ERIC Number: EJ1023618
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0950-0782
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Towards a Sociocultural Understanding of Children's Voice
Maybin, Janet
Language and Education, v27 n5 p383-397 2013
While "voice" is frequently invoked in discussions of pupils' agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic dynamics of children's voices and the sociocultural features shaping their emergence. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research involving recent recordings of 10- and 11-year-old children's spoken language experience across the school day, this paper examines how pupils' voices are configured within institutional interactional contexts which render particular kinds of voice more or less hearable and convey different kinds of value. Analysis shows how children appropriate and reproduce the authoritative voices of education, popular culture and parents in the course of their induction into social practices. At the same time, they also express varying degrees of commitment to these voices and orchestrate their own and other people's voices within accounts and anecdotes, making voice appropriation an uneven, accumulative process shot through with the dynamics of personal and peer-group experience. The examination of children's dialogue from different contexts across the school day highlights the situated semiotics of voice and the heteroglossic development of children's speaking consciousness.
Descriptors: Sociocultural Patterns, Video Technology, Ethnography, Popular Culture, Student Attitudes, Semiotics, Discourse Analysis, Oral Language, Classroom Communication, Semi Structured Interviews, Friendship, Teacher Student Relationship, Elementary School Students, Peer Relationship, Elementary School Teachers
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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