desire.And lastly,free play and mealtime provide teachers with valuable opportunities to talk about decontextualized topics with young children.