Janet Maybin

Story voices: the use of reported speech in 10-12 year olds' spontaneous narratives

Five spontaneous narratives from 10 12-year-olds conversations are analysed to show how they contribute to the children s ongoing construction of knowledge and identity. A Labovian analysis of the evaluative function of narrative is supplemented with ethnographic research and Bakhtin and Volosinov s work, to demonstrate more dynamic and complex processes in children s talk. It is argued that the children s use of reported speech drives both the referential and the evaluative functions of their narratives. The children s reproduction and framing of other people s and their own voices enables them to explore the different perspectives of characters within the story, and also to comment on and evaluate these perspectives. The stories are orientated towards listeners and previous conversational turns, and they also set up intertextual connections with other stories and other conversations, to create additional connotations and layers of meaning. Children s narratives revisit particular themes and preoccupatio...

Towards a sociocultural understanding of children's voice

While ‘voice’ is frequently invoked in discussions of pupils’ agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic dynamics of childrens voices and the sociocultural features shaping their emergence. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research involving recent recordings of 10- and 11-year-old childrens spoken language experience across the school day, this paper examines how pupils’ voices are configured within institutional interactional contexts which render particular kinds of voice more or less hearable and convey different kinds of value. Analysis shows how children appropriate and reproduce the authoritative voices of education, popular culture and parents in the course of their induction into social practices. At the same time, they also express varying degrees of commitment to these voices and orchestrate their own and other peoples voices within accounts and anecdotes, making voice appropriation an uneven, accumulative process shot through with the dynamics of personal and peer-group experience. The examination of childrens dialogue from different contexts across the school day highlights the situated semiotics of voice and the heteroglossic development of childrens speaking consciousness.

Framing and evaluation in ten- to twelve-year-old school children's use of repeated, appropriated, and reported speech in relation to their induction into educational procedures and practices

Using recorded data from an ethnographic study of ten- to twelve-year-old school childrens informal language practices, this article discusses how the use of repeated, appropriated, and reported speech contributes to their entry into the institutional practices of schooling. In teacher-pupil dialogue, reproduced voices are used to invoke, confirm. and transform interpretative frameworks which underpin, and sometimes undermine, the dialogic induction of pupils into classroom roles, procedures. and discourses. In pupil-pupil dialogues, appropriated and reported speech is used to invoke individuals, relationships, and social events, and to evaluate these in relation to the speakers current conversational purposes. Appropriated and reported voices are grammatically and paralinguistically framed to express varying degrees of mitigation and commitment, and children shift between reported and reporting frames to exploit ambiguity and explore different evaluative perspectives. Through their references to school procedures, teacher behavior, and institutional values, childrens immediate conversational goals articulate with broader institutional practices, and thus negotiations of knowledge and identity in informal talk also mediate childrens induction into schooling. The heteroglossic processes explored in this article raise questions about the notion of individual voice, individual agency, and the boundaries between the voice of the self and the voice of the other.

Textual trajectories: Theoretical roots and institutional consequences

Abstract This article maps out and reviews work on textual trajectories and related concepts from sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse and literacy studies. The first part of the article argues that work on entextualization and recontextualization, and their incorporation in recent research on textual chains or trajectories, contributes to a new language of description which conceptualizes texts in dynamic terms while still maintaining a sense of their coherence and durability. The article traces how conceptions of dialogicality and recontextualization have been used to develop transcontextual approaches to analysis which have highlighted the ideological work of textual movement and resemiotization. It argues that envisaging linked series of entextualizations and recontextualizations as institutionally consequential trajectories not only illuminates micro-level practices, but also indicates their dynamic interconnection with macro-level institutional processes and ideologies. In this sense, the concept of textual trajectories contributes to meso-level theorizing of the interrelationship of language with social life. Examples of research from institutional contexts are reviewed to examine how textual trajectories are used to produce specialized knowledge, the instantiation of institutional procedures and the articulation of participant positionings and identities.

The contribution of children's literature studies

Children’s Literature Studies is currently thriving, established as a subject in its own right which is taught in universities around the world. Variously offered as part of programmes in English, Education or Library Studies, it may also include work on publishing and creative writing for children, and illustration. As an academic subject in higher education, however, it emerged relatively recently in the UK and the US in the mid-twentieth century, when literary studies were opened up to social theory and cultural studies. At this point, children’s literature and other ‘popular’ forms became serious objects for academic research and teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic, the study of children’s literature was first incorporated as a strand within courses for teachers and librarians, and it has always maintained strong links with pedagogy. However, interest in children’s books and in children’s literature study has hugely increased over the last twenty years and the subject is now well established and thriving at both undergraduate and postgraduate level with its own encyclopaedias, scholarly journals, academic conferences and funded centres of research excellence.

Introduction: the dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice

This Special Issue has two main aims. Firstly, it contributes to building a theoretical framework – drawing on relevant theoretical and empirical insights from sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse and literacy studies – to address the propensity of texts to be transferred, transposed and transformed by a wide range of text makers and users (e.g. designers, disseminators, users, interpreters) across different contexts, with different resultant meanings, significance and effects. This framework problematizes the ways in which texts – understood as spoken, written and multimodal semiotic artifacts and phenomena – have been analyzed as discrete and boundaried units fixed in time and place. Secondly, it illustrates what a dynamic approach to textual analysis looks like, by offering detailed empirical tracking of text production and uptake in a number of professional and workplace domains – policing, social work, journalism, medical surgery, social housing. Taken together, the papers contribute to and extend the recent shift away from researching language-in-place to researching and conceptualizing the projection of language and text across different spatiotemporal contexts (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). We use the term “textual trajectories” in the title of the Special Issue to capture the growing theoretical and empirical impetus towards dynamic approaches to text analysis. In this issue we use “text” to mean spoken, written and multimodal semiotic artifacts and phenomena and “textual trajectories” as an overarching category to signal a cluster of related terms currently in use to capture the changes, movements and directionalities of texts – and relationships between these – across social space and time. This cluster includes terms such as trajectories (Blommaert 2005), text histories (Lillis and Curry 2010), genre chains (Fairclough 2003 [1995]), genre suites (Berkenkotter and Hanganu-Bresch 2011), genre sets (Devitt 2004), text chains (Fraenkel 2001; Linell 1998) and meaning-making trajectories (Kell 2009), all of which are used to empirically track and theorize the ways in which texts instantiate and

BAAL/CUP Seminars 2013 / Text Trajectories Developing dynamic approaches to textual analysis

This seminar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Language and Education Studies, The Open University. The seminar was coordinated by Janet Maybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, including four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium and South Africa.

A window on children's lives? The process and problematics of representing children in audio visual case study

This article is concerned with the challenge of representing children in audio-visual material commissioned by The Open University in the UK to support an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on childhood. The article explores the process of filming and representing childrens lives audio-visually and the ways in which these processes contribute to an understanding of childhood as an unstable conceptual category. Our exploration of these themes rests upon a critical analysis of the production process that includes reflections on our own role as academics, interviews with the directors responsible for the filming, and textual analysis of the audio-visual material itself. Our focus throughout is upon the pedagogic project of producing audio-visual material for distance learners. We discuss the ways in which processes of representation may enhance our understanding of childhood as a defining trope that is both constructed and lived. Our analysis suggests that processes of representation highlight the fragility of childhood as a conceptual category in which boundaries between adulthood and childhood remain fluid, geographically diverse, and contextually contingent.

Airhostess legs and jealous husbands: explorations of gender and heterosexuality in 10-11 year-olds’ conversations

In this chapter I examine the ways in which ten and eleven year-old children use talk to explore and experiment with changing conceptions of gender and sexuality as they move through the transition between what is commonly seen in Anglo-American culture as a sexually innocent childhood and a publicly sexual adolescence. While the children are inevitably constrained by language and other social practices, I see them as making choices, taking up positions within conversations and constructing individually inflected representations of social experience within their talk. Thus they play an active, inquiring role in their own socialisation.