Analysis of the questions asked by preschool teachers to children with discourse analysis

This research is a qualitative study conducted to examine the questions used by preschool teachers in their classroom interactions with discourse analysis. Within the scope of the research, the types of questions asked by the teachers to the children were determined. In addition, the discourse patterns created by the teachers' questions and the communication approaches used by the teachers were also examined. The research was carried out with 3 pre-school teachers selected by purposive sampling method, working in kindergartens in public schools. The classroom interactions of the teachers participating in the research were recorded with a voice recorder. Audio recordings from each teacher were first transcribed and then decoded. The types of questions used by preschool teachers in their classroom interactions were analyzed under three headings as content, interrogative and tag question types. The discourse patterns formed during the interaction are; adjacent utterance (Schegloff, 1978), chain pattern (Scott, Mortimer, & Aguiar, 2006) and triple pattern (Lemke, 1990). Communication approaches used by teachers during their dialogues are; It has been analyzed under four types of communication approaches developed by Mortimer and Scott (2003) as interactive authoritative/dialogue and non-interactive autotrite/dialogue. As a result of the research, it was determined that the participant preschool teachers generally included content and question types in their classroom interactions. It has been determined that the discourse patterns formed during the teachers' dialogues are generally chain and triple patterns. Finally, it has been determined that preschool teachers often adopt interactive dialogue and interactive authoritative approaches in their interactions with children. In addition, it was concluded that teachers, in classroom environments where they adopt a student-centered approach, ask interrogative questions with the interactive/dialogue approach and form the chain discourse pattern. In cases where they created a traditional classroom environment, it was determined that they asked content questions with an interactive / authoritarian communication and used adjacent / utterance patterns.