Fiona Maine

Collaborative and Dialogic Meaning-Making: How Children Engage and Immerse in the Storyworld of a Mobile Game

This chapter explores primary-aged children’s collaboration as they played a mobile game together on an iPad, examining the nature of their engagement in the diegetic world, or storyworld, of the game. The chapter argues that essentially this is a twofold dialogic interaction as the children collaborated with each other to creatively problem-solve their way through the game, but also collaborated with the game and its characters. The children responded critically and affectively to the scenarios and characters that they encountered and by assuming the goals and motivations of the latter, they were at once immersed and invested in the storyworld and engaged in the strategic play of the game. By playing together on an iPad, they needed to negotiate their collaborative play on a tool that responds to a single touch, thus taking turns physically but making meaning together. This was an additional dimension to their interaction with each other and the game.

Developing reading comprehension with moving image narratives

This paper reports the findings from a small-scale exploratory study that investigated how moving-image narratives might enable children to develop transferable reading comprehension strategies. Using short, animated, narrative films, 28 primary-aged children engaged in a 10-week programme that included the explicit instruction of comprehension strategies in small-group settings. Baseline and final data relating to children’s reading accuracy, rate and comprehension of written texts were gathered using a standardised reading assessment. Findings show that children’s reading comprehension scores showed significant improvement after the programme. Furthermore, reading accuracy scores also improved beyond expected levels even though no decoding of written words had occurred in the programme. While further research is needed, these findings offer a challenge to models of reading that potentially over-simplify the complex relationship between the word recognition and comprehension. More importantly, the findings point at the importance of using alternatives to written texts within the reading curriculum.

‘I wonder if they are going up or down’: children's co-constructive talk across the primary years

This article reports a research project, where two pairs of children were recorded in discussion, first in Year One and then five years later in Year Six. A unique opportunity meant that the children engaged in the same task at the beginning and end of their Primary School education. The research analyses the talk on three levels, considering the language that they use, the way that they manage their talk together, and the broader themes that they bring to their discussion. The findings suggest that their language changes subtly over time, with their earlier discussions more imaginative and fluid.

The bothersome crow people and the silent princess: exploring the orientations of children as they play a digital narrative game

Many thanks to the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) who kindly funded this research through their research grant scheme.

Oracy and Literacy in the Making

This chapter focuses on analysing the development of oral and written communication in Mexican elementary students, in the context of the implementation of an innovative educational programme called ‘Learning Together’ (LT). The programme was designed to enhance oral and written communication in the students, including dialogic interactions, as well as reading comprehension and text production strategies through a variety of collaborative learning activities (Rojas-Drummond, Littleton, Hernandez, & Zuniga, 2010).

Children, literacy and ethnicity: reading identities in the primary school

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