Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of teacher talk and the development of spontaneous production ability in the Japanese-speaking children learning English in a kindergarten immersion program. This was done by comparing the teacher talk of two different English-speaking teachers, L and R. These two classes were almost the same in terms of size, children's age, and curriculum. A comparison of the children's L2 development in the two classes revealed that the children in one class produced more creative English, whereas the children in the other used more set phrases. It was hypothesized that this difference may have been due to a difference in quality of L's and R's teacher talk. Analysis of their teacher talk confirmed this hypothesis.
