The clarification request in teacher-child conversation

Current research on adult-child interaction has stressed the importance of some conversational tactics for the development of communicative competence in children. The conversational device used in the presence of ambiguity and incomprehension is the clarification request (CR), an interrogative utterance by which the speaker asks for explanation, confirmation or repetition of an utterance previously produced by the listener, but which has not been perfectly understood. In this research we analyzed several aspects of nursery school teachers use of the clarification request with children of three different age groups (10–17 months; 21–26 months and 28–37 months). Using audio-recordings of naturally occurring teacher-child interactions, the following features were analyzed: 1) the quantitative distribution of CRs in teacher’s language according to the children’s age; 2) the form of the CRs; 3) their function; 4) the conversational sequences containing CRs. The results suggest that the teacher’s use of CRs is guided by their knowledge and evaluation of the children’s developing communicative competence. The distribution of CRs in the various forms and function that we indentified seem to follow the same general path isolated in the previous studies, collected in a different language and culture, suggesting that the CRs may be a constant feature of adult-child interaction.