Conversational leadership in toddler-educator talk and its potential to promote learning

It is well-established that toddlers make sense of things when they talk with their educators. While previous research has explored how educators’ talk shapes young children’s learning, less in known about how toddlers participate in conversations with educators and what learning opportunities their participation affords. In this study, we video-recorded and qualitatively examined naturalistic conversations between 12 two-year-old toddlers and their educators. Attending to both toddlers and educators, we first coded each conversation for its communicative purpose and language features, which allowed us to identify eight types of toddler-educator conversations. We then examined the conversations with a focus on who exercised ‘conversational leadership’, that is who influenced the topic and communication purpose (determined by intent and language features) in each conversation. We found that in three conversation types conversational leadership belonged to toddlers, in another three to educators, and in the remaining two to both. We also examined the potential of each option of conversational leadership distribution to provide toddlers with learning opportunities to either demonstrate their knowledge or create new knowledge. Our findings support a broader understanding of toddlers’ agency in shaping their own learning. The findings can inform and help to validate educators’ efforts to enrich their conversations with toddlers as an effective learning-promoting pedagogy.