Jane Torr

• BA(Hons1)(UNSW);DipLing(UCLondon);PhD(SydU)
• Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University

A comparison between preschool children's verbal participation during the shared reading of a wordless and a text-based rendition of Aesop's fable The Lion and the Mouse Abstract This study compared the story-focused language of two groups of 40 Chinese preschool children who separately read and discussed a wordless and a text-based version of one...

Television, like other media, can work as a platform for promoting learning. This article illustrates the value of multimodal discourse analysis for evaluating the potential of a children’s television show as a vehicle for fostering knowledge and skills in a specific subject area. Drawing on social semiotic principles and systemic functional genre...

Early childhood educators are encouraged to read with infants, yet little is known about the educator–infant book‐focused interactions that occur in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centres. This study provides a systematic linguistic analysis of the naturally occurring interactions between one focal child Charlie (aged 21 months and 13 da...

Research shows an association between mother-infant shared reading and children’s language and literacy development. Educators in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres frequently interact with groups of similar-aged infants, yet infant-educator shared reading has received little attention. This naturalistic observational study videoreco...

Families’ mealtime talk has significant implications for children’s language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore (1) the nature of the Chinese parents’ language use in interactions with children at mealtime and (2) the factors that m...

This study examines the frequency of reasoning talk used by 56 educators during their naturally occurring play interactions with infants in their early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. Using Hasan’s semantic framework, reasons were coded as social (based on social rules) or logical (based on rules of nature). The communicative function...

Children's language experiences in the first two years of life are inextricably connected with their current and future language and literacy development. Research has shown that mother–child shared reading of picture books is a practice that can promote this development. Little is known, however, about the shared reading experiences of infants att...

This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted withinfants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as confirm (yes/no), specify (what, who, where,...

This study investigated the quantity of audible and intelligible ('near and clear') educator talk directly experienced by under-two-year-old infants attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs and examined whether the quantity of educator talk was related to characteristics of quality in their ECEC room. Participants were 57 infant...

This report presents and interprets the results of the survey of public library staff involved in early literacy initiatives, which was conducted in Stage 1 of the collaborative project 'Developing a context-sensitive framework for supporting early literacy across NSW public libraries'. The project was a research collaboration between he State Libr...

This study investigated the manner in which 56 infant educators used language to direct the behaviour of infants (defined as children aged birth to two years), on the basis that the ways in which educators frame their commands represent an important component of young children’s learning experiences. Underpinned by systemic functional linguistic th...

The enthusiasm for using tablets in education has been witnessed in several countries including Thailand. One Tablet Per Child (OTPC) introduced by the Thai government in 2011 involves tablet distribution to primary school students and application development. English as a foreign language (EFL) applications in OTPC tablets hold much promise to add...

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATES THE quantity and quality of infant–toddler educators' language-support practices during morning or afternoon snack-time short episodes. Infants' participation in, and the quality of their interactions with adults plays a critical role in their language development. However, while mealtimes with older children have been ident...

The social practice of reading aloud picture books to children, or shared reading, has been represented on many televisions programmes broadcast across English-speaking countries. This article views shared reading as a performance, and explores its transformation on two television shows for children and the potential of such shows to promote readin...

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a...

The everyday conversations that occur between mothers and children, particularly those involving reasoning, are a major vehicle for the transmission of information and values to young children. This study explored the manner in which five Australian Chinese mothers engaged in reasoning talk with their preschool-aged children. A total of 83 instance...

Australia’s first national early childhood curriculum, the Early Years Learning Framework (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009), aims’to extend and enrich children’s learning from birth to five years and through the transition to school’ (p. 5). The framework sets out some key principles, practices and learning...

Educators’ questions can encourage children to engage in extended conversations, facilitate comprehension and stimulate thinking. Many studies of educators’ questioning have focused on children aged 3 years and older. Little is known about the manner in which educators of infants in non-parental group care settings use questioning as a pedagogical...

In 2011, the Thai government introduced a national project, One Tablet per Child (OTPC), with the aim of supporting students' learning in the digital world. The project commenced with Grade 1 in 2012 and Grade 2 in 2013. The applications embedded in the OTPC tablet given to each child feature multimedia teaching applications (apps) on various subje...

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RmiT8PtZG7UaBZb7QT8w/full. Play gives young children opportunities to develop language and relationships. Friendships and the topics children choose for play can influence the nature of that play, but little is known about how friendship and topic choice impinge on topic maintenance. Topic maintenance is an importa...

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to one of the world’s leading and most influential linguists. Born in 1925, Halliday is the figure most responsible for the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics, into the study of styl...

Little is known about the quality and characteristics of the language used by childcare staff when interacting with infants in non-parental group care settings. This qualitative study analysed the manner in which staff used language when interacting with ten children aged between 9 and 20 months in four different long day care centres in Sydney, Au...

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/eeEkc6Abx8Q6JJW94fDE/full Friendships and play provide children with opportunities for mutual engagement, which both require and facilitate children's language use. Modality is a semantic system in the language associated with children's learning. One way in which modality is realised is through linguistic expressi...

This study investigated five Australian early childhood educators’ negotiation of the complex terrain of working in partnership with Chinese parents regarding their children’s language usage in early childhood settings. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken to explore educators’ views on children’s language usage in early childhood settings, t...

This article reports on a deep investigation of five Australian Chinese families regarding their preschool-aged children's bilingual experiences and development. Each family was visited 3 to 5 times by the first author. The mothers were interviewed about their attitudes toward their child's bilingualism and their practices to promote it. A detailed...

Language-rich environments are key to overall quality in early childhood settings, including frequent child—staff interactions around picture books and dramatic play. In a language-rich environment, explicit teaching of literacy concepts, such as phonics, is embedded in authentic and meaningful situations where alphabet letters and sounds are taugh...

This article presents findings of a pilot project for a study investigating the language of preschool-aged peers, with particular attention to differences in genre that were evident in the dyadic play of children who self-identified as being 'very best friends' as opposed to 'just a little bit' friends. Participants were three 5-year-old boys in a...

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school (Department...

Research has shown that mothers' attitudes towards early English language and literacy learning are important for children's English language development. Some researchers have indicated that in Taiwan most parents have a positive attitude towards English instruction and are motivated to teach English at home to their preschoolers. There is, howeve...

Researchers have indicated that many children from Asian countries have the experience of learning English prior to school at home or at private institutes. The Taiwanese government promotes informal and play-based teaching of English in the home if the parents would like their young children to learn English prior to formal instruction. This study...

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school (Department...

Early childhood education and care services in Australia are undergoing major reforms, following widespread community concern about the quality of provision in general and the viability of corporate childcare in particular. A National Quality Framework has been developed by the current Australian Government to improve the quality, access and equity...

This chapter describes how young children, who cannot yet read and write in conventional terms, respond to and construe the images and written text in a well known picture book.

Singaporean preschool teachers are responsible for preparing their young students for a formal education that is predominantly conducted in English. What these teachers believe about how young children learn English literacy skills is important to study, especially when much of the research is situated in very different contexts. Talking to teacher...

Recent research has demonstrated that parents’ beliefs about their children's minds constitute an important environmental factor affecting children's development. One difficulty with this area of investigation is that beliefs are often implicit, unconscious, and not always accessible through direct questioning. This study addresses this difficulty...

Research has shown a relationship between mothers' beliefs about literacy, their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and their children's emergent literacy awareness. Many Australian Indigenous children experience educational disadvantage, as do children whose parents are manual workers. One recommendation that is frequently made is for pare...

Children's exposure to mind-related talk has been shown to foster young children's metacognitive understanding and to orient them to the patterns of literate language long before they commence formal literacy instruction at school. In this paper, we report on a longitudinal study of the mind-related talk of 22 mothers when their infants were aged 1...

Mature readers draw on a complex web of previous experiences when interpreting written and visual texts. Yet very little is known about how preschool children, who cannot yet read, make connections between texts. This study explores how 13 4‐year‐old children made intertextual connections during shared reading with their mothers (seven children) an...

It is widely recognised that teachers' pedagogical practices are influenced by many factors, including their personal experiences, their theoretical knowledge and the institutional context in which they work. Yet little is known about the beliefs held by Singaporean teachers about language and literacy development. Given the significance of early c...

It is widely recognised that adult/child interactions surrounding the sharing of picture books are significant for young children's literacy understandings (De Temple & Beals, 1991; Snow, 1993). Recently Pappas (1993) has challenged the traditional view that narratives or stories are the most appropriate vehicle for learning in young children. To d...

It is widely recognized that there is a relationship between vocabulary development and children's reading ability. This article will focus on the strategies employed by 24 adults (12 mothers and 12 qualified preschool teachers) when introducing new and unusual vocabulary to four-year-old children during shared reading. The mothers differed in term...

In presenting his ideas on a ‘language based theory of learning’, Halliday (1993) has both emphasised the interpersonal beginnings of the child’s new linguistic achievements and also proposed a three step model of human semiotic development. In this chapter we will draw on the major systemic functional case studies that have contributed to this the...

This study analyses how pre-school children who differ in terms of maternal education respond to and interpret the images and written text in the same two picture books, one informational (The sleepy book[Zolotow and Bobri, 1960]) and one narrative (The baby who wouldn’t go to bed[Cooper, 1996]). Twelve children were recorded in their homes interac...

In children's picture books, the connection between play and the rituals associated with bedtime is frequently addressed. Despite the fact that bedtime would seem to have little connection with play, play is a significant element in the construction of meaning in those books that focus on that period of the day. Play is embedded in bedtime picture...

This article will analyze the manner in which children's ability to use language to represent the thoughts and sayings of themselves and others varies across grade levels in the elementary school (Year 1 children aged 6–7 years and Year 5/6 children aged 11–12 years). Specifically, the study focuses on the manner in which teachers and children use...

Modality is a particularly interesting area developmentally, as it is concerned with the child's evaluation of the possibilities and obligations involved in everyday interpersonal encounters. This paper will present the findings of a longitudinal case study of one child's development of modality over a 21 month period, beginning at 2;6 (two years a...

In this article the authors report on the findings of a study which explores certain linguistic features in the discourse of two Year 1 teachers and their students. The study focusses on the teachers' use of grammatical metaphor, which is considered to be a significant feature in the construction of scientific and technical knowledge, including the...

This paper discusses some of the results of a pilot study of spontaneous teacher/child discourse in two Year 1 Sydney classrooms (children aged 6 and 7 years). The two classrooms differed greatly in terms of their ethnic composition; in one class, the majority of children came from non-English speaking backgrounds, while in the other class, all the...

This paper discusses some features of a child's construction of experience, and of personal relationships, by means of language. The paper also considers what may have been the effects on this process of her being the second child in the family.

Two case studies have been done on the early language development of boys (without siblings), using a functional framework (Halliday, 1975; Painter, 1984). This paper will discuss the results of a case study of a second-born child, Alison, analyzed using the same methods as the above studies. The similarities and differences between the children wi...