TOTs: A time‐on‐task analysis of ethnic minority children in a multilingual nursery school

This paper presents a time‐on‐task analysis for a group of six 3‐year‐old children during their first term in a multilingual nursery school. The children are third‐generation British, born to families who are settled migrants. Data were collected using observation schedules specially designed to gather contextual data (Geertz, 1975), to describe the ways in which these young pupils spent their time in the nursery school. The children were observed on two separate occasions, on their first day in the nursery and then again 12 weeks later towards the end of their first term in formal education. Data analysis will be presented in the form of graphs to demonstrate the change in the patterns of time‐on‐task during the period of enculturation into the school environment. Findings differ from previous time‐on‐task analyses for monolingual children of a comparable age in a similar setting (Sylva et al., 1980).