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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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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''.

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".

In this paper we aim at analyzing the modes of differentiation in children’s writing development during the presyllabic phase that, in the theoretical framework developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky, comes before the discovery of sound correspondance. Seventeen Italian children were interviewed seven times during the implementation of research on «Educational Continuity» between «scuola materna» and primary school. We first examine how minimum quantity and internal variation rules appear in Italian children as organizing principles for controlling quantity and quality of writing, and as necessary conditions for the differentiation process. Starting from this, it is possible to find two differentiation modes in writing; aformal one, and a mode in which some type ofexternal referent is used (meaning or object features). For most children the two modes are alternatives, and passing from one to another is a possible but not necessary step. The external group (which is older) has significantly less quantity repertoire than the formal one: this can explain why looking for an external point of reference can be an outcome of the child’s formal research for differentiating writings.

The aim of this study is to test develo pmental changes in metalinguistic skills in primary school children, using the distinction proposed by Bialystock (1986) between «analyzed knowledge» and «executive control», as two components of metalinguistic awareness involved in different tasks. 60 first, second ami third grade children were individually interviewed on two tasks. In the first task (guided word substitution) children were asked to substitute an underlined word with five alternatives, thus producing new sentences to be judged on their semantic and/ or morpho-syntactical acceptability. In the second task (free word substitution), children have to fiad out the word that can be cancelled ami substituted with a new one. In both tasks children have to express an acceptability judgement, giving reasons for it. Each subject receives two scores for each task. Results from two-way Anova show that the «control» component does not change much, while the «analyzed knowledge» changes signi ficantly, although alto third grade children are more aware of semantic than of morpho-syntactic features of language.

This study, part of a larger longitudinal research project, examined the process and products of story dictation of beginning readers. The subjects were 14 six-year-old Italian school children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who were interviewed four times (March, May, December and May of the following year) over a period of 16 months. In the interviews, the subjects were asked to construct and dictate a story in response to a picture stimulus, to reflect on their own stories, and to respond to questions from the scribes. The products (the stories) were analyzed for story structure elements, variety of verbal tenses, use of connectives, and anaphoric references. The processes (metatextual elements of interaction with the scribe) were analyzed according to variations in dictation speed, text segmentation, terminal signalling, and indications of revision. Results support an emergent literacy perspective, provide direction for further research, and are related to the needs of the early childhood curriculum.

This paper presents the results of a curriculum of basic economic concepts given to 5 fourth-grade classes (Ss=95). The main topic of this curriculum was the production and distribution of agricultural produce, which had already proved to be difficult for the children. The proposed curriculum was largely inspired by the idea that familiarity with «social scenes» related to the economic process in question is necessary (although not sufficient) to allow children to understand such concepts. Children's level of understanding was tested before and after the curriculum by means of a semi-structured interview on 3 main topics: farmers' use of produce; farmers' use of earnings; produce distribution. Answers were scored according to their complexity and correctness; variance analyses performed on the scores showed significant improvements, as well as differences between classes. A qualitative analysis of children's answers was also performed, with the aim of interpreting the nature of change in each topic.