Preschool teacher interactive style with handicapped and nonhandicapped children: A comparative study.

Abstract

The purpose in this study was to investigate teacher interactive style and to provide a description of teachers' interactive style in early childhood classrooms for handicapped versus nonhandicapped children. It was predicted that the two groups of teachers would not differ in global dimensions of style when managing children during play, but would differ in communicative style when instructing children in groups. Forty preschool teachers--20 teachers with handicapped children and 20 teachers with nonhandicapped children--were observed in their classrooms during two regularly scheduled periods of the school day: Free Play and Group Instruction. Global scales were used to evaluate teachers' interactive style in free play and a turntaking classification scheme was employed to estimate the extent to which the child or teacher controls and dominates the interaction during instruction. There were three major findings. First teachers with handicapped children differed in performance orientation from teachers with nonhandicapped children, reflecting greater effort to instruct children by directing their attention and behavior during play. Teachers with handicapped and nonhandicapped children did not differ in affective dimensions of style or in child orientation, the extent to which they focused on, accepted and valued children's behavior during play. Second, teachers with handicapped children in the instruction situation demonstrated a greater frequency of conversational turns that directed children's actions and fewer conversational turns that invited children's responses than teachers with nonhandicapped children. Third, for all preschool children, children's responsive turns were positively related to teachers' conversational turns that reciprocally responded to children, as opposed to turns that directed children's actions and verbal responses. Overall, results demonstrated that teacher interactive style and children's status--handicapped versus nonhandicapped--are related to the extent that preschool children are drawn into conversation and cooperative actions with their teachers.