Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grants
Project Title: Talking about text: Contiguity in child-teacher interaction
Chief Investigator:Dr Amelia Church
Funded by: 2009 Early Career Researcher Grant Scheme
Project Summary: Children’s early experiences with text are fundamentally important for later literacy development, yet there is little research in discourse processes in early learning environments that may facilitate this development. This project will detail interactions between teachers and young children during storybook reading to demonstrate how young children’s learning is on display in the interaction and how teachers respond to children’s spontaneous talk. The main aim of this study is to document what children understand about literacy and what teachers do with this understanding. The focus on contiguity emphasizes the importance of responses in interaction and allows identification of features of talk-in-interaction that are significant in literacy learning, and learning more generally.
This study of child-teacher interactions will contribute to an understanding of teacher practices in early learning environments and result in several publications. This research represents a novel approach to investigation of children’s learning-in-interaction, so is placed to make a unique contribution to theory of discourse, pre-service training in early childhood, and professional practice.
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