Clotilde Pontecorvo

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza

This study aims to explore how children express their need to account for actions by using valid arguments in order to prevent the non-compliance of a rule within family conversation. Previous works have shown the relevance of parental requests towards children and the need to account for a violation or for incorrect verbal expressions. The present...

This paper presents the results of a curriculum of basic economic concepts given to 5 fourth-grade classes (Ss=95). The main topic of this curriculum was the production and distribution of agricultural produce, which had already proved to be difficult for the children. The proposed curriculum was largely inspired by the idea that familiarity with «...

The study aims at investigating the hypotheses that preliterate children work out, before the systematic teaching of writing, about the written representation of negation, absence, impossibility, and falsity. This problematic area has been previously investigated by Ferreiro (1981; 1997) and by Olson (1996). The present study focuses on a whole ran...

The aim of this paper is to analyze how fathers position themselves within their everyday discursive practices at home. We consider the shift from a traditional father figure, defined and perceived as a provider, to an emerging collaborative one in order to explore the discursive acts of fathers’ positioning through the observation of the everyday...

Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data collected among 8 Italian middle-class families, this article analyzes transitions in and out of episodes of games played by parents and children at home. The analyses focus on game prefaces in which participants display their mutual availability to engage in the game, and game codas in which participants si...

The study aims at analyzing toddlers' sociability within an early educational context, by adopting a socio-constructivist perspective that considers 'school-nursery' (Italian 'nido di infanzia') as an important natural context that can promote their sociability development. The larger research involved 18 toddlers of 20-40 months of age, who attend...

This paper examines a dataset that derives from an observational tracking, in order to analyze where and how middle-class working families spend time at home. We use an ethnographic approach to study the everyday lives of Italian dual-income middle-class families, with the aim to analyze quantitatively the use of home spaces and the types of activi...

This comparative study aims at understanding which the difficulties children face in word segmentation in early writings. The term 'word' is both a metalinguistic and an everyday term. Rules about word separation have evolved over many years and are now normative in the languages these children are trying to write: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. Chi...

This paper analyses the concept of civilisation as it is constructed in anthropology and history, and uses the various dimensions so defined as a frame to understand how children grasp and make active use of the concepts in their interpretation of historical information. School fosters a notion of progress developing through different socio-histori...

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to highli...

This article is an introduction to the special section of ERQ devoted to «Family cultures between everyday practices and representations». The core of this section is constituted by four studies, drawn from an international research on the everyday life of middle class families in Rome, Stockholm, and Los Angeles, called CELF and supported with a g...

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This paper examines the rhythm and the management of classroom interaction as an important constituent of a teaching-learning process. Twenty-three lessons in 12 classes (four 2nd grades, four 3rd grades and four 4th grades) of state primary schools spread all over Italy were observed and videotaped for a total of 15 hours. The descriptive analysis...

Drawing on autobiographical recollections, I propose to see collaborative research as a learning experience. I assume a sociocultural psychological approach to the social understanding and interpretation of different scientific research practices. I examine the modalities of collaboration in my first experience of managing an important national res...

This article concerns the dynamics of domestic space `appropriation' in Italian middle-class working families. The article starts from a background in multidisciplinary literature, mostly in the area of ethnographical and psychological studies, where the concepts of both `ownership' and `territoriality' prove to be inadequate. A dynamic view of spa...

This paper introduces intersubjectivity as a concept playing a crucial role in collaborative tasks, even when performed between partners at a distance. Two 5th grade classes from two European countries (Italy and Greece), collaborated in writing fairytales inspired by philosophically relevant issues. The software supporting the task is an asynchron...

What has Little Red Riding Hood taught us about the writing of Italian children? The review of the studies conducted to date on the Italian sample has emphasized how early and effectively these children confront written language. Neglecting a strictly normative perspective and looking at the texts not only for how deviant they are, but also, and ab...

The article studies the manipulation of meanings between legal professionals and witnesses as it unfolds turn by turn in a hostile examination. Eleven hours of video-recording of the Italian criminal trial against Sergio Cusani were fully transcribed, resulting in 3700 turns of talk (1850 question turns and 1850 answers), which were analyzed on the...

The contributions of this book lead the way to a wide variety of questions related to young people moving toward adulthood in complex societies. Ideas such as youth, society, and adulthood are problematic; so is the nature of the move itself. In their opening chapters, Perret-Clermont and Resnick consider this period as a time of preparation or tra...

This study addresses a timely and crucial topic, the socialization of today's youth, by asking such precise questions as-What are the young socialized for? Which skills, modes of thinking or action are required of them and what are their developmental values? All too often, socialization tends to be viewed within the confines of a particular geogra...

INDICE 1. Definire e caratterizzare il dialogo (Carla Bazzanella) 2. Prototipo, dialogo e configurazione complessiva (Carla Bazzanella) 3. Le voci del silenzio (Carla Bazzanella) DIALOGHI PERSONA-PERSONA 4. ‘Dialogare’ nelle conversazioni in famiglia (Sabine Pirchio, Clotilde Pontecorvo, Laura Sterponi) 47-57 5. Il dialogo nella situazione scol...

Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian chi...

The article by Leitão on ‘The potential of argument in knowledge building’ raises interesting issues. Having researched a similar topic in which collective children’s reasoning (on different school topics) was observed to develop through arguing against the points of view of other children in the group, we agree that the topic deserves research att...

Children's use of referential expressions is far from being firmly identified. The main objective of the study was to examine children's development between first and fifth grade in theuseof referential expressionsin oral and writtennarratives. Westudiedhow children maintain and reintroduce animate entities by employing different linguistic forms,l...

Dyadic interaction does not necessarily imply that just two people are present. It is often possible to single out episodes of dyadic interaction in multiparty contexts that we analyse, such as family dinner table conversation. Within such a speech event, multiparty participation framework (variously organized) is the default conversational structu...

This study aims at understanding the use of punctuation in children's early writings in connection with the organisation of the written text. Data are drawn from a larger comparative study in which written stories of Little Red Riding Hood were collected from primary school children who speak one of the three Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese,...

The paper addresses the issue of cultural descriptions as they are perceived and used within mundane conversation. We analyze a discussion of an Italian family about a future formal occasion (a party) in a foreign country (Austria), with foreign participants, in which they shall produce a typically Italian meal. The analysis shows how cultural desc...

A qualitative study analyzed the distribution of participation by young children (ages 3-5) in family dinnertime conversation, focusing on "backstage talk," sequences adjacent to those in which the child is involved and within his auditory range, so that the child-projected participation-role alternates between that of addressee and overhearer. (Au...

Small groups of 4th-grade school children worked autonomously on the analysis of a photograph, guided by a set of questions ranging from particular issues to more general ones. Transcripts of the recordings show that children's talk deals with key issues of historical methodology: reliability of the source, manipulations transforming findings into...

In 1990, we were asked by the Scientific Affairs Division of NATO1 to organize a conference on situated cognition and technologies of learning. In planning the conference, held in Lucca, Italy, in November, 1993, and in recruiting participants, we sought to bring together people from several scholarly disciplines, some of whom might not yet have kn...

The aim of the study is to identify both modes of children’s participation in family disputes and types of argumentative moves adopted, particularly in the act of opposing (problematizing) others or defending oneself. The corpus consists of twenty-seven dinner conversations of ten middle-class families living in Rome and Naples, each with one child...

Not long ago, projections of how office technologies would revolutionize the production of documents in a high-tech future carriedmany promises. The paper­ less office and the seamless and problem-free sharing of texts and other work materials among co-workers werejust around the corner, we were told. To anyone who has been involved in putting toge...

In this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4-10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms....

Though eating and taste are central to social and moral order, we know little about the mundane practices that socialize children into the world of food. This study pioneers direct observation of the practices involved in socializing taste. Utilizing Bourdieu's distinction between ‘the taste of necessity’ and ‘the taste of luxury/freedom ‘, it exam...

studies of the development of literacy competence in children speaking different languages, 2 basic organizational principles are emerging: the minimum quantity principle and the internal variety principle / these 2 principles mark an important step in the process of written language construction: they allow the child to judge whether or not writin...

The need to reexamine cognitive and constructivist approaches to development and learning, while taking social and cultural factors into account, is now widely recognized. Different research fields-represented by studies on language and social development, reasoning, thinking, and cultural development-converge, inasmuch as they am oriented toward a...

Social interaction provides a social support system, particularly for the acquisition of procedural knowledge. If learning is mainly a social process, what is learned is mainly a process of behaving. Innovative learning settings, called discussions, were used in this research to provide a cognitive apprenticeship in scholarly ways of arguing and re...

A review of features and results of a research program concerning social interaction in knowledge construction that covers more than 10 years of research is given. Starting from a Vygotskian theoretical background, interactive dimensions are considered as an instrument for curriculum change in different domains and, subsequently, as an experimental...

The research presented in this chapter discusses the use of technology as a medium within the ecology and organization of a second to sixth grade literacy curriculum in Rome and in Florence. This is an example of an epistemological approach to schooling which “argues that knowledge is not acquired as a collection of abstract entities but rather is...

This article describes children's and teacher's talk in classroom discussion that is a kind of speech event aimed at knowledge construction. Eleven discussions attended by twelve 5-year-old children in two different social contexts and on two different subjects were recorded and analyzed. The discussions were preceded by shared activity and guided...

The way of speaking at school can transmit ways of thinking and knowing and give structure to experience and knowledge. This study aims to describe and interpret the kind of discursive practices which can be constructed in a «literacy event», in this case a particular type of classroom discussion about a story. The study integrantes a Vygotskian pe...

The aim of this investigation is to describe planning strategies and ideational processes of dyads of primary school children in a problem solving story completion task. Nine dyads of 2nd graders were asked to fill in the gaps of a 10 sentence story using a piece of computer software. The corpus of data is made up of full transcripts of children’s...

This study is part of a research project aimed at studying ways and effects of introducing computer use within a context of linguistic education. Linguistic activities, in which language was treated as an object instead of a means of communication, were carried out through a curriculum unit aimed at developing reflection on language. Within the cur...

This study, part of a larger longitudinal research project, examined the process and products of story dictation of beginning readers. The subjects were 14 six-year-old Italian school children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who were interviewed four times (March, May, December and May of the following year) over a period of 16 months. In the in...

The aim of this study is to test developmental changes in metalinguistic skills in primary school children, using the distinction proposed by Bialystock (1986) between «analyzed knowledge» and «executive control», as two components of metalinguistic awareness involved in different tasks. 60 first, second and third grade children were individually i...

In this paper we aim at analyzing the modes of differentiation in children's writing development during the presyllabic phase that, in the theoretical framework developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky, comes before the discovery of sound correspondance. Seventeen Italian children were interviewed seven times during the implementation of research on «Ed...

Research on children's social cognition has dealt mainly with face to face relations; only a few studies have considered how children understand impersonal aspects of society such as economics. This study involves an investigation of teaching the concepts of work and profit to third-graders. Five instruction units were created and during a one-mont...

Studied the relationship between drawing and writing and between writing and quantity notation in 48 preschool children 4–6 yrs old of low socioeconomic status (SES). Ss were interviewed individually in kindergarten settings according to a preestablished format. The aim was to identify and describe levels and strategies in Ss' representations of pi...

Discusses children's acquisition of writing systems. Written language is an object of sociocultural knowledge and, thus, the object of complex reconstructive activity. The processes of acquiring reading and writing skills are closely related, and opinions vary on whether to introduce children to reading or writing first. The crucial stages in the a...

Cross‐cultural examinations of teaching and schooling can help one gain a new, more open perspective on that which is the closest at hand. One's own experiences provide a personal framework through which all subsequent perceptions are filtered, so that what may seem “objective” is really a view colored by past events and performances.This paper pre...