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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 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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

Cross‐cultural examinations of teaching and schooling can help one gain a new, more open perspective on that which is the closest at hand. One's own experiences provide a personal framework through which all subsequent perceptions are filtered, so that what may seem “objective” is really a view colored by past events and performances. This paper presents information gained from a year spent observing and talking with teachers and teacher trainers in Italy, a country in which the statement “There is no reading problem in Italy” is often heard and just as often qualified by exceptions. By looking at the processes and procedures which match and vary from the norm of the United States, one can begin to sort out those things that may be operational or philosophical “giyens” in reading education from those things which vary in a different cultural context.

The Committee on General and Technical Education of the Council of Europe has organized a number of conferences on teacher in-service training in the past few years. One of these was the meeting held at Frascati in December 1969, which is the topic of the following article. The author, Clotilde Pontecorvo, gives a critical account of the conference and intersperses references to national developments based on the questionnaire data gathered in preparation for the conference. Understandably, the Italian situation is given particular (and critical) attention.