Takayo Sugimoto
July, 2015
Abstract
Fostering communicative competence of children has been one of the most important and urgent issues of school education in Japan. In the rapidly changing age of the 21st century, often dubbed as ‘the age of globalization’, communicative competence has been said to be one of essential skills for effective collaborative learning in school education and profound life-long learning worldwide (Dumont et al., 2010). This paper considers fostering children’s communicative competence in Japanese, the language used in the early childhood education forward. This paper reports on preliminary results of our longitudinal observational studies on the picture book reading in one-year old groups in the early childhood education. We discuss some consequences of a distinctive nursery policy of picture book reading and its implications for teachers’ professional development and children’s learning. In particular, nursery school practices which value endogenous attributions of picture book reading were considered. This type of nursery practice or policy is not only effective from self-regulated learning, but it also motivates teachers rich linguistic inputs and teachers’ scaffolding and un-scaffolding in class, resulting in children’s active learning through child-oriented interactions. We also found that teachers observing endogenous attributions of picture-book reading tended to talk more to young children to ease them emotionally in the situations that children could be nervous about new activities or had negative emotional experiences from previous events. We conclude this paper by discussing how both children and teachers could benefit from endogenous attributions of nursery practices.
