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The paper focuses on arguing and reasoning processes occurring at dinnertime family conversations. Our goal is to highlight the interplay between two sides of argumentative practices: the justification as social need to provide evidences for an assertion; the dialogic function of argumentation that refers to the goals arguers want to achieve during discussions. Through the analysis of a case study we discuss a sequence in which a child resists his father’s directive by an elaborated argumentative strategy in order to achieve his goal. Results show how participants engage in opposing the other’s standpoint and are socialized to argumentative dialogues.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how fathers position themselves within their everyday discursive practices at home. We consider the shift from a traditional father figure, defined and perceived as a provider, to an emerging collaborative one in order to explore the discursive acts of fathers’ positioning through the observation of the everyday activities of eight middle-class Italian families. Adopting the positioning theory and the discursive approach as guiding analytical concepts, we discuss how fathers position themselves as representatives and as mediators of the family and of its everyday activities. We propose a qualitative analysis of discursive interactions in order to show how Italian fathers position themselves as active partners in different activities at home, ascribing meanings to what they do with the other family members and with the researchers.

Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data collected among 8 Italian middle-class families, this article analyzes transitions in and out of episodes of games played by parents and children at home. The analyses focus on game prefaces in which participants display their mutual availability to engage in the game, and game codas in which participants signal their disengagement. The article shows how game prefaces and game codas allow parents, in particular, to accomplish concurrent operations (such as, attending to housekeeping activities) while orienting to the game. Transitional sequences, then, help sustain the management of the parallel temporalities ordinarily running across family life.

The study aims at analyzing toddlers' sociability within an early educational context, by adopting a socio‐constructivist perspective that considers ‘school‐nursery’ (Italian ‘nido di infanzia’) as an important natural context that can promote their sociability development. The larger research involved 18 toddlers of 20–40 months of age, who attended an Italian nursery, and their four caretakers. The study used an ethnographical methodological approach: it has been field research within a real life situation and has been based on semi‐participant observation with different observational instruments. Observational data have been analyzed at three different levels, based on the main principles of activity theory, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. This paper focuses specifically on the construct of a participation framework: the analysis showed that toddlers are able to co‐construct complex structures, based on different interactional levels and diverse communicative registers (e.g., linguistic–v...

This paper examines a dataset that derives from an observational tracking, in order to analyze where and how middle-class working families spend time at home. We use an ethnographic approach to study the everyday lives of Italian dual-income middle-class families, with the aim to analyze quantitatively the use of home spaces and the types of activities of family members on weekday afternoons and evenings. The different analyses (multiple correspondence analysis, agglomerative hierarchical cluster, discriminant analysis) show how particular spaces and activities in these spaces are dominated by certain family members. We suggest a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies as useful tools to explore in detail the everyday lives of families, and to understand how family members use the domestic spaces. In particular, we consider relevant the use of quantitative analyses to examine ethnographic data, especially in connection with the methodological reflexivity among researchers.

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to highlight the relations between parents and preadolescents in these specific situations. The data collection methodology is mainly ethnographical: videotape recordings of Italian middle class family dinners (the families were selected as being dual career ones with two children) were fully transcribed and codified following the approach of Conversation Analysis. The results of the quantitative (by the use of the log-linear models) and qualitative analyses confirm the importance of verbal conflict in family context as a particular cultural strategy of relationships between parents and preadolescents. The analytical data underline the relations between different aspects of conflict and the pragmatic implications for all family members at dinnertime conversations.

This paper examines the rhythm and the management of classroom interaction as an important constituent of a teaching-learning process. Twenty-three lessons in 12 classes (four 2nd grades, four 3rd grades and four 4th grades) of state primary schools spread all over Italy were observed and video taped for a total of 15 hours. The descriptive analysis of the collected data revealed a transformation of children’s and class interactivity and a change in the use of turn-taking strategies (overlaps, interruptions and pauses)_from 2nd to 4th grade. Additionally, it showed that: (1) speaker after overlap changes according to the type of overlap; (2) teachers differ from children in their turn-interrupting strategies (teacher interrupts with supportive and silent turns, whereas children with failed or simple interruptions); (3) log-linear analysis revealed that the next speaker was correlated both with the first speaker and pause duration, but these correlations were independent between them. For a more accurate interpretation of the results various aspects characterizing educational and school interaction were taken into account.

Drawing on autobiographical recollections, I propose to see collaborative research as a learning experience. I assume a sociocultural psychological approach to the social understanding and interpretation of different scientific research practices. I examine the modalities of collaboration in my first experience of managing an important national research project on Italian families' dinner table conversations, and in a larger collaborative research endeavor concerning the everyday life of middle-class Italian, Swedish and US families from a comparative view (the Sloan project). On the basis of these experiences, I highlight some of the difficulties met by two other projects presented in this special issue, the DUNES project (Tartas and Muller Mirza, this issue) and the Transition project (Markova and Plichtova, this issue). I conclude by suggesting a provisional criterion for generativity in collaborative research. I suggest that generativity occurs when the more expert and academically oldest ones become conscious that they are learning something new from the group and from some other, independently from age and experience.

This article concerns the dynamics of domestic space `appropriation' in Italian middle-class working families. The article starts from a background in multidisciplinary literature, mostly in the area of ethnographical and psychological studies, where the concepts of both `ownership' and `territoriality' prove to be inadequate. A dynamic view of space appropriations is chosen instead: starting from `outside appropriations', the presence of marked thresholds is then considered. Secondly, domestic space appropriations within the house are analysed in a purely qualitative way. There are selective and `predominant' appropriations by a single family member and by the whole household; questions of sovereignty and painful `proscriptions' (kingdoms and exiles) arise when specific parts of the house pertain to a given individual. But there are also unstable appropriations which reveal that there are negotiations in progress according to the family's power dynamics. Thus defined, the categories of domestic space also provide a key to understanding the families' relationships.

Psaltis, C., & Duveen, G. (2006). Social relations and cognitive development: The influence of conversation types and representations of gender. European Journal of Social Psychology. Psaltis, C., & Duveen, G. (in press). Conversation types and conservation: Forms of recogni tion and cognitive development. British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Rommetveit, R. (1990). On axiomatic features of a dialogue approach to language and mind. In I. Markovi & K Foppa (Eds.), The dynamics of dialogue (pp. 83-104). New York: Harvester. Schubauer-Leoni, M.-L., & Grossen, M. (1993). Negotiating the meaning of questions in didactic and experimental contracts. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 8, 451-471. Schubauer-Leoni, M.-L., & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (1997). Social interactions and math ematics learning. In P. Bryant & T. Nunes (Eds.), Learning and teaching mathematics. An international perspective (pp. 265-283). Hove, England: Psychology Press. Tryphon, A., & Voneche,J. (1996). Piaget-Vygotsky: The social genesis of thought. Hove, England: Erlbaum and Psychology Press. Valsiner,J. (1992). Making of the future: Temporality and the constructive nature of human development. In G. Turkewitz & G. Devenney (Eds.), Time and timing in development (pp. 13-40). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. A sociogenetic approach to personality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valsiner,J. (2000). Culture and human development. London: Sage. Valsiner, J. (2003). Beyond social representations: A theory of enablement. Papers on Social Representations, 12, 7.1-7.16. Retrieved October 2, 2004, from http://www.psrjku.at. Verba, M., & Winnykamen, F. (1992). Expert-novice interaction: influence of partner status. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 7, 61-71. Zittoun, T., Duveen, G., Gillespie, A., Ivinson, G., & Psaltis, C. (2003). The use of symbolic resources in developmental transitions. Culture &Psychology, 9, 415-448. Zittoun, T., Cornish, F., Gillespie, A., & Psaltis, C. (in press). Disentangling triangles: The development of subject, other, object and sign. Human Development. Zittoun, T., & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (in press). Four social psychological lenses for devel opmental psychology. Paper for a special issue of International Reviewv of Social Psychology, T. Leonova (Ed.). Zittoun, T., Perret-Clermont, A.-N., & Carugati, F. (1997). Note sur la notion de conflit sociocognitif [A note on the notion of socio-cognitive conflict]. Cahiers de Psychologie, 33, 27-30.

The article studies the manipulation of meanings between legal professionals and witnesses as it unfolds turn by turn in a hostile examination. Eleven hours of video-recording of the Italian criminal trial against Sergio Cusani were fully transcribed, resulting in 3700 turns of talk (1850 question turns and 1850 answers), which were analyzed on the basis of the conversational and discursive approach. Besides identifying the basic feature of the question and answers turns, our qualitative and quantitative data show how legal professionals and witnesses use different strategies to impose their own line of argument. In general, the more frequently the lawyers use a question the more it is coercive. Witnesses, on their side, prefer to provide elaborate answers. Moreover, the study provides evidence of the interconnection between the use of the strategies during the blame-implicative ‘thematic phases’ and the sequential organization of turns.

This comparative study aims at understanding which the difficulties children face in word segmentation in early writings. The term 'word' is both a metalinguistic and an everyday term. Rules about word separation have evolved over many years and are now normative in the languages these children are trying to write: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. Children hesitate precisely at those places where historically there was also hesitation. They probably face similar difficulties with the conceptual definition of the 'word'. A total of 987 texts written by second- and third-grade children (7 to 9 years) were collected in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and Uruguay, in a large number of different schools. The children were asked to write the story of Little Red Riding Hood, well known by children in those cultures. The normative view led to a quantitative analysis of 'deviations' from present language orthographies to give an overall picture of the situation. The interpretative attitude aimed at understanding chi...

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own. The rich structure of meanings involved in the word text provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows: * the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts; * the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language; * the initial phases of text construction by children; and * the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian children in dialogue on normative behavior and ways that their discursive contributions shape the structure and thematic content of parental talk that ensues. Parental responses to children’s normative transgressions socialize them also into the language of transgression. The children we studied supply and elicit accounts from others that attempt to justify or explain transgression.

Children's use of referential expressions is far from being firmly identified. The main objective of the study was to examine children's development between first and fifth grade in theuseof referential expressionsin oral and writtennarratives. Westudiedhow children maintain and reintroduce animate entities by employing different linguistic forms,looking attheinteractionbetweenlinguisticformsandfunctions.Asecondobjective was to analyse a new context of use, written narrative, and compareit to the oral one. The third aim was to compare the development of referential expressions in children of two Romance languages, Italian and Catalan. Results show that first grade children are already able to master the distinction between maintenance and reintroduction functions. On the other hand, even fifth grade children are not fully aware of possible referential ambiguities. Whereas no significant differences in managing the referential system emerged between the two languages, a few differences were found between o...

This paper analyses the concept of civilisation as it is constructed in anthropology and history, and uses the various dimensions so defined as a frame to understand how children grasp and make active use of the concepts in their interpretation of historical information. School fosters a notion of progress developing through different socio-historical forms which are understood as steps of a unique process. Such superordinate schemata of school history can preclude an understanding of 'otherness' deliberately situated within the other's perspective. The study investigates nine-year-old children's understanding and use of the notion of civilisation in the context of a historical task at school. Children were given a simplified version of a historical description of the Huns and were asked to take a stance about the Roman author's pejorative judgement of the Huns. Our analysis draws on the audio recordings of the small group and class group discussions. Data show the children's initial stereotyping reaction...

This study aims at understanding the use of punctuation in children’s early writings in connection with the organisation of the written text. Data are drawn from a larger comparative study in which written stories of Little Red Riding Hood were collected from primary school children who speak one of the three Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The corpus consists of 134 written stories of second grade children from low income families. Different quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented. Results show that all children, in spite of differences in literacy practices, try to make sense of the conventions of a system of writing, including punctuation marks (PMs). Some children seem to assume a ‘graphic principle’, while others make sophisticated attempts to distinguish the function of PMs for different types of speech genre. Contrastive textual use of PM seems to be critical also for teaching purposes. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The paper addresses the issue of cultural descriptions as they are perceived and used within mundane conversation. We analyze a discussion of an Italian family about a future formal occasion (a party) in a foreign country (Austria), with foreign participants, in which they shall produce a typically Italian meal. The analysis shows how cultural descriptions are both a resource and a constraint when they must orient a practical activity which must be publicly acknowledged for its cultural typicality. Discrepancies are highlighted between cultural descriptions and ordinary practices, but it is also shown how culture (or ‘cultural preferences’) gets produced, at a less explicit level, within discursive practices, through turn-taking filtering, sequential architecture and selection of differentiated addressees. The socializing import of the discursive situation for the younger participants is also discussed, with reference to the relevant conversational devices.

Small groups of 4th-grade school children worked autonomously on the analysis of a photograph, guided by a set of questions ranging from particular issues to more general ones. Transcripts of the recordings show that children's talk deals with key issues of historical methodology: reliability of the source, manipulations transforming findings into a "source," generalizability from single cases, and interpretation and comparison with present times. In addressing the latter point, children are also drawn to a prospective view of the present time, social organization, scientific progress, and the like. The depth of the discussion was the result of the nature of the stimulus material, the group situation, and the structured format of the task.

Written texts produced by 10 Italian deaf native signers in four different writing tasks were analyzed. Data analysis focused on linguistic and orthographic nonstandard forms. The written production of deaf subjects with deaf parents (DD) was compared to the written production in two control groups: a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf parents (HD) and a group of 10 subjects who have had no contact with deaf people or sign language (HH). The results duplicate findings from previous studies. Deaf subjects display a pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical morphology, especially with free-standing function words. The four different writing tasks used in the present study yield results indicating that text type does influence our assessment of deaf writing abilities. A comparison of the texts written by deaf native signers with those of two hearing groups confirms the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written Italian are best explained by deafness itself, not by the influence of a previously acquired Sign Language, and that the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely to their limited experience with written Italian.

ResumenEl objetivo de este estudio es decribir un posible itinerario evolutivo de la capacidad simbolica infantil en el sistema de notacion numerico. Se quiere ver como esta evolucion se relaciona tanto con la representacion de la palabra y del nombre, como son la capacidad numerica del nino. Se analiza esta evolucion en sujetos pre-escolares de entre 3;9 a 6;2 anos de edad. Se ha individualizado tres niveles principales en la representacion de la cantidad: el primero, en el cual no existe sensibilidad o precision hacia los aspectos cuantitativos; el segundo, donde se pone en correspondencia un signo de representacion con aquello que se representa, gracias a un variedad de estrategias particulares; el tercero donde se usa el numeral, aunque no siempre de un modo exclusivo. La relacion entre la notacion de la cantidady la notacion del nombre indica un progreso mas notorio y general en la representacion de la cantidad que en la representacion del lenguaje. En todo caso el nivel de construccion y de interpre...

A review of features and results of a research program concerning social interaction in knowledge construction that covers more than 10 years of research is given. Starting from a Vygotskian theoretical background, interactive dimensions are considered as an instrument for curriculum change in different domains and, subsequently, as an experimental treatment in young children's education. In particular, arguing within school settings appears to be a crucial tool for learning to reason and to explain: Knowledge domains become characterized by epistemic procedures, which are implemented in arguing, and by shared reasoning within adequate educational settings.

This article describes children's and teacher's talk in classroom discussion that is a kind of speech event aimed at knowledge construction. Eleven discussions attended by twelve 5-year-old children in two different social contexts and on two different subjects were recorded and analyzed. The discussions were preceded by shared activity and guided by the children's teacher. Children's talk and teacher's talk are described through categories based on the sequential function of turns at talk. Sequences of two turns are identified and discussed. Results suggest that, in the agreement phases of discussion, children's topical talk and teacher's topical talk are reciprocally affected. In particular, children's extended talk is more likely to occur when preceded by teacher's repetitions and rephrasings or by peer continuations. In the disagreement phases, peer discourse is to some extent more independent of teacher's talk, and topical talk is made up of claims and explanations that rely on the discourse structur...

The way of speaking at school can transmit ways of thinking and knowing and give structure to experience and knowledge. This study aims to describe and interpret the kind of discursive practices which can be constructed in a «literacy event», in this case a particular type of classroom discussion about a story. The study integrantes a Vygotskian perspective with the conversational approach proposed by Levinson. Following this approach, particular sequential moves in dispute and co-construction episodes are identified. This analysis was complemented by framing the task and the resulting data within the general background of Leont'ev theory of activity, and its recent applications to adult-child joint activity. The different components of this social event in early literacy, were interpreted according to tisis approach. The study hows the teacher and children can accomodate to each other and reciprocally appropiate different perspectives in a literacy event.

The aim of this investigation is to describe planning strategies and ideational processes of dyads of primary school children in a problem solving story completion task. Nine dyads of 2nd graders were asked to fill in the gaps of a 10 sentence story using a piece of computer software.

This study is part of a research project aimed at studying ways and effects of introducing computer use within a context of linguistic education. Linguistic activities, in which language was treated as an object instead of a means of communication, were carried out through a curriculum unit aimed at developing reflection on language. Within the curriculum a new software has been developed and implemented. The software promotes reflection on language and metalinguistic awareness in a social and educational context in wich «playing with language» is stimulated in children. It requires language comprehension and production, and offers to children (working in groups of three) the open task of composing sentences and stories in a problem solving setting. In this study we collected observational data on children’s interactions with the software and used the data as an ecological measure of children’s metalinguistic development. Positiv effects of the curriculum supported by the computer use were verified through measures of metalinguistic skills, investigated through individual interviews and administered also to a matched control group.

What has Little Red Riding Hood taught us about the writing of Italian children? The review of the studies conducted to date on the Italian sample has emphasized how early and effectively these children confront written language. Neglecting a strictly normative perspective and looking at the texts not only for how deviant they are, but also, and above all, for how correct they are, we could observe that children display early competence regarding both the writing system and the written language. The collected narrative texts in fact testify to an implicit and effective knowledge of the limitations of the graphic system among children, as well as to their precocious intention to produce written texts appropriate in form and register. In the framework of an approach that acknowledges the informative value of errors, the analysis of deviant output demonstrates the presence of regularities that reveal an internal logic in the texts.

This paper introduces intersubjectivity as a concept playing a crucial role in collaborative tasks, even when performed between partners at a distance. Two 5th grade classes from two European countries (Italy and Greece), collaborated in writing fairytales inspired by philosophically relevant issues. The software supporting the task is an asynchronous virtual environment. Videos recorded in the Italian class and materials posted on the platform were analyzed using qualitative approaches and discourse analysis. The case-study discussed shows how the construction of intersubjectivity at a distance is a complex process involving many aspects. The main results highlight how participants: (a) use the narrative structure as a pre-requisite to build an intersubjective space where partners' representation plays an important role; (b) exploit to a high degree the intellectual reasoning needed to accomplish the task in a truly collaborative way; (b) attain a fine tuning of reflective and metacognitive skills fostering a genuine interdependency during the task. Within this process, computer mediation amplifies the partners' ''presence'' all through the creative writing process, expanding [Bruner, J., 2002. Making stories: law, literature, life. Farrar Straus & Giroux] definition of writing as an activity where the ''audience'' plays a fundamental role as a ''co-author''.

The contributions of this book lead the way to a wide variety of questions related to young people moving toward adulthood in complex societies. Ideas such as youth, society, and adulthood are problematic; so is the nature of the move itself. In their opening chapters, Perret-Clermont and Resnick consider this period as a time of preparation or transition; but it can also be described in terms of socialization, of learning – and learning refers both to acquisition of skills in specific communities and to the ability to enter new social spaces – or of developing thinking abilities – for resolving problems or for reflecting on one's own trajectory. The authors included in this volume would all admit that young people neither learn nor think in isolation, and the authors would also assume the embeddedness of personal, intersubjective, group, and wider contextual dimensions, although their analyses focus on different levels. In this dense landscape, the reader is invited to follow a spiral path, moving along these dimensions through different zones of social worlds. This path should provide some relief and some depth to this landscape. The book is organized in six parts. Parts II and III focus on communities of practice. Part II plunges us into gray zones of the social world. The study of these less known, more spontaneous spaces makes it possible to highlight tensions and challenges that young people face in transition periods in modern societies.

Joining Society asks precise questions: To what are the young socialized? Which skills, modes of thinking or action are required from them and what are their developmental value? Socialization tends to be viewed within the confines of a particular geographical or cultural situation. The multi-national list of contributors brings an international perspective to the problem of socialization to work and to adult life, while at the same time emphasizing the common issues that face youth around the world. Some of the topics addressed are the rules and roles involved in socialization, attaining personal agency through collective activity, use of new technologies, and the role of intergenerational relationships. This book sheds new light on the processes through which society may hope to intervene in positive ways with today's youth.

The study aims at investigating the hypotheses that preliterate children work out, before the systematic teaching of writing, about the written representation of negation, absence, impossibility, and falsity. This problematic area has been previously investigated by Ferreiro (1981; 1997) and by Olson (1996). The present study focuses on a whole range of tasks concerning written representation, that were presented to 62 preliterate children, attending kindergarten and having an age between 4 yrs. 8 mth. and 6 yrs. 5 mth. The children were given a complex interview, including tasks that concerned children’s skill in representing negation, quantifiers and absence, and the written representation of impossible and false statements. Some of these tasks may create representational problems in children, since a contrast between reality and writing was purposively created. We expected a relationship between children’s writing development (that we measured independently) and their answers, at least in the two first tasks.

Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften 22 (2000) 3, S. 535-558, Dyadic interaction does not necessarily imply that just two people are present. It is often possible to single out episodes of dyadic interaction in multiparty contexts that we analyse, such as family dinner table conversation. Within such a speech event, multiparty participation framework (variously organized) is the default conversational structure. Consequently, a groundwork is required for participants to gain space and exclusivity for a dyadic exchange. This paper shows how dyadic framework is made out of the multiparty default interactional structure of a family dinner. Furthermore, we analyze the resources participants deploy to protect the dyadic exchange from anothers intrusion and/or from the risk of desertion of one member of the dyad. Young and older children actively participate in that activity and learn to manage it through diverse dyadic settings. It is not the number of participants that unequivocally determines whether an interaction is dyadic or multiparty. Varying and complex participation frameworks, alliances, and challenges are built and transformed within family dinner conversation; it is in their locus of the interactive organization of ongoing activity in which children are socialized to a complex socio-cognitive activity. (DIPF/orig.), Eine Interaktion in Dyaden bedeutet nicht notwendig, dass nur zwei Personen anwesend sind. Oft ist es möglich, Abschnitte in dyadischen Interaktionen aus Kontexten zu isolieren, an denen mehrere Personen beteiligt sind. Ein Beispiel ist das Gespräch am familiären Mittagstisch, das wir in diesem Beitrag analysiert wird. Bei einem solchen Gesprächsanlass besteht die normale Konversationsstruktur darin, dass in einem unterschiedlich organisierten Rahmen mehrere Personen beteiligt sind. Deshalb braucht es Durchsetzungsvermögen, um Raum und Exklusivität für einen dyadischen Austausch zu gewinnen. Diese Arbeit zeigt, wie der dyadische Rahmen aus der Interaktionsstruktur mehrerer Beteiligter beim Familienmittag herausgearbeitet wird. Darüber hinaus analysieren wir die Ressourcen, die die Beteiligten einsetzen, um den dyadischen Austausch vor Eingriffen anderer und / oder vor dem Riskiko des Verlassens der Dyade durch ein Mitglied zu schützen. Jüngere und ältere Kinder nehmen aktiv an diesen Handlungen teil und lernen gleichzeitig durch diverse dyadische Situationen solche Aktivitäten zu beherrschen. Es ist nicht die Anzahl der Beteiligten, die letztlich bestimmt, ob eine Interaktion dyadisch ist oder aus mehreren Mitgliedern besteht. Unterschiedliche und komplexe Beteiligungsrahmen, Allianzen und Herausforderungen werden während des mittäglichen Familiengesprächs gestaltet und verändert; genau in dieser interaktiven Umgebung ständiger Aktivität erfolgt die Sozialisation der Kinder in das komplexe sozio-kognitive Handeln. (DIPF/Orig.)

The present article focuses on the distribution of participation in family interaction involving young children (3-5 years old). Adopting a purely qualitative method of analysis, we show instances of family dinnertime conversations in which children appeared banned from participation, while they are the topic of the ongoing talk. We have called " backstage interaction, " sequences adjacent to those in which the child is involved, and within her/his auditory range, so that the child projected participation role alternates between that of addressee and overhearer. We argue that the "backstage talk" in the child's presence has the main effect of casting the current interaction with the child as a representation, in Goffman's terms (1959). Though, the child is left the opportunity to enter again the conversation: the person involved is interested in layering the selfs/he exposed, offering the child a "fictional self to interact with, thus preserving their face from the incumbent threat of the child's impoliteness or embarrassing "spontaneity".

1. Studying writing and writing acquisition today: A multidisciplinary view 2. Part I: Writing and literacy acquisition: Links between linguistics and psycholinguistics 3. 1. On the relations between speech and writing (by Olson, David R.) 4. 2. The Unit of Written and Oral Language (by Blanche-Benveniste, Claire) 5. 3. The Word out of (Conceptual) Context (by Ferreiro, Emilia) 6. 4. Presschool Knowledge of Language: What Five year olds Know about Language Structue and Language Use (by Berman, Ruth A.) 7. 5. Explicit Word Segmentation and Writing in Hebrew and Spanish (by Tolchinsky, Liliana) 8. Part II: Writing and reading in time and culture 9. 6. Orality/ Literacy, Languages and Alphabets. Examples from Jewish Cultures (by Sirat, Colette) 10. 7. The Notion of Orthography. A Latin Inheritance (by Desbordes, Francoise) 11. 8. Aspects of a History of Written Language Processing. Examples from the Roman world and the early Middle Ages (by Guenther, Hartmut) 12. 9. Orality in Literate Cultures (by Koch, Peter) 13. 10. The Graphic Space of the School Exercise Books in France in the 19th-20th century (by Hebrard, Jean) 14. Part III: Written language competence in monolingual and bilingual contexts 15. 11. Production and Comprehension of Connectives in the Written Modality. A Study of Written French (by Fayol, Michel) 16. 12. Towards a Better Understanding of Biliteracy (by Luedi, Georges) 17. 13. Acquisition of Literacy by Immigrant Children (by Verhoeven, Ludo) 18. Part IV: Writing systems, brain structures and languages: a neurolinguistic view 19. 14. Domain-Specificity and Fractionability of Neuropsychological Processes in Literacy Acquisition (by Cossu, Giuseppe) 20. 15. Reading difficulties among English and German Children. Same Cause - Different Manifestation (by Wimmer, Heinz) 21. 16. Neural Organisation and Writing Systems (by Butterworth, Brian) 22. Bibliographic references 23. Analytic index

The aim of the study is to identify both modes of children’s participation in family disputes and types of argumentative moves adopted, particularly in the act of opposing (problematizing) others or defending oneself. The corpus consists of twenty-seven dinner conversations of ten middle-class families living in Rome and Naples, each with one child between three and six years and at least one older sibling.

Classroom discourse is any type of discourse which goes on in the classroom: between teacher and students, or among students with or without the teacher. Since other reviews will consider specific settings (e.g., peer groups) or domain-bound types of discourse (such as literacy, computers, or maths), I will focus here on the general aspects of classroom discourse for the facilitation of learning.

La scuola e un particolare ambiente socio-culturale, in cui si possono sviluppare apprendimenti complessi, accompagnati da forme di socializzazione tra pari e tra adulti e bambini/ragazzi; per gli apprendimenti complessi, legati a contenuti storico-culturali e a metodologie conseguenti, non vanno bene i modelli utilizzati nei primi capitoli di un qualsiasi manuale di psicologia generale, come se ci fosse un solo concetto di apprendimento. Piuttosto, la scuola e un contesto sociale in cui, progressivamente, bambine/i, ragazze/i e giovani crescono e imparano insieme a contatto con varie esperienze e sollecitazioni che possono venire da diverse attivita ed esperienze, e in cui la dimensione sociale e verbale non e un evento aggiuntivo, bensi essenziale. A scuola si impara a stare con gli altri, a collaborare, a confrontarsi polemicamente, a "litigare senza picchiarsi", cercando di definire a che cosa servono le parole. Attualmente la psicologia non serve molto alla scuola, perche perlopiu non dispone degli strumenti e delle metodologie adatti per offrire un contributo significativo che possa guidare l’osservazione e l’azione successiva.

In this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4–10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms. A detailed analysis of null forms shows that children of different ages exploit different properties of the verbal and non-verbal context which can make a referent predictable. Compared to preschoolers, elementary school children are more likely to use null forms when the semantic content of the verb, or the structure of the preceding text make referents inferrable. On the other hand, preschoolers tend to exploit the importance of a character in the story plot, or the visual availability of the referent in the non-verbal context, as properties that make an entity salient enough to prevent the speaker from using overt linguistic forms such as full nouns. Our study confirms results of previous research, showing that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.