In the context of a large, and growing literature on the nature and influence of parents' talk ("motherese") in children's language development, this paper investigates the nature and possible influence of teachers' talk in early childhood settings. The relevant literature on both “motherese” and “teacherese” is briefly reviewed in order to establish the context in which the major findings of two recent Australian investigations of teachers, mothers and children are discussed. These studies analysed the “public” talk of teachers and children in the classroom, the talk of teachers and mothers in “private” conversations with their children, and the relationship of both the mothers' and the teachers' language and conversational styles to the childrens' progress in language development measured over a school year. Using, in all, thirty kindergartens located in a wide range of suburbs and inner city areas of Melbourne, the language abilities of 4-year-old children, evaluated using measures of spontaneous speech and standard test performance, were assessed at the beginning and end of their first year of preschool education, and correlated with a range of features of their mothers' and teachers' conversational styles with them. The influence of the socio-economic status of their parents and preschool population and the children's gender were also investigated. The results of both investigations, taken together, presented a complex picture of the relationship of aspects of children's language development in the preschool period with features of their teachers' and parents' verbal interactions with them. Previous research, conducted in England and America, indicating the teachers and parents speak to children in very different ways, was clearly confirmed. These differences were even shown to exist in their styles of conducting private conversations with the same children and significantly affected the way the children responded. On the other hand, no differences relating to gender or social class emerged. It is concluded that while parents' speech and conversational styles may be of greater assistance to children in the areas of general communicativeness and conversational competence, teachers' styles were more related to improvements in linguistic complexity. Thus, the possibility of a planned partnership of parents and teachers in promoting children's language development is raised.
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