Teaching practices of Mexican American mothers with everyday and school-related tasks

The teaching behaviors of Mexican American mothers were examined using an everyday task and a school-related task. The sample consisted of 37 Mexican American mother-child dyads. The children's mean age was 50.8 months (SD = 6.1). The results indicate that when instructing the everyday task, mothers relied on the use of various verbal utterances to guide their children to task competence. When teaching the school-related task, the mothers relied on the use of nonverbal instructional behaviors. This suggests that mothers instruct their children in a complementary fashion, altering their general strategies with respect to the task demands on the children. Regardless of the task, the mothers followed an instructional pattern that is consistent with a Vygotskian framework.