What Do Preschool Teachers and Parents Think about the Influence of Screen-Time Exposure on Children’s Development? Challenges and Opportunities

Children’s exposure to screens has been increasing in recent years and so has the concern about its impact on children’s development. This study aims to analyze preschool teachers’ and parents’ views on the influence of screen-time exposure on children’s development. Semi-structured interviews with preschool teachers (n = 9), as well as data from a previous quantitative study, based on an online questionnaire applied to parents of children in preschool (n = 266) were used for data collection. For this study, eminently of qualitative nature, the following dimensions were analyzed: children’s habits of exposure to screens at home, changes in children’s play habits at school, strategies/methodologies used by preschool teachers, use of technologies at school and children’s language development. The results from the study with parents show that screen-time exposure of children is between 1 h to 2 h of television per day, mostly to watch cartoons. Parents also report that most of the children use vocabulary in other languages at home. Most preschool teachers agreed that children are changing their play habits and mainly their behaviors and attitudes, influenced by screen-time exposure. They believe that language development is also changing, mentioning more language problems in children. Changes in pedagogic strategies and specialized training on educational technology are needed to get closer to children’s interests.

Do Children With Developmental Language Disorder Activate Scene Knowledge to Guide Visual Attention? Effect of Object-Scene Inconsistencies on Gaze Allocation

Our visual environment is highly predictable in terms of where and in which locations objects can be found. Based on visual experience, children extract rules about visual scene configurations, allowing them to generate scene knowledge. Similarly, children extract the linguistic rules from relatively predictable linguistic contexts. It has been proposed that the capacity of extracting rules from both domains might share some underlying cognitive mechanisms. In the present study, we investigated the link between language and scene knowledge development. To do so, we assessed whether preschool children (age range = 5;4–6;6) with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who present several difficulties in the linguistic domain, are equally attracted to object-scene inconsistencies in a visual free-viewing task in comparison with age-matched children with Typical Language Development (TLD). All children explored visual scenes containing semantic (e.g., soap on a breakfast table), syntactic (e.g., bread on the chair back), or both inconsistencies (e.g., soap on the chair back). Since scene knowledge interacts with image properties (i.e., saliency) to guide gaze allocation during visual exploration from the early stages of development, we also included the objects’ saliency rank in the analysis. The results showed that children with DLD were less attracted to semantic and syntactic inconsistencies than children with TLD. In addition, saliency modulated syntactic effect only in the group of children with TLD. Our findings indicate that children with DLD do not activate scene knowledge to guide visual attention as efficiently as children with TLD, especially at the syntactic level, suggesting a link between scene knowledge and language development.

THE ROLE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE AS A BRAND OF PRODUCT FROM CONSTRUCTIVISM POINT A VIEW

The identity of a product has an important part for the company. Product identity should have the unique aspect to draw attention of customers and to win the competition with the other competitors. Nowadays, the identity of a product with foreign language is having uptrends because most people think it is unique and draws more attention. Therefore, foreign language has an influence to the identity of a brand. The development of technology and language make most of the owner of a product choose a foreign language than Indonesian language. Moreover, the assumption of Indonesian language does not have a rich vocabulary than Indonesian language become the main reason. Besides that, an identity of a brand with foreign language can deliver the main point of a product to the customer. From the context of the problem raised, there are some question asked, how does a foreign language in the identity of a product can affect the buyer's decision process? And what is the solution to raise the use of Indonesian language for the identity of a product? This study used qualitative research with a questionnaires and interviews as a way to collecting data. Therefore, the author hopes this research can contribute to language development and local product in Indonesia. From the research with questionnaires and interviews, it showed that most people tend to choose a brand of a product with a foreign language. However, the Indonesian language product brands also have the big contribution to the increase of Indonesian economic.

How Does Toddlers’ Engagement in Literacy Activities Influence Their Language Abilities?

The most intensive period of language development is during the first years of life, during which the brain is developing rapidly. Research has shown that children from disadvantaged households who received high-quality stimulation at a young age grew into adults who earned an average of 25% more than those who did not receive these interventions. In addition, it has been suggested that children who show a greater interest in literacy-related activities and voluntarily engage in them are likely to become better readers than children with less interest in literacy. These children’s factors, along with their engagement in literacy activities, are important components in children’s early literacy experiences and may affect their early language development. In this study, we examined associations among maternal education, home literacy environment (HLE), children’s interest and engagement in literacy activities, and language development of 44 toddlers aged between 20 and 36 months. Overall, results showed that only children’s engagement in literacy activities was related to vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills, whereas maternal education, HLE, and children’s interests were not. These results suggest that taking advantage of individual children’s interests by planning activities in which children are fully engaged, may be effective strategies for promoting children’s oral language development.

Diversity of and Differentiation for Gifted English Learners

This chapter presents a need to understand the diversity of the English learner population. Within this large multi-lingual group of students, there is a richness of diversity in languages, skills, histories, abilities, and experiences. Teaching for differences begins by learning about the students in the classroom. English learners collectively share language needs, but as individuals require attention to their own personal assets and abilities and ongoing learning needs. This chapter presents suggestions for teaching English learners through the lens of differentiation and extends to individualization and personalization. Strategies for supporting the unique needs within and across the multi-lingual learning population are presented. A focus on maximizing thinking shows a strong correlation to language development. Therefore, this chapter presents instruction for English learners as rigorous and challenging to promote thinking and language development.