Nigel Hall

Interactive Writing with Young Children

oung children rarely have a voice in their own education. Y Beginning with the legal stipulation that children attend school, the education process controls and determines what children can say, do, and write. Furthermore, the mechanism for most teaching is the exercisesomething that is constructed, set, and marked by teachers. For many of the world’s children, education is a seemingly endless set of such exercises. Consequently, the life of a student is all about doing exercises to learn skills, rather than exercising those skills to do things in the world. It should be possible for children’s voices to be heard, right from the start, not only through what they say, but also through what they write. The problem is finding a way to allow children the space and time to really use their own words, and then getting teachers to listen to them. This article explores one type of writing-interactive writing-that has proved spectacularly successful in achieving this goal.

'Hiya, Mum!' An Analysis of Pretence Telephone Play in a Nursery Setting

Childrens knowledge of telephone discourse has been little researched, despite the inherent challenge of this mode of communication. Previous research has studied childrens performance in artificial environments with children talking to adults, and has focussed upon childrens deficiencies in telephone dialogues. In this paper we argue for the importance of pretence play in the development of discourse skills and present data gathered from spontaneous toy telephone talk in a themed pretence play setting. Evidence demonstrates sociolinguistic competencies displayed appropriately and supports Vygotskys suggestion that pretence play is an important arena for learning within aspirational role realizations.

The Development of Young Children as Authors

Writing is a very complex process; it involves the orchestration of a range of elements — the physical creation of the text, organisation of the sound/symbol correspondences, control over linguistic structure — all of which are directed to the ultimate purpose of writing, the composition of a meaningful and purposeful text for a communicative situation. People do not learn to write in order to spell, handwrite or punctuate; while important, these are tools for the effective construction and presentation of written language and as such are areas dealt with in other reviews in this volume. People write because they have messages to send, ideas to record, and thoughts to clarify. These texts need to be composed, and it is the process of composition that in this review is called authorship. This review concentrates on how young children learn, and are taught, to compose meaningful texts; in other words how young children become authors.