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“What Does It Say About It?”: Doing Reading and Doing Writing as Part of Family Mealtime
Abstract
How children acquire knowledge about and use written language has been examined in a range of disciplines or fields. While formal education settings provide instruction for children to develop literacy, support occurs during everyday activities in the family home. This chapter examines a number of extended sequences of talk during one breakfast of an Australian family comprising the mother and the father and their five children. The interactions were video recorded and then transcribed using conversation analysis conventions. This chapter focuses on how the family members deploy interactional resources to support access to the text of a bookclub brochure, assess the appropriateness of the books for individual family members, and fill in the forms to order books. Analysis shows how the multiparty context and the incipient agenda of purchasing a book from the bookclub brochure are consequential for when and how literacy events are accomplished. Second, analysis shows how the provision of assistance with literacy practices is accomplished interactionally. Also identified in the analysis is the way in which literacy events happen ‘on the hop’ with a shifting in and out of other activities. The chapter contributes understandings about how family members accomplish reading and writing interactionally during an ordinary everyday family occasion, having breakfast.
... Mealtime talk includes both adult-adult and adult-child conversations in which the richness of topics and the complexity of language use may be different from the instance of adult-child interactions in other situations. Parents as skilful language users can create extensive opportunities for children's language learning with sophisticated vocabularies and complex syntactic structures in their dinner table talk (Snow and Beals 2006;Busch 2017). The well-timed turn-taking, the maintenance of one's turn and the cohesive links with previous talk presented in the family members' talk facilitate children's language practices and improve children's language expression as well as social-cognitive abilities (Arcidiacono and Bova 2015;Busch 2017). ...
... Parents as skilful language users can create extensive opportunities for children's language learning with sophisticated vocabularies and complex syntactic structures in their dinner table talk (Snow and Beals 2006;Busch 2017). The well-timed turn-taking, the maintenance of one's turn and the cohesive links with previous talk presented in the family members' talk facilitate children's language practices and improve children's language expression as well as social-cognitive abilities (Arcidiacono and Bova 2015;Busch 2017). Socioeconomic status (SES) and cultural background of families are widely acknowledged as an important factor affecting the style of dinner table conversations. ...
... Specifically, we focus on language expansions in expanded genres (e.g. narrative or explanatory talk) that regards the feature of ideas being exchanged spontaneously and cohesively in conversations, as they have extensive pedagogical functions for children's language learning (Bohanek et al. 2009;Busch 2017;Snow and Beals 2006). Results of this study would increase the cultural diversity in the mealtime research field and enhance our understanding about the language environment of Chinese families that is established by both parents and children. ...
... Mealtime talk includes both adult-adult and adult-child conversations in which the richness of topics and the complexity of language use may be different from the instance of adult-child interactions in other situations. Parents as skilful language users can create extensive opportunities for children's language learning with sophisticated vocabulary and complex syntactic structures in their dinner table talk (Snow and Beals 2006;Busch 2017). The well-timed turn-taking, the maintenance of one's turn and the cohesive links with previous talk presented in the family members' talk facilitate children's language practices and improve children's language expression as well as social-cognitive abilities (Arcidiacono and Bova 2015;Busch 2012). ...
... Specifically, we focus on language expansions in expanded genres (e.g. narrative or explanatory talk) that regards the feature of ideas being exchanged spontaneously and cohesively in conversations, as they have extensive pedagogical functions for children's language learning (Bohanek et al 2009;Busch 2017;Snow and Beals 2006). Results of this study would increase the cultural diversity 5 in the mealtime research field and enhance our understanding about the language environment of Chinese families that is established by both parents and children. ...
... Firstly, the decontextualized & conflicted conversations seemed to create more opportunities for the speakers to expand on each other's ideas constantly. This finding is consistent with the growing body of research that emphasize the didactic value in decontextualized talk or conflicting conversations at the dinner table (Bohanek et al 2009;Busch 2017;Snow and Beals 2006). Raising parents' awareness of the educational affordance of different conversational types, especially the value of decontextualized & conflicted type is more likely to motivate them to adjust their language for improving the conversational quality. ...
This study examined the distribution of language expansion in parent–child (preschool aged) mealtime conversations in 30 Chinese middle-class families. The conversations were categorised into four types: contextualised & conflicted, contextualised & non-conflicted, decontextualised & conflicted, and decontextualised & non-conflicted. The language expansions were analysed using the systemic functional linguistic theory related to cohesive patterns in language expansion: elaborations, extensions, and enhancements. While the parents dominated the conversations generally, the children were active contributors, initiating over one-quarter of the conversations. Initiation had an impact on the distribution of the conversational types: the proportions of contextualised & non-conflicted conversations was significantly higher in child-initiated conversations. The contextualised & conflicted conversations accounted for a higher proportion in parent-initiated conversations. It was the conversational type rather than initiation, which had an effect on the distribution of language expansion patterns. The least occurring decontextualised & conflicted conversations generated the most extensions. The frequently appeared contextualised & non-conflicted conversations, however, produced the fewest expanded messages. The implications from the findings for promoting high-quality mealtime conversations conducive to children’s language learning are discussed.
... Requests have received substantial attention in the conversation-analytic literature. In studies of parent-child interaction, parents' and children's requests-for-action (for example Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011;Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013;Wootton, 1981a), their requests-forinformation (for example Busch, 2017;Filipi, 2009) and children's requests-for-permission (see Butler & Wilkinson, 2013;Nguyen & Nguyen, 2016;Waring, 2020;Wootton, 1981b) have been investigated. However, work on the responses to requests have mostly focused on preference organisation and preferred and dispreferred response options (Waring, 2020). ...
As children and parents go about their daily lives, they initiate, engage in and complete various tasks around the home; and in the process of completing these activities, they encounter the challenge of getting each other to do things. Prior EMCA research has primarily focused on how parents get children to do things through the investigation of parent-initiated request-sequences and parental pursuits of compliance through demands, threats and touch. While I also focus on request and demand sequences, I examine how children initiate and pursue a course of action to get their parents to do things, thereby identifying previously unexamined methods that children use to exercise agency and authority in interaction with their parents. I do so by adopting an ethnomethodologically-informed conversation-analytic approach to studying child-parent interaction that emphasises the need to study participant orientations to the developmental scheme and to avoid making a priori assumptions about asymmetries in competence, agency and authority. The data corpus consists of 9 hours of video-recordings of child-parent interactions spanning 13 days. Data were collected from two volunteer families with four-year-old children who recorded their daily lives using smart nanny cameras. In an examination of parent-initiated request-sequences, I look at how children initiate an alternative sequence of action by countering their parent’s requests. I identify two types of counters; one that children can use to challenge a proposed task’s roles and another that replaces a parental course of action with the child’s. I also analyse child-initiated demand-sequences and children’s methods for pursuing parental compliance. I then focus on a specific type of demand - the “look at X” demand - and parental responses to it. Through these investigations of children’s methods, I demonstrate that young children utilise the developmental scheme as a resource for designing their actions and managing their social positions. This study contributes to a growing body of knowledge on children’s methods for engaging with adults, managing their social positions (through deontic, epistemic and affective claims) and, thus, contributing to their own socialisation; while demonstrating the importance of avoiding a priori assumptions of authority in interactions between parents and children. From: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/9c0b8dec-038b-495c-aee2-ee0dd532b8ce
... It is well established in literature that adult-child interactions in mealtime can be an important language learning context for young children (Bush, 2017;Clark, 2013). Mealtime, as a fixed routine for engaging family members enjoying food together facilitates free communications on a variety of topics that potentially contain different genres with diverse vocabulary and complex syntactic structures (Busch, 2017;Snow & Beals, 2006). Likewise, mealtime is an important routine in childcare centre for involving educators and children sitting together that can be an ideal context for children's language learning (Cote, 2001). ...
Abstract
This study explores the nature of six Chinese infant educators’ language use in their interactions with infants during lunch time. Drawing on the ideational functions of systemic functional linguistic theory, the experiences exchanged in educators’ language were categorized into the process of doing-&-happening (material), sensing (mental), and being-&-having (relationship). Totally, 2222 language messages produced by the six educators were analyzed and findings reveal the significant variations among the cases. Whilst the process of doing-&-happening predominating the type of the educators’ language in general, some educators displayed much more balanced pattern of the language types than the others. The educator who generated more language messages seemed to be more likely to have a higher portion of messages with the function of sensing and being-&-having. The educational implications of the different educators’ language relating infants’ language learning are discussed.
... Mealtime talk has attracted substantial research attention due to its pedagogical functions embedded in daily life. The research addresses this issue through the analysis of adults' language use in their interactions with children in both school and home contexts (Bouchard et al., 2010;Busch, 2012Busch, , 2017Degotardi, Torr, & Nguyen, 2016;Dickionson & Tabors, 2001). Extended genres such as narrative and explanatory talk relating to decontextualized information is frequently addressed because this type of language is viewed as a significant predictor of children's future language and literacy abilities (Demir, Rowe, Heller, Godin-Meadow, & Levine, 2015;Nelson, Aksu-Ko ‡, Johnson, & Aksu-Koc, 2014;Rowe, 2013). ...
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 may impact the quality of mealtime talk. Drawing on systemic functional linguistic theory, the parents’ language was analysed in terms of interpersonal functions and cohesive patterns. The findings show distinctive differences among the families. The parents sitting with children for meals generated a higher quality of language that contained informational functions, expanded in various cohesive patterns, than the families where parents were positioned separately from children or where fathers were absent from dinner. This study indicates the diversity of Chinese children’s language experiences at home. Lifestyles and meal routines could be a mediator affecting the nature of mealtime talk.
Bu araştırmada, 4-6 yaşlarındaki çocuklar ve ebeveynlerinin yemek sırasındaki etkileşimlerinin derinlemesine incelenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu kapsamda ebeveynlerin çocuklarıyla yemek sırasındaki etkileşimleri, ifadelerin türü ve içeriği, ebeveynlerin etkileşimlere dair görüşleri ve çocukların yemek sırasında teknolojik aletlerle etkileşim kurma durumu incelenmiştir. Nitel durum çalışması desenindeki araştırmanın çalışma grubunu kolay ulaşılabilir durum örneklemesiyle ulaşılan 17 çocuk ve ebeveynleri oluşturmuştur. Gözlem ve yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmelerle toplanan verilerin analizinde içerik analizi tekniğine başvurulmuştur. Bulgular (1) Akşam yemeklerine genel bakış ve (2) Yemek sohbetleri olarak adlandırılan iki temada sunulmuştur. Sonuç olarak; ailelerin genellikle birlikte yemek yedikleri ancak yemekteki etkileşimlerinin sınırlı olduğu saptanmıştır. Ebeveynlerin genellikle çocuklarına emir bildiren ifadeler yönelterek yemeğini bitirmeye yönlendirdiği; çocukların ise yemek dışındaki konulara da yoğunlaşarak sohbet etme eğiliminde oldukları görülmüştür. Genel etkileşimler sınırlı olmasına rağmen yemek sırasında öğrenme fırsatlarının yakalandığı da dikkat çekmiştir. Son olarak teknolojik aletlerle kurulan etkileşimin hem doğrudan hem de arka planda gerçekleşebildiği ve az sayıda çocuğun ekrana maruz kaldığı sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.
This study examined the distribution of language expansion in parent–child (preschool aged) mealtime conversations in 30 Chinese middle-class families. The conversations were categorised into four types: contextualised & conflicted, contextualised & non-conflicted, decontextualised & conflicted, and decontextualised & non-conflicted. The language expansions were analysed using the systemic functional linguistic theory related to cohesive patterns in language expansion: elaborations, extensions, and enhancements. While the parents dominated the conversations generally, the children were active contributors, initiating over one-quarter of the conversations. Initiation had an impact on the distribution of the conversational types: the proportions of contextualised & non-conflicted conversations was significantly higher in child-initiated conversations. The contextualised & conflicted conversations accounted for a higher proportion in parent-initiated conversations. It was the conversational type rather than initiation, which had an effect on the distribution of language expansion patterns. The least occurring decontextualised & conflicted conversations generated the most extensions. The frequently appeared contextualised & non-conflicted conversations, however, produced the fewest expanded messages. The implications from the findings for promoting high-quality mealtime conversations conducive to children’s language learning are discussed.
This article reports a study that explored young children’s digital literacy in the home. The aim of the study was to identify the range of digital literacy practices in which children are engaged in the home and to explore how these are embedded into family life and involve family members. Four children, two girls and two boys aged between 2 and 4 years, were the focus for study. Parents were co-researchers in the study in that they made written observations on children’s activities and captured practices using a digital camera and a digital camcorder over the period of 1 month. They took part in a series of interviews during the study in which they reflected on this data and were asked about related practices. Findings suggest that children were immersed in a range of multimedia, multimodal practices which involved extensive engagement with other family members who scaffolded their learning and delighted in the children’s technological capabilities. The article suggests that, in the light of socio-cultural developments in the new media age, a change in focus from ‘family literacy’ to ‘family digital literacy’ is required.
Research has established young children's increasing use of computers and other new technologies in the home. Yet, teaching about digital texts and digital practices most often appears as an addition to early literacy instruction in classrooms where "business-as-usual" maintains an emphasis on print and print-based texts. This article examines two young children's literacy practices in the home during their searches for information about lizards using Google, Wikipedia and a reference book about reptiles. Conversation analysis of the young children's social interaction establishes how interaction resources produced socially recognisable actions, how social activity mutually accomplished knowledge about lizards, searches, images and print, and how children shifted seamlessly between various technologies and texts. It is concluded that the children's activities constitute the kinds of digital literacy practices that might inform, reform, or transform, the teaching of English in the early years of schooling.
Talk in interaction is the prevailing form of instructional activity. To understand and improve second language literacy instruction, an appreciation of the interactional practices in which reading and writing are embedded is necessary. In this article I examine one aspect of these practices: speaker turn design. I focus on the uses of incomplete turn‐constructional units in structuring subsequent participation. First, I describe several ways teachers design their turns at talk and show how these furnish differing opportunities for subsequent participation by students. Next, I show how the task of producing written answers as complete stand‐alone sentences can be carried out as an utterance‐completion task in which turn design plays a key organizing part. Finally, I show how this form of sequential organization can be used as an analytic resource in diagnosing a problem one group of students encounters in writing the answer to a story question.
This article examines the ensemble of conversational practices a particular family makes use of to cultivate active and joyful engagement in imaginative inquiry about the world, during mundane, largely unstructured activity. Parents provide opportunities for children to query new words, idioms, and concepts, and invite them to do so, though they do not impose explanations on children. Explanations are ‘recipient-designed’ in terms of age appropriateness, and may involve dramatic animations through use of the current scene as a local metric. Unpacking meanings of words and concepts can involve the playful exploration of possible rather than literal meanings as well. Participants choose to hear (and restructure) words in particular ways so that they can be seized as opportunities for launching play on sound structure. Involvement in the talk of the moment entails practices such as collaborative production of utterances, format tying, and sound play.
An understanding of “Okay” usages in conversation requires analytic considerations extending beyond free-standing and non-continuative deployments. Relying on previous findings on how recipients and current speakers organize such activities as phone openings and closings, the present analysis addresses a wider variety of interactional environments in establishing certain predominant and thus fundamental features. Those addressed herein include how recipients and current speakers rely on “Okay” pivotally, at or near transition/opportunity spaces: Decidedly in response to prior talk, yet also in transitionally relevant (‘state of readiness’) ways via shifts/ movements to next-positioned matters. Though recipients or current speakers may (in next turn) treat prior “Okay” usages as non-continuative, and/or move to sequentially delete the actions “Okay” was taken to be projecting (i.e., ‘Okay + [fuller turn]’), just what participants appear to be prefacing or setting-up via “Okay” is recurrently (and eventually) apparent.
In responses to English questions, prefacing with the particle oh indicates that, from the viewpoint of the answerer, a question is problematic in terms of its relevance, presuppositions, or context. In addition, oh-prefacing is used to foreshadow reluctance to advance the conversational topic invoked by a question; it may also be part of a “trouble-premonitory” response to various types of How are you inquiries in conversational openings and elsewhere. (Conversation analysis, English, utterance design, particles.)
Scholars have long understood that linkages between the identities of
actors and the design of their actions in interaction constitute one of
the central mechanisms by which social patterns are produced. Although a
range of empirical approaches has successfully grounded claims regarding
the significance of various forms or types of identity (gender, sex, race,
ethnicity, class, familial status, etc.) in almost every form of social
organization, these analyses have mostly focused on aggregated
populations, aggregated interactions, or historical periods that have been
(in different ways) abstracted from the particulars of singular episodes
of interaction. By contrast, establishing the mechanisms by which a
specific identity is made relevant and consequential in any particular
episode of interaction has remained much more elusive. This article
develops a range of general analytic resources for explicating how
participants in an interaction can make relevant and consequential
specific identities in particular courses of action. It then illustrates
the use of these analytic resources by examining a phone call between two
friends, one of whom relevantly embodies “grandparent” as an
identity. The conclusion offers observations prompted by this analysis
regarding basic contingencies that characterize self-other relationships,
and the role of generic grammatical resources in establishing specific
identities and intimate relationships.
Grandparents play a significant role in childcare and one activity that frequently occurs within this context is story-reading. However, relatively little attention has been given to the potential part that grandparents can play in terms of language and literacy development of young children.This article reports on work investigating the interlingual and intercultural exchanges occurring in a home setting in East London. In particular, it focuses on how the traditional heritage pattern of story and rhyme reading by a grandmother of Bengali origin is fused with practices experienced by her six-year old grandchild.The data reveal not only the multiple worlds inhabited by the grandchild during story-reading but also the syncretism of these worlds on a number of levels.This article contributes to the small but growing body of investigation into the reading styles occurring within families from different cultural backgrounds.
Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.
Local Literacies is a unique study of everyday reading and writing. By concentrating on a selection of people in a particular community in Britain, the authors analyze how they use literacy in their day-to-day lives.This exploration provides a description of literacy at one point in time, and also reveals the nature and significance of communication to people, households and communities.Local Literacies, the first in-depth study of literacy, includes: * appendices of raw data * notes for teachers and students on how to use the book * guidance for carrying out individual researchLocal Literacies is both a theoretical work, and a practical book. It provides stimulating and informative reading for anyone interested in the nature of literacy today, particularly students, teachers and researchers.
This article explores three innovative family literacy programs and employs a multi-categorical framework to analyse the theoretical orientation, goals, pedagogy, target group, personnel, resources used, partnerships and the literacy practices in the programs. The programs were Lap-Sit a birth to three-year-old outreach program from a public library, a Dads’ program in a children’s centre for parents of three- to five-year-olds and a Parent as Partners program in a school. The family literacy programs were developed in a two-year action research project involving nine teachers, community workers and university researchers employing collaborative action research methodology. The family literacy programs were designed for parents and carers to support children’s early literacy development, and to reconnect parents with reading, learning and schools in positive ways around their young children’s literacy experiences. The article highlights importance of the responsiveness of family literacy programs to local contexts, active learning pedagogies and importance of playfulness when developing home-school connections.
Fluent reading is best conceived as rational action, rather than solely as cognitive processes. Information processing theories focus only on two conditions of rational reading: the nature and the medium of cognitive processing. There are three cultural conditions of rational reading: the materials read, the purposes for reading, and the circumstances of reading. Consideration of the origins of writing and the organization of literacy activities allows me to construct and elaborate a continuum of kinds of writing (documents and texts). At one pole is "reflective writing," which consists of formatted signs on a surface, i. e., a document, the reading of which facilitates judgment about, or engenders a response to, some state of affairs. Most reading theorists presume that virtually all reading is of this kind. Newspapers, magazines, novels, nonfiction books, and journals are examples of reflective writing. At the other pole is "enabling writing," which consists of a document whose text enables the accomplishment of some action beyond the acts of reading. It must be possible to use enabling texts for transtextual purposes. Forms of all sorts, schedules, contracts, lists, and menus, fall into the category of enabling writing. Acts of reading enabling documents require attention because it is these acts that insert us into the bureaucratic structures of society, allowing the administration of goods and services and the control of persons and property, i. e., the reproduction of social order.
In the context of parent–child interaction we examine the syntactic, prosodic and embodied shape of directive response sequences used to launch, choreograph, monitor, and stall the ongoing progress of a routine communicative project (Linell, 1998) occurring across temporal and spatial dimensions. We explore directive/response usage in the goal-oriented routine activity (Weisner, 1998) of getting children ready for bed, a temporally anchored project that involves the movement of bodies through social space and transitions from one activity to another (Cekaite, 2010; M.H. Goodwin, 2006a and Goodwin, 2006b). Dialogic and embodied characteristics of social action and accountability are demonstrated (1) through alternative grammatical formats for directives (declaratives, imperatives, interrogatives (formatted as noun phrases produced with rising intonation)) (2) as well as through the systematic ways in which participants overlay action within directive sequences with alternative forms of affect, touch, and mobility.
This article presents analysis of question–answer sequences during problem inquiry between a teacher and two children in an early childhood crèche in New Zealand. Conversation analysis is used to reveal which questions the teacher asks, how children answer the questions, and the teacher’s responses to the child’s answers. Although adults’ ‘effective’ questions were identified and promoted in the REPEY study much less attention has been given to how adults respond to children’s answers. It is imperative to investigate the sequences of talk which follow a question in order to establish how teaching and learning is co-constructed in context, one utterance at a time and as a joint project between teacher and child. The findings suggest that task problems and emotional problems are treated in a similar way during problem inquiry, highlighting the complexity of interactions when teachers are providing both emotional care and educational support for young children.
Research confirms that young children engage in digital literacy practices in the home. While there is an emerging body of work that documents the diversity of these practices, there is little research that examines their acquisition in situ. This article uses conversation analysis to describe and explicate the social accomplishment of a number of activities that led to and constituted a young child’s Google search to find information about a lizard. Discussion of the child’s activities considers the local and situated use of technology, including how the child and adult jointly obtained the information needed by the child to read and write texts related to the search. The article establishes ways that social interaction contributes to young children’s acquisition and use of digital literacy practices, including when learning about print and about techology itself.
This article examines children’s meaning making in the home, drawing on an 18-month long ethnographic study of three low income families of 5–8 year-old boys. It is argued that children’s meaning making in the home is a complex activity shaped by family structure and family narratives.There needs to be a more rigorous theoretical framework in which to set children’s communicative practices, visual, textual and artefactual, in the home; one that both attends to the way the home is structured and the cultural resources the home draws upon. In order to make this argument material is presented from the three homes, including the words of the children’s parents. In particular, the article looks at the concept of ‘mess’ in the home and how this impacts on children’s text making.While much of children’s text making may appear ephemeral it is suggested that it deserves serious theoretical attention in order to begin to construct home-based pedagogical structures that support and credit the ever changing landscape of communication that is the home.
In this article, we analyze aspects of the complex literacy lives of three Spanish dominant, mainland Puerto Rican kindergartners who were beginning readers at the time of the study. We investigate literacy as a social and cultural practice in the children’s bilingual classroom, homes, and churches, describing the people who supported their developing literacy, their beliefs about literacy, and the characteristics of literacy events that the children coconstructed with them. Our analysis is based on data collected with ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews, and audio recording. At home and in church, the children’s developing literacy was supported by a network of people, many of whom believed that reading was about combining sounds into words and that meaning was inherent in text. Literacy events were often social, collaborative interactions as the families created a syncretic literacy by drawing on the multiple resources in their lives, including their religion, their culture, and their knowledge of two languages as well as their experiences in school. Overall, we found both similarities anddifferences between literacy in school and literacy in the children’s homes and community rather than the matches ormismatches described in the literature.
Volume I contains the lectures of Fall 1964 through Fall 1967, in which Sacks explores a great variety of topics, from suicide to children's games to Medieval Hell as a nemonic device to pronouns and paradoxes. But two key issues emerge: rules of conversational sequencing - central to the articulation of interaction, and membership categorization devices - central to the social organization of knowledge. This volume culminates in the extensive and formal explication of turn-taking which Sacks delivered in Fall, 1967. Volume II contains the lectures of Spring 1968 through Spring 1972. Again he touches on a wide range of subjects, such as the poetics of ordinary talk, the integrative function of public tragedy, and pauses in spelling out a word. He develops a major new theme: storytelling in converstion, with an attendant focus on topic. His investigation of conversational sequencing continues, and this volume culminates in the elegant dissertation on adjacency pairs which Sacks delivered in Spring, 1972. © 1992, 1995 by The Estate of Harvey Sacks. All rights reserved.
Beginning with a consideration of some commonsense and professional conceptions of what a formal situation might comprise, this paper goes on to ask the question: where along a linear array which has its poles in exemplars of formal and informal speech-exchange systems, can classroom talk be placed? Its answer is given in part in the form of rules for the taking of turns in classrooms, these being modifications of those, already established in the literature, for natural conversation. These rules allow for and require that formal classroom situations be constructed so as to involve differential participation rights for parties to the talk depending on their membership of the social identity-class ‘student/teacher’. The analyses which follow examine some of the applications and violations of these rules found in audio and video recordings of naturally occurring classroom talk (and transcripts thereof) for their orderliness as orientations to these rules. It is argued that the rules provide a systematic basis for the ‘feelings’ of ‘formality’ that researchers and participants have of such situations and that a decision as to the ‘formality’ or otherwise of a social situation can be predicated on the degree of pre-allocation involved in the organization of turns at talk in the situation. (Configuration and distance in interaction, conversational analysis, turn-taking systems, classroom language, sociology of education; British and Australian English).
The purpose of this article is to examine developments in the area of family literacy over the last decade. Acknowledging the bifurcation that has occurred in the field of family literacy, as well as changing conceptions of literacy and of families, we review naturalistic studies of literacy embedded and enacted in communities and families across different sociocultural context and also what we see as the evolving nature of family literacy programs. We conclude with an acknowledgement of some of the ongoing concerns, issues, and tensions in the field and a call for sensitivity on the part of all of us involved in family literacy research and programs.
This conversation-analytic study examines how students in peer groups interact and organize their own literacy learning activity to accomplish written question-answering tasks based on their reading of a story. Written question-answering tasks, especially those designed for literacy learning, require students to answer questions as an academic task—to “do answering.” A turn-by-turn analysis of the students’ talk-in-interaction shows that for the students examined in this study, “doing answering” involves two sub-activities. One sub-activity, question-answering, is to produce a substantive answer to the question as one would do in ordinary conversation. Then to fulfill the requirements of the written task, a second sub-activity, answer-framing, involves moving the answer from its conversationally-framed grammar to a written grammatical frame. The findings reveal the various methods or patterned ways in which the question-answering and answer-framing sub-activities are accomplished through the students’ peer group talk-in-interaction.
This study investigates the organization of conversational interaction
via push-to-talk mobile radios. Operating like long-range walkie-talkies,
the mobile radios mediate a remote state of incipient talk; at the push of
a button, speakers can initiate, engage, disengage, and reengage
turn-by-turn talk. Eight friends used the mobile radios for one week; 50
of their conversational exchanges were analyzed using conversation
analytic methods. The findings describe the contour of their
conversational exchanges: how turn-by-turn talk is engaged, sustained, and
disengaged. Similar to a continuing state of incipient talk in copresence,
opening and closing sequences are rare. Instead, speakers engage
turn-by-turn talk by immediately launching the purpose of the call.
Speakers disengage turn-by-turn talk by orienting to the relevance of a
lapse at sequence completion. Once engaged, the mobile radio system
imposes silence between speakers' turns at talk, giving them a
resource for managing a remote conversation amid ongoing copresent
activities. a
This paper explores issues arising from the long-standing theoretical and empirical attention to reading as a specifiable set of psychological processes, and the consequences of this attention for parents’ and educators’ deliberations and practices. The argument is developed that these theorisations and research projects have both driven and been driven by the social and interactional configurations that teaching has traditionally been taken to entail. It then offers a critique of available theories and research findings from the perspective of ethnomethodology, along with a brief description of an ethnomethodological approach to reading as a co-ordinated set of practical social activities. The paper proceeds to exemplify what an ethnomethodological approach could look like, through the examination of transcripts of reading sessions. The paper concludes that theories of reading need to deal fundamentally with the practices that learners, teachers and parents display as they engage in and ‘bring off’ as reading sessions, as phenomena to be explained in their own right, rather than as representations of available theories.
This article aims at taking part in the development of conversation analysis approaches to studying learning in interaction. In focus is the learning of a small group of children doing child-initiated reading. We examine how a topic – the size of the blue whale – is constituted and developed over time in interaction, and how this development can be understood as learning. The analysis is based on a video recording of three 7-year-old children reading a picture book together, where the children explicitly orient to the topic of blue whales. The results of the analysis show that, when content is considered an intrinsic aspect of participation, there are changes over time in the organisation of participation in relation to, in this case, the topic of blue whales. In particular, this concerns how the children relate to the size of the blue whale. Thus, the results show that learning occurs, and how this learning is accomplished. This is made possible through the fine-grained participant perspective-based conversation analysis. The reported work also demonstrates how issues of topic and content can be integrated into micro-analyses of learning.
Over the past three decades numerous studies from the English-speaking world have pointed to the advantages for young children of family involvement in their literacy development. However, their emphasis has always been firmly and almost exclusively upon parentsworking with children in specific waysand often using school-sanctioned materials. This article investigates the role played by young siblings close in age in each others’ literacy development and argues for a unique reciprocity in learning between older and younger child. Thus it steps outside hitherto recognized paradigms of ‘scaffolding’ and ‘collaborative learning’. This reciprocity of learning I refer to as a synergywhereby siblings act as adjuvants, stimulating and fostering each others’ development. Using examples from Bangladeshi and Anglo children living in East London, the article traces ways in which synergy takes place between dyads through play activities in home and community contexts.
Analysing literacy events in classrooms and homes: Coversation-analytic approaches. Everyday literacy practices in and out of schools in low socio-economic urban communities
- J Freiberg
- P Freebody
Young children’s learning in contexts of families and communities
- A Anderson
- J Anderson
Evaluation of the Read4Life community literacy project
- B Harreveld
Word recognition in theory and in classroom practice
- J Heap
Writing as social action. Theory into Practice
- J Heap
Young children’s initiation into family literacy practices in the digital age
- J Marsh
- P Hannon
- M Lewis
- L Rickie