Child Discourse contains papers presented in a symposium on child discourse at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Mexico City in November 1974. Three other papers, one presented by Edelsky at the same meeting, and two by Dore and Garvey, are also included to broaden the scope of methods and issues considered. Organized into three parts, this book generally aims at describing and analyzing social and linguistic knowledge of a child in utilizing language to project socially appropriate identities and to engage in purposive social acts. Part I focuses on children's speech events, while Part II centers more on function and act. The last part takes into consideration the social aspect of language usage among children.

This comparative study explores two central questions in the study of first language acquisition: What is the relative impact of structural and functional determinants? What is universal versus language-specific during development? Maya Hickmann addresses these questions in three domains of child language: reference to entities, the representation of space, and uses of temporal-aspectual markings. She provides a thorough review of different theoretical approaches to language acquisition and a wide range of developmental research, as well as examining all three domains in English, French, German and Chinese narratives. Hickmann's findings concern the rhythm of acquisition, the interplay among different factors (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) determining children's uses, and universal versus variable aspects of acquisition. Her conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic perspective. Children's Discourse will be welcomed by those working in psychology and language-related disciplines interested in first language acquisition.

This book is an empirical study of naturally occurring interaction between child counselling professionals and young children experiencing parental separation or divorce. Based on tape recordings of the work of a London child counselling practice, it offers the reader a unique and sustained look inside the child counselling consultation room at the talk that occurs there. The book uses conversation analysis against a backdrop of sociological work in childhood and family studies to situate the discourse of child counselling at an interface between the increasing incitement to communicate in modern society, the growing recognition of children’s social competence and agency, and the enablements and constraints of institutional forms of discourse participation. Chapters include overviews of recent developments in the sociology of childhood and the sociolinguistics of children’s talk; conversation analysis and institutional discourse; and detailed empirical studies of the linguistic techniques by which counsellors draw out children’s concerns about family trauma and the means by which children, through talking and avoiding talking, either cooperate in or resist their therapeutic subjectification. This book will be of interest to readers in counselling psychology and practitioners of child counselling; to researchers and advanced students in social psychology, sociology and sociolinguistics; and to others interested in childhood and family studies, interactionism, qualitative methodology and conversation analysis.

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse -- the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex topic through oral reports and essay examinations. Although many students are proficient with the expository genre, others struggle to meet these expectations. This book is designed to provide information on the use and understanding of expository discourse in school-age children, adolescents, and young adults. Recently, researchers from around the world have been investigating the development of this genre in typical students and in those with language disorders. Although many books have addressed the development of conversational and narrative discourse, by comparison, books devoted to the topic of expository discourse are sparse. This crossdisciplinary volume fills that gap in the literature and makes a unique contribution to the study of language development and disorders. It will be of interest to a range of professionals, including speech-language pathologists, teachers, linguists, and psychologists who are concerned with language development and disorders.

Provides insights into a lively field of international human rights politics – the protection of children and their rights – by looking at the negotiations leading to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This collection offers an in-depth study of children's peer talk and its potential impact on children's learning.

Children's literature shapes what children learn about the world. It reflects social values, norms, and stereotypes. This book offers fresh insights into some of the key issues in fiction for children, from the representation of gender to embodied cognition and the translation of children's literature. Connecting classic children's texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Murder Most Unladylike, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. It explores approaches to experiencing fiction, as well as methods for the study of literary texts. Childhood discourses are investigated through the materiality of texts, the spaces that literature takes up in libraries, the cultural history of fiction moulded through performances, as well as reading environments that shape childhood experiences, such as fashion and urban spaces. Children's Literature and Childhood Discourses emphasizes the crucial link between fictional stories and real life.