Communicative Constraints in EFL Pre-School Settings: A Corpus-Driven Approach

The present article investigates the use of interrogatives made by teachers and the responses given by learners in two different (bilingual and non-bilingual) English language classroom contexts in two Spanish nursery schools.

The analysis shows the relevance of the type of functions made by the teachers through interrogatives, rather than the quantity of input in the target language. The study classifies the functions of interrogatives in the pre-school context and makes a statistical corpus-driven analysis of the questions and responses in the two schools. Finally, the article makes some suggestions, based on the data, about the kind of questions than can lead to a more natural L2 development in the classroom context.