Open Ended Questions: A Comparison of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Language Use during Play Time

Abstract

Parent level of education makes important contributions to the linguistic development of children (Hoff, 2003). This cross-sectional study focuses on the link between family socioeconomic status (SES) and child-directed speech and aims to investigate how parents’ levels of education influence their language use in terms of their question types. Asking children good questions is a critical tool for developing their skills. In particular, open ended questions are believed to be useful for developing children’s cognitive skills, as these questions encourage children express and elaborate upon their thinking, and to provide rationales for their thoughts (Lee, Kinzie, & Whittaker, 2012). They usually involve reasoning and judgment (Hargreaves, 1984). In addition to these, open ended questions are found to offer linguistic advantages for children. They help develop children’s vocabulary. Since children are expected to think at higher levels when they enter school, open ended questions are important tools in engaging children in cognitively challenging conversations and promoting higher-order thinking in the preschool period. Within this context, this study is an attempt to explore how parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds guide their preschoolers with regard to their question types. Families differing in socioeconomic status were audio- taped in their homes for about 20 minutes while they were playing with their 5-year-old children. Results demonstrated that high SES parents asked more open ended questions and spoke to their children much more than low SES parents. These findings suggest that children of high SES families are introduced with higher-order thinking before school by their parents. Thus, high SES children who start school with better language skills are able to develop better literacy skills.