This practical resource is a comprehensive introduction to envisioning and carrying out high-quality teacher research in early childhood settings. The text features original research projects by teachers working with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and primary age children. With special attention given to multicultural and multilingual classrooms, the authors examine forms of children's play, social interaction, and friendships, language and literacy learning, as well as work with parents and families.
This exploration of children's "inquiry" - what it is, how it develops, and how it contributes to children's learning - should help elementary and language teachers to understand, appreciate, and foster children's inquiry in classrooms. In this volume, the author introduces a theoretical framework for understanding children's "inquiry" language, not as linguistic forms (questions), but as communication acts in which the child brings another into the act of sense-making. By examining these "inquiry acts", the author aims to uncover new possibilities for the understanding of how children learn and how tachers can foster their learning in classrooms, class exercises, research findings, classroom episodes, and the author's own reflections.
Comprises papers at the Child Language Seminar held at the University of Durham in March 1996. The seminar focused on social dimension of children's developing language and was attended by delegates from a variety of backgrounds and interests, including teachers, linguists, psychologists, speech therapists and a number of postgraduates. All of the papers are based on empirical research. Each focuses on a particular aspect of the children's developing sociolinguistic strategies and pragmatic competence. The book should be of interest to those interested in children and their language development.
Presents background to the descriptions and discussions of child language that are presented in this issue of the journal on the theme of developing pragmatic competence. This background information, referred to as "intuitive knowledge," serves as a framework for understanding children's development of pragmatic linguistic competence and accompanying sociolinguistic strategies.
Building on her groundbreaking work in "Writing Superheroes, Anne Dyson traces the influence of a wide-ranging set of "textual toys" from children's lives--church and hip-hop songs, rap music, movies, TV, traditional jump-rope rhymes, the words of professional sports announcers and radio deejays--upon school learning and writing. Wonderfully rich portraits of five African American first-graders demonstrate how children's imaginative use of wider cultural symbols enriches their school learning."
