YOUNG CHILDRENS DISCOURSE & THE ORIGINS OF THE WORLD.pdf (original) (raw)

In Ronald Reed, Ed., When We Talk: Essays on Classroom Conversation. Fort Worth, TX: Analytic Teaching Press, Texas Wesleyan University, 1992. I want to distinguish roughly between three kinds of young children's discourse in educational settings. On one end of a continuum there is school discourse in its classical form. Its major characteristic is an order imposed by a central adult authority, around whose cues topic initiation and maintenance, turn-taking conventions, speaker-listener interchanges, and conversational repair are practiced and internalized. On the other end of the continuum is the discourse of children left to themselves--the language of dramatic play, of the playground, of groups sitting around without a teacher-or we may even say, groups "out of control” in a classroom setting. This is a discourse much more difficult to capture in its structural patterns, given its wildly playful modalities. It is the sort of language event whose inner logic tends to be hidden in apparent randomness or chaos, rather than self-consciously imposed. The text here under interrogation is an example of a third sort, and it falls somewhere between these poles. It is not didactic discourse or spontaneous (un-adult-erated) discourse, but what may in a loose sense be called philosophical discourse.