Listening to young children talking on the telephone: a reassessment of Vygotsky's notion of 'egocentric speech'.

In this article the author explores aspects of young children's private speech, examining characteristics of their development of discourse knowledge in utterances that are not directed to actual conversants. Two routes are taken, which the author tries to interlink without seeking a hard and fast juncture. The first is a study of what children are doing when they talk into a toy telephone, with reference to a transcript taken from empirical research. Knowledge of the essential structure of telephone discourse is displayed, as are emotional motivations behind the construction of pretence talk. The second is the notion of 'egocentric speech' as coined by Piaget and developed, within his sociocultural perspective to language acquisition, by Vygotsky. The author argues that dominant contemporary presentations of Vygotsky's notion of 'egocentric speech' tend to stress the self-regulatory or planning function at the expense of its role in expression of the imagination. The two discussions come together in the suggestion that the deployment of the imagination in reassembling sociocultural knowledge for the creation of pretence play, sometimes expressed in private speech, can be a significant factor in the exercise of discourse competencies for young children

Fluid leadership in a multi-user virtual environment educational project with teenagers: Schome Park

This paper examines leadership practices in a virtual community, the Schome Park project. Schome Park, based at the Open University, UK, was the first European closed (i.e. protected) island in Teen Second Life, a multi-user 3D virtual environment. This fully realised, complex interactive 3D environment has no imposed narrative and offers significant engagement for educational projects. The Schome (‘not school not home’) third space community – i.e. not placed in the first space of home or second space of work/school (Oldenburg, 1989) - was set up with the explicit aim of challenging the instructional models and pedagogic practices of the formal, state educational system. In this disembodied environment identities, represented in the virtual world by personalised avatars, possess usefully ambivalent valences. Often adults will join ‘inworld’ educational events organised and delivered by the younger members of the community. Schome makes flexible use of a wiki (collaboratively designed website), asynchronous discussion fora and other communicative media to support learning processes and enhance the development of a physically distanced yet authentic learning community. The authors propose that the community design in these new spaces created an opportunity for leaders to emerge regardless of contextual hierarchy and to forge a developing culture. The paper makes use of evidence from varied datasets to examine manifestations of leadership in the community and issues arising. Young people have been engaged in proposing, planning, executing and reflecting on teaching and learning and governance without deference to adults. Our analysis contributes to understandings of the development of leadership within carefully designed educational online communities and some of the challenges involved for adults in facilitating an appropriately supportive environment for young people. While aware that this innovative experiment continues to face many challenges, we propose that the design of the project offers much to encourage an approach to education in which collaborative, situated engagement in learning and teaching is perceived as a more fruitful model for the twenty-first century than reproduction of traditional hierarchies of teachers and the taught of conventional classrooms

Digital Literacies

With our increasing use of digital and online media, the way we interact with these forms of communication is having an enormous impact on our literacy and learning. In Digital Literacies, Julia Gillen argues that to a substantial extent Linguistics has failed to rise to the opportunities presented by studying language in digital contexts. Assuming no existing knowledge, and drawing from a wide range of research projects, she presents a range of approaches to the study of writing and reading language online. Challenging some of the existing concepts, Digital Literacies traces key ideas through both the history of literacy studies and contemporary approaches to language online, including linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. Examples, taken from real life studies, include the use of digital technologies in everyday life, online teenage communities and professional use of Twitter in journalism. Within each chapter, the relevant research methods used are explored and then tied to the theory underpinning them. This book is an innovative and essential read for all those studying and researching applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of literacy and multimodality, at an upper undergraduate and postgraduate level. The title will also be of interest to those working with new media in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Psychology, and Education

Exploring a learning ecology: teenagers' literacy practices in a Teen Second Life project - Schome Park:Paper presented as part of a symposium: Researching the Literacy Practices of Children and Young People in Virtual Worlds

This paper examines the literacy practices of teenagers in a Teen Second Life project, the Schome Park programme, with the specific aim of investigating connections students explicitly made between their learning in the virtual world project, and their experiences of schooling. Digital literacies, as all literacy practices, can usefully be approached through an ecological perspective (Barton, 2007). The notion of ecology provides a metaphor to assist us in thinking about "how the activity – literacy in this case – is part of the environment and at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment" (Barton, 2007, p. 29). This connects well with Barbara Rogoff's (1997) proposal that learning can be regarded as transformations in the patterns of participation in joint activity. Thus, taking a sociocultural approach to the teenagers' interactions expressed through their literacy practices in a combination of communicative domains, each with their own affordances, we are enabled to consider evidence of connections the students themselves choose to make with their experiences of schooling. The methodology for this paper combines 2 modes of analysis: corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. Corpus linguistics techniques include comparisons of word frequencies, the identification and analysis of keywords and examinations of collocates and concordances. Exemplar texts are then selected for more fine-grained discourse analysis in order to further investigate texts evidencing complex relationships between learning in the virtual world project and in school, as expressed by the teenagers. The data for this study are constituted by records of activities logged in two domains: A. Logs of synchronous 'chat' and instant messaging while inworld. B. Discussions posted on the community's forum. The corpus linguistics investigation was revelatory of a complex web of discourses concerning schooling and learning in Schome Park. One dichotomy was particularly powerful, contrasting the environments in terms of what the virtual worlds environment in terms of affordances contrasted against the perceived affordances of schools: including new curriculum topics, opportunities for leadership, empowerment in a community through the sharing of expertise and so on. However, close analysis also shows the manifold and varied ways in which students drew on knowledge and experience gained in schools when tackling various problems 'inworld'. Finally, there are many interesting traces of ways in which students spontaneously reported taking learning back from the virtual worlds project into their school learning lives. This paper and the experiences of the project more generally assist in meeting Barron's (2006) suggestion that reaching understandings of how learning takes place across settings, and of the possible synergies involved and obstacles, may be useful to educators especially if they are interested in finding ways to supplement or extend school-based opportunities. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates strengths and limitations of corpus and discourse analytic approaches to digital projects that generate vast data records

Digital Literacies

With our increasing use of digital and online media, the way we interact with these forms of communication is having an enormous impact on our literacy and learning. In Digital Literacies, Julia Gillen argues that to a substantial extent Linguistics has failed to rise to the opportunities presented by studying language in digital contexts. Assuming no existing knowledge, and drawing from a wide range of research projects, she presents a range of approaches to the study of writing and reading language online. Challenging some of the existing concepts, Digital Literacies traces key ideas through both the history of literacy studies and contemporary approaches to language online, including linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. Examples, taken from real life studies, include the use of digital technologies in everyday life, online teenage communities and professional use of Twitter in journalism. Within each chapter, the relevant research methods used are explored and then tied to the theory underpinning them. This book is an innovative and essential read for all those studying and researching applied linguistics, particularly in the areas of literacy and multimodality, at an upper undergraduate and postgraduate level. The title will also be of interest to those working with new media in the fields of Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Psychology, and Education

Young Children’s Digital Literacy Practices in the Home: A Review of the Literature

ISBN: 9780902831469Non peer reviewe

Young children’s digital literacy practices in homes : Past, present and future research directions

The changing nature of childhood in the digital age is attracting major attention among researchers, educators, health care professionals, parents and policy-makers. In this chapter, the authors summarize how research published in 2016 and 2017 has added to the findings of their earlier review of literature. In order to develop a conceptual picture of the latest studies in the field in terms of how these have addressed and approached young children’s digital literacy practices in the home, focusing on three interrelated dimensions of literacy, namely the operational, cultural and critical. The authors turn the key findings of their conceptual analysis based on the 3D model of literacy, focusing on how studies in the field situate themselves in terms of understanding children’s digital literacy practices in the home. Their conceptual analysis of literature reveals that to date there is scant research focusing more directly on the operational dimension of children’s digital literacy practices in the home.Peer reviewe