Spanish/English bilingual kindergarten teachers and parents serving as instructional aides in the same bilingual education classrooms served as subjects in a study on classroom interaction. Audio/video recordings of small-group instruction sessions of teachers and parents were subjected to discourse analysis. A point of interest was the qualitative character of teacher/parent interaction, with specific attention to linguistic and cognitive attributes. Results indicate that both teacher and parent discourse is highly teacher-oriented, with both parents and teachers dominating lesson discourse and keeping children to the topic. Such a similarity between teachers and parents is examined with regard to the language development needs of language minority students in early childhood. (Author/MSE)