“Now you see me, now you don't": Dialogic loopholes in authorship activity with the very young

The genesis for this paper lies in the problematic nature of assessment practice, as a central authorship activity, for early childhood education teachers. This paper draws on dialogic philosophy to explore this challenge based on a doctoral investigation of a very young child (White, 2009) and the strategic means by which she reveals and conceals meaning through dialogic loopholes that are generated through eavesdropping tactics. The central argument made is that what can be seen and interpreted, when language is not shared between dialogic partners, is always and only an ontologic endeavour and never an epistemological truth. Seen in relation to the very young child, this tenet invites the potential to ‘see’ more and to move beyond narrow definitions of learning as an outcome of authorial intervention on the part of the teacher; to embrace uncertainty and difference as a central pedagogical stance; and to re-vision the infant as polyphonic hero in their own adventure plots

Landscape for children to play and learn: A conceptual framework

Play and movement are at the very center of young children’s lives. Allowing the children to experience the natural and man-made elements in their living environments would generate cognitive, physical and social skills and developments. Children do not discriminate between playing and learning; to them both activities are attained in same time and space. To them natural forces such as rain and wind, natural features such as vegetation, animals and landform, and man-made elements such as building and road are ubiquitous elements in their living environments. Through play with the elements they learn to perceive their benefits or adversities. They learn through three modes of learning which are cognitive, affective and evaluative from the landscapes, either natural or nurtured. Such involvement would generate physiological and psychological well-being to them. This paper explains a conceptual framework on landscape for children to play and learn in direct mean rather than vicarious way. The landscape is described as an ecological dynamic entity that develops the cognitive, physical and social functioning of the children. In conclusion, it is important to design and develop landscapes for children that stimulate their senses, provide feedbacks and afford functional meanings to their cognitive, social and physical skills

Digital Entertainment to Support Toddlers' Language and Cognitive Development

This current research aimed at seeing how English nursery rhymes and kids' songs as learning media support toddlers who are not living in an English speaking country (Indonesia) but exposed to the English language media during their normal baby-sitting times to learning English. To observe how two Indonesian toddlers learned English language in their early critical period of language acquisition through co-watching activity, Early Development Instrument which focuses on language and cognitive development domain with reading awareness and reciting memory subdomain was applied to observe two subjects after 15 month treatments (from age 10-24 months). The results show that the media and the co-watching activity are able to support the toddlers' understanding of the English words spoken and their ability to produce the intelligent pronunciation of those words. The interesting fact reveals that English which is normatively learned merely as a foreign language to most Indonesian people is no longer something far-off to the toddlers who are exposed to it through English nursery rhymes and kids' songs online since they are at the very young age. They naturally tend to be bilingual since at the same time they learn their mother tongue

Enhancing Parent-Child Communication and Parental Self-Esteem With a Video-Feedback Intervention: Outcomes With Prelingual Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Evidence on best practice for optimizing communication with prelingual deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children is lacking. This study examined the effect of a family-focused psychosocial video intervention program on parent–child communication in the context of childhood hearing loss. Fourteen hearing parents with a prelingual DHH child (Mage = 2 years 8 months) completed three sessions of video interaction guidance intervention. Families were assessed in spontaneous free play interactions at pre and postintervention using the Emotional Availability (EA) Scales. The Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale was also used to assess parental report of self-esteem. Compared with nontreatment baselines, increases were shown in the EA subscales: parental sensitivity, parental structuring, parental nonhostility, child responsiveness, and child involvement, and in reported self-esteem at postintervention. Video-feedback enhances communication in families with prelingual DHH children and encourages more connected parent–child interaction. The results raise implications regarding the focus of early intervention strategies for prelingual DHH children

The role of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant imitation from television

An imitation procedure was used to investigate the impact of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant learning from television. Eighteen-month-old infants watched two pre-recorded videos showing an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions with two sets of stimuli. Infants' familiarity with the demonstrator and the language used during the demonstration varied as a function of experimental condition. Immediately after watching each video, infants' ability to reproduce the target actions was assessed. A highly familiar demonstrator did not enhance infants' performance. However, the addition of a narrative, developed from mothers' naturalistic description of the event, facilitated learning from an unfamiliar demonstrator. We propose that the differential effect of demonstrator familiarity and language cues may reflect the infants' ability to distinguish between important and less important aspects in a learning situation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Context and repetition in word learning

Young children learn words from a variety of situations, including shared storybook reading. A recent study by Horst et al. (2011a) demonstrates that children learned more new words during shared storybook reading if they were read the same stories repeatedly than if they were read different stories that had the same number of target words. The current paper reviews this study and further examines the effect of contextual repetition on children's word learning in both shared storybook reading and other situations, including fast mapping by mutual exclusivity. The studies reviewed here suggest that the same cognitive mechanisms support word learning in a variety of situations. Both practical considerations for experimental design and directions for future research are discussed