Rebecca Kantor

The construction of schooled discourse repertoires: An interactional sociolinguistic perspective on learning to talk in preschool

Abstract Analysis of the discourse demands across the school year within a recurrent event, “Circle Time,” is presented to show how 3- and 4-year-old students learned to be conversationally appropriate partners within a group setting, how the teachers interactional patterns shifted as students learned to participate in socially and academically appropriate ways within this event, and how participation in the subevents of Circle Time (Milling, Transition, Singing, Talking, and Dismissal) placed differing social and communicative demands on both teacher and students. The overtime analysis of one Circle Time subevent, Talking, is presented to illustrate how 3- and 4-year-old students, in their first school experience, construct with their teachers a schooled discourse repertoire for participating in large group discussions, and how the discourse demands on the teacher shifted across time in the Talking subevent as well as across all subevents.

Becoming a person in the preschool: creating integrated gender, school culture, and peer culture positionings

This article explores social processes related to the social competence of children evident in preschools and to researchers’ collaborative efforts to understand it. Drawing examples from the authors’ respective programs of research in the United States and Australia, we demonstrate how preschool children struggle to construct their full social membership in classroom discourse to achieve the often simultaneous accomplishment of oneself as a student, peer, and gendered person. With regard to research processes, we demonstrate how researchers with different but compatible theoretical#shresearch perspectives may widen their interpretive lenses through collaborative dialogue, the yield being a more multifaceted vision of young childrens social competence.

Play and the Peer Culture: Play Styles and Object Use

Abstract In this paper, childrens play and friendship in relation to the peer culture was examined from, an ethnographic perspective. Because the majority of interactions in the preschool take place during play, a unique view of the classroom may be obtained by examining the social dynamics of play in the peer culture. This view is based on the assumption that classroom life is at least partially constructed and negotiated through the peer culture. Nineteen children ages three to five, enrolled in a university preschool, were observed and data were collected through extensive videotaping and daily field notes taken by participant observers. Analysis of the data for the first five weeks of school consisted of identifying patterns of object use and types of play styles through the construction of a domain analysis (Spradley, 1980). The findings suggest that, first, the peer culture is not a unitary whole but rather a differentiated social system comprised of various groups and different types of players. S...

First the Look and Then the Sound: Creating Conversations at Circle Time.

Abstract Becoming a student means learning to interpret and construct the multiple demands for interaction in distinctive classroom events. For an increasing number of children, the preschool provides the setting for the first encounter with these complex and dynamic classroom communicative environments. This article presents an interactional analysis of preschool circle time from an ethnographic perspective. The social participation structure for conducting these events is uncovered using Greens conversational mapping system. Findings suggest that the rules and guidelines, expectations, and roles within the event change over time. The focus of learning within the event, evident in social action rules ( Erickson, 1982 , Philips, 1972 ), shifts from the formation of the circle itself to actual collaborative conversation. This shift is interpreted in terms of the childrens developing competencies for participating in group conversation. In a final section, a potential peer culture dimension to this event is proposed.

Becoming Students and Becoming Ethnographers in a Preschool

Abstract Preschool poses unique schooling demands which challenge young children to become young students. This distinctive socialization process is the research problem addressed in an ethnography of a preschool classroom. The introduction details practical considerations which suggest the distinctiveness and importance of early education and of childrens socialization to it. The first major section presents an integration of relevant socialization theories and a discussion of ethnography as a research perspective. In the next section, the ethnographic research procedures used in the study are explained generally. In a final section, a conceptualization of this preschool classroom as a dynamic configuration of school culture and peer culture (Corsaro, 1985) is proposed, serving as hypothesis and heuristic tool for ongoing research.

Being kitties in a preschool classroom: maintaining group harmony and acting proper in a female peer-culture play routine

This study examines how young girls construct emotional themes in their peer-culture play routines and rituals in the daily life of a preschool classroom. This research is part of a larger eight-month ethnographic study of one preschool classroom. The data selected and analysed in this article are taken from a focused six-week theoretical sampling of five female preschool childrens play. Micro-level analysis of the data (field notes, videotaping, video revisiting and interviews with teachers and students) revealed how childrens peer-culture and emotional themes were socially constructed through a specific play narrative that centred on five females being ‘kitties’. A closer look at one group member named Mary uncovered emotional themes that centred on acting proper and group harmony. Females used their peer-culture and emotional themes to hold group members accountable, resolve conflict and appropriate societys emotional display rules. These data reveal the social–emotional ‘work’ of children and the role of peers in childhood socialisation.

Cohesion in spoken and written dialogue: An investigation of cultural and textual constraints

Interactions of language, culture, minority group membership, and literacy instruction in schools have evidently spelled success for some children but not for others. The purpose of this study was to explore an area of intersection among language use, ethnolinguistic group membership, and literacy learning materials to provide additional insight into the higher rates of literacy problems in urban black and Appalachian cultures. Specifically, it investigated how the informal discourse modes, exemplified by mother-child dialogue in a childs home environment, compared and contrasted with more formal discourse modes, exemplified by dialogue among characters in basal reader stories and in childrens storybooks. Cohesion was used as the primary form of analysis. Findings, based on a determination of tie types as well as identity and similarity chains, indicated that the dialogue of the mothers and children across the three ethnolinguistic groups was more similar than different, and in turn, was similar to the dialogue among characters in childrens storybooks. None of these resembled the cohesion patterns found in the dialogue of the basal reader stories, which were found to be unique to that genre.

Mixed-age grouping in infant/toddler child care: Enhancing developmental processes

This article discusses the benefits of mixed-age grouping in infant/toddler child care programs. Single-age grouping limits the resources available in the room and disrupts developmental processes as young children move from room to room. Benefits of mixed-age grouping are discussed in terms of the children, parents, and teachers.