Talking and Writing: How do Children Develop shared Meanings in the School Setting?

Abstract

This study aims to explore how the learning and development of writing take place in the classroom. Adopting a Vygotskian perspective two specific questions form the point of departure of our work. First, we explore the development of writing texts as a social process involving conversations with teachers and peers and carried out by the appropriation and recontextualization of other persons’ oral texts rather than pure and individual invention; second, we consider how different ways of organizing social relationships are reflected in children’s writing processes and products when they learn to write at school. In order to explore the setting of writing teaching in the school context, we acted as participant observers in the classroom where children and their teacher collaborated in a writing workshop. We concentrate here on analyzing the activities of six children (three girls and three boys) who were planning how to write descriptive essays in a group. In this process, we analyze two situations in which the group is designing guidelines for writing a descriptive text about two different pictures. The crucial difference between these situations is that in one of them, the participants are six students and their teacher, whereas in the other, the six students are working alone. The video and audio recordings of discussions during collaboration were transcribed and examined in order to explore `moment-to-moment social constructions of meaning’. The main objective of this analysis is to identify the kind of conversational activities the students and the teacher perform in these two situations, and to determine how these activities produce different ways of dealing with the joint task of planning an outline. In order to explore the classroom organization we defined a category system that permits us to compare the two situations described above. Results show that there is a striking contrast between the development and learning environments, depending on whether the teacher was present or absent. The challenge for us to explore in further studies is whether the only context in which children can reverse interactional roles with the same intellectual content, i.e. giving directions as well as following them and asking questions as well as answering them, is when they are alone with their peers.