Styles of interaction used by learning assistants: the effectiveness of training

This study examines the effectiveness of a training day for classroom learning assistants (LAs), which aims to change the way LAs interact with language-impaired children. The subjects were eight LA/language-impaired child dyads (with children aged 4;11 to 9;11 years) attending mainstream schools. The dyads were video recorded interacting at two times (before and after training) and in two contexts each time (sharing a book and in class). The training increased the percentage of facilitating utterances and recasts used by the LAs but did not decrease the percentage of controlling utterances used. Although the trained styles of interaction were used more frequently while sharing a book than in a classroom activity, the amount of change following training was not significantly different for these two settings.