Many children enter school with little to no external language exposure—many times due to lack of language support by early childcare providers. The demands of Kindergarten and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) expect students to possess higher-order thinking skills, including academic language use to support and reason with texts in conversation. The current qualitative study examined guided play conversations with 1 pre-k student, involving use of academic language to display how teacher reflection guided student language expansion. The participant responded to multiple questions and prompts regarding read alouds during guided play. Results suggest that teacher effectiveness of promoting oral language expansion is evident if open questions are apparent during guided play because they encourage independent, deep thinking
