Representations of questioning and answering in children's first school books.

Autor/inn/en	Baker, Carolyn D.; Freebody, Peter
Titel	Representations of questioning and answering in children's first school books.
Quelle	In: Language in society, 15 (1986) 4, S. 451-483 PDF als Volltext Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Beigaben	Tabellen; Literaturangaben S. 482-483
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1469-8013
Schlagwörter	Methode; Grundschule; Konversation; Schulbuch
Abstract	Behavioural Studies in Education University of New England ABSTRACT Children's first school books contain a considerable amount of reported talk among characters in the stories. This is a central aspect of the characteriza- tion of these books as transitional from the conventions of oral language to the conventions of written prose, that is, as introductions to literacy. The nature of the written representation of conversation in such books has not previously been examined. This paper presents a partial analysis of this feature of beginning school readers, focussing on "question-answer se- quences." We show how these representations of talk compare with natu- ralistic research on child-adult interaction at home and in classrooms, and we propose that the model of child-adult talk portrayed in "home" and "school" scenes in the books appears to endorse some of the conventions for participation in instructional talk, and in this respect is implicitly a source of socialization into classroom culture. At the same time, we find that the texts give child speakers far more initiative in conversation than typically obtains in classroom talk, and this is seen also to be a feature of the social constitution of the child in these texts. Thus an image of childhood which combines conversational initiative and conversational competence as a member of the classroom community is conveyed. The paper also points out possible difficulties for child readers in interpreting the talk-on-paper, arising both from textual formats and from the particular version of the child as conversationalist which the books describe (Child-adult conversation, question-answer sequences, first school books, literacy acquisition.
Erfasst von	Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien \| Georg-Eckert-Institut (GEI), Braunschweig
Update	2020/3