Cohrssen2014

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Cohrssen2014
BibType ARTICLE
Key Cohrssen2014
Author(s) Caroline Cohrssen, Amelia Church, Collette Taylor
Title Purposeful pauses: teacher talk during early childhood mathematics activities
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Teacher, Silence, Classroom, Early Childhood, intentional teaching
Publisher
Year 2014
Language English
City
Month
Journal International Journal of Early Years Education
Volume 22
Number 2
Pages 169–183
URL Link
DOI 10.1080/09669760.2014.900476
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This paper describes how early childhood teachers' incorporation of pauses raises the quality of talk-in-interaction during play-based mathematics activities. Responses of both children and teachers are shown to be more contingent and expansive when conversations include protracted pauses than during interactions in which pauses are largely absent. Pauses provided children with opportunities to initiate topics and facilitated more equitable access to discourse moves for children. By pausing before responding to a child's conversational gambit, teachers gained opportunities to assess children's demonstrated numeracy-related skills and understanding, and could thus provide authentic, individualised scaffolding. Pauses were not necessarily silent: a pause in an interaction with one child could be used strategically to model the learning interaction with a second child before returning to the first child in order to continue the discourse sequence.

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