Difference between revisions of "Baker-Freebody1986"

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Baker-Freebody1986
BibType ARTICLE
Key Baker-Freebody1986
Author(s) Carolyn D. Baker, Peter Freebody
Title Representations of Questioning and Answering in Children's First School Books
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Child-adult conversation, question-answer sequences, first school books, literacy acquisition
Publisher
Year 1986
Language
City
Month
Journal Language in Society
Volume 15
Number 4
Pages 451-483
URL
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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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.

Notes