The
purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of two professional
development models in increasing family child care providers’ frequency of
linguistic inputs in conversations with young children. The first
professional development model consisted of a 10-h in-service training
focused on supporting early language development. The second included the
same 10-h in-service training program and mentoring. Providers and children
at 48 family child care programs participated in this study. The family child
care programs were randomly assigned to one of the two professional
development models (i.e., training or training with mentoring) or to a
control group. Audio recordings of the language environment were collected
prior to the in-service training, at the completion of the in-service
training, and at the completion of the mentoring. Hierarchical linear
modeling was used to examine the average increase in the frequency of
providers’ use of linguistic inputs over three observations, conducted before
training, immediately at the end of training, and 6 weeks after training.
Results indicate that both forms of professional development increased
linguistically stimulating inputs as compared to the control group. The
professional development model including mentoring support was related to
greater increases in providers’ use of informational talk and teaching
utterances over in-service training without mentoring.
