María Luisa Silva

Teacher–Children Interaction and Concept Development in Kindergarten

This article analyzes the interaction between teachers and children in kindergarten classrooms in order to identify and describe the discursive strategies of teachers that retrieve childrens previous expressions to clarify and specify concepts represented in them. Data analyzed include 90 situations of teacher–children exchanges in 7 kindergarten classrooms located in marginal urban neighborhoods in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The analysis followed a qualitative procedure: the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1991). This allowed the authors to identify and describe the various ways in which teachers reconceptualize information offered by the children in ways that allow them to gradually specify, define, and characterize concepts underlying the words they use, albeit with a limited meaning. It also leads children to develop a finer differentiation and integration between concepts. Such development promotes processes of generalization and construction of hierarchical taxonomies.

De las imágenes al texto: focalización y uso de recursos anafóricos en relatos de niños y jóvenes

This study aims to analyze the use of anaphoric expressions for introducing, re-introducing and maintaining referents in children and teenagers Spanish-speaking narrative productions from a picture book. We try to explore whether they are able to produce an autonomous narrative text by the adequate use of correferential mechanisms. Four groups of children, aged 5, 8, 11 and 16, took part in his study. Results showed that all groups performance is similar with regard to the prevailing use of FN to introduce and re-introduce agent in focus and subjects omissions for referential continuity. But in 5 years old children narratives, the use of deictic forms is very frequent, fact that indicats their diffi culty to produce autonomous texts. In the other group’s narratives a signifi cant increment in the control over the linguistic cohesive resources was observed.

APRENDIENDO A ARGUMENTAR: ANÁLISIS DEL USO DE MARCAS ENUNCIATIVAS EN CARTAS INFANTILES

Este articulo estudia el impacto de la intervencion didactica en el empleo de marcas enunciativas en cartas de solicitud, escritas por ninos hablantes de espanol de 3er grado de primaria, de Cordoba, Argentina. Las cartas fueron producidas en el marco de una secuencia didactica, organizada en modulos de ejercicios, que atendio a mejorar ciertas competencias discursivas involucradas en la escritura de este genero. Las actividades planificadas no contemplaron, en ninguna instancia, la ejercitacion sobre marcas enunciativas. El analisis comparo las marcas enunciativas de las producciones iniciales y finales. Los resultados permiten comprender el uso infantil de esas marcas linguisticas como parte del conocimiento procedural que los ninos poseen sobre las relaciones entre a) itemes linguisticos, b) genero textual, c) niveles de adecuacion a la situacion comunicativa y d) variaciones de registro. Asimismo, las dificultades se analizan como indicadores de la incidencia que la situacion de enunciacion tiene en el conjunto de los elementos linguisticos del texto. Finalmente, se discuten las implicancias didacticas del estudio.