Adopting Quality for School Readiness (AQSR): A Heuristic Framework using Recommended Practice and Professional Knowledge to Support Oral Language in Multilingual Classrooms

Quality oral language interventions support children’s readiness for formal literacy instruction and yet a framework for multilingual classrooms is not available. To address this gap, we drew on the empirical literature on linguistically diverse learners, classroom linguistic environments, and usage-based theories to identify principles for recommended pedagogical practices. We next examined how teachers explained their oral language teaching and what they said after delivering an intervention based on recommended practice. Using a reflexive approach to qualitative interview and questionnaire data, we found some convergence but also areas of limited overlap between recommended practice and teacher professional knowledge. Supporting child talk was seen to serve a motivational-affective purpose more than the cognitive-linguistic purposes implicit in research-informed recommended practices. Based on insights from specialized literature and distillations of professional knowledge, we propose a heuristic framework named Adopting Quality for School Readiness (AQSR). We also discuss uses for the AQSR framework and outstanding questions for future research.