Teacher's intervention in the pretend play to scaffold kindergartener's language development
According to Vygotsky, pretend play is the main source of development of kindergarteners. Moreover, it constitutes a favorable context for language development and literacy learning. However, kindergarten teacher involvement in children’s pretend play to support their learning do not happen very often. This could be explained by their uncertainties as to when and how to get involved in children's play. Thus, an educational design research was carried out with the aim of developing a pedagogical device based on the Vygotskian perspective. First, this article describes how, with anasynthesis, we created a flowchart presenting eight interventions to be conducted in the pretend play to scaffold children’s language development and literacy learning. Second, it presents the usefulness of this tool according to three kindergarten teachers who try it out in their class for 10 to 12 weeks. Data were collected with the think-aloud method, two semi-structured interviews and one focus group. A qualitative analysis allowed to identify the interventions that have proven useful in scaffolding the children’s language development and literacy learning, to describe to what extent the flowchart has made it possible to meet the needs of teachers, to highlight the interest of children in using the writing and in doing writing attempts, as well as children's progress in language development, literacy learning and play. These results thus contribute to the advancement of knowledge on the operationalization of Vygotsky's ideas in education, more specifically concerning the development of language, literacy, and play.