Myrte Gosen

Teachers′ Demonstrations of Epistemic Access in Teacher-Student Interactions in a Digital Setting

This paper is concerned with a Conversation Analytic (CA) study of teachers’ demonstrations of epistemic access to a student’s domain or territory of information in teacher-student interactions in a digital setting. It describes interactional practices analyzed in 12 excerpts with an explicit reference to information about students’ progress provided by the digital system. It will be shown that teachers initiate interactions about already fulfilled assignments that are shown to be problematic. In the opening of the interaction, teachers more or less explicitly refer to the digital programme as an information source and/or to the hitches in student’s progress. In the continuation of the interaction, teacher and student are concerned with a redoing of assignments. In this phase of the interaction, the teacher demonstrates epistemic access to possible causes for students’ mistakes. In all cases, students do not show resistance to teachers’ demonstrations of epistemic access to knowledge and experiences falling into their epistemic domain. The findings confirm teachers’ and students’ orientation to the educational context as being a specialized context where students’ problems are not treated as ‘theirs to know and describe’. The findings in this paper shed light on interactional practices in relation to epistemics, as well as on interactional practices in a digital setting.

Problem-solving during shared reading at kindergarten

This paper reports on a conversation analytic study of problem-solving interactions during shared reading at three kindergartens in the Netherlands. It illustrates how teachers and pupils discuss book characters’ problems that arise in the events in the picture books. A close analysis of the data demonstrates that problem-solving interactions do not only occur when directly asked for by the teacher; more importantly, pupils are found to be oriented to problem-solving without being explicitly invited to do so. Our analyses show that shared reading offers pupils room for hypothesising where teachers and pupils can discuss possible solutions for the problems experienced by the book characters. By using problem-solving to talk and think about problematic book-related events, pupils from 4 to 6 years old practise basic elements of problem-solving that are important from a developmental perspective.

De ontwikkeling van een instrument voor het meten van de voorleeservaring van kleuters.

When children enter school at the age of four, they are expected to differ in their experience with reading-aloud of picture books and stories. Experience with reading-aloud influences their further development. Therefore, insight in the amount of experience with reading-aloud is useful. Until now, there was no measurement instrument available for children in the age range of 4 to 6 years old. This paper describes the development, design and measurement qualities of such an instrument. The reliability of the so-called VLES-K is acceptable and there are a number of positive indications of the validity. However, continuation of development is needed to improve the VLES-K and to keep it up-to-date.