Impressions,improvisations and compositions: reframing children's text production in social network sites

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8–17‐year‐old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of research is finding that while young people transfer knowledge and practices across the sites that they occupy, children's text production using informal digital literacy practices and children's school‐based text production can be regarded as increasingly disparate activities. This paper draws from a current research project that is exploring three pre‐teenage children's text production in social networking sites. Here one child's Bebo profile page is presented and discussed in order that the forces that play upon her text production can be identified. Through consideration of these forces, a framework for considering children's text production in informal digital environments is suggested. This framework steps away from the existing frameworks currently found within the Primary National Strategy for Literacy and Mathematics and instead requires that children's texts are viewed in relation to structure and agency.     

Access to local books: the effects of Read Malawi from a children's rights perspective

Children in low‐income, postcolonial countries such as Malawi have few opportunities with quality reading materials that promote independence as readers. In this study, we argue that access to locally produced text relevant to linguistic and cultural contexts is a fundamental human right for children throughout the world. Situating this study within the intersection of research on children's rights and complementary reading materials, we analyse data from a project in Malawi. We consider the ways in which a respect for children's educational rights – specifically, their rights to access information via children's books – can help them develop their biliteracy. Additionally, we examine how the Read Malawi program contributes to Malawian children's literacy development in both national and official languages. Our findings suggest not only a humanistic need for quality complementary books, but also the empirical justification for books in the hands of children; in particular, an interconnected relationship between borrowing books from school and engagement with Read Malawi was found, especially when we explore children's English proficiency. Through Read Malawi, this study exemplifies what a quality literacy intervention can do in supporting children's Chichewa and English proficiency and improving their rights to quality education.     

Txt msg n school literacy: does texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children's literacy attainment?

This paper reports on two studies which investigated the relationship between children's texting behaviour, their knowledge of text abbreviations and their school attainment in written language skills. In Study One, 11–12‐year‐old children provided information on their texting behaviour. They were also asked to translate a standard English sentence into a text message and vice versa. The children's standardised verbal and non‐verbal reasoning scores were also obtained. Children who used their mobiles to send three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores than children who sent none. However, the children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations (‘textisms’) tended to have better performance on a measure of verbal reasoning ability, which is highly associated with Key Stage 2 (KS2) and 3 English scores. In Study Two, children's performance on writing measures was examined more specifically. Ten to eleven‐year‐old children were asked to complete another English to text message translation exercise. Spelling proficiency was also assessed, and KS2 Writing scores were obtained. Positive correlations between spelling ability and performance on the translation exercise were found, and group‐based comparisons based on the children's writing scores also showed that good writing attainment was associated with greater use of textisms, although the direction of this association is nor clear. Overall, these findings suggest that children's knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for children in this age range.     

Ben and his army scenes: a consideration of one child's out-of-school text production

In this paper, findings from a recent small‐scale case study exploring children's out‐of‐school text production are shared. It has been strongly argued that the standard literacy curriculum offered by schools is dislocated from the real interests and home literacy practices of children (Millard 2003). This argument is used as a starting point for considering the texts produced by Ben, a ten‐year‐old writer. Here, Ben's texts are considered for the range of factors that can be seen to influence his out‐of‐school text production. These factors are wide‐ranging and include social, material and agentive factors. To conclude, the factors that arise from the data are explored in relation to one another, and a framework for considering children's text production that brings into balance the social, material and agentive factors is proposed.     

Individual variation in children's reading comprehension across digital text types

The present study examined children's digital text comprehension of digital text types linear digital text vs hypertext, with or without graphical navigable overviews. We investigated to what extent individual variation in children's comprehension could be explained by lexical quality (word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge), cognitive load factors (prior knowledge and working memory), text type and graphical overview. Participants were 93 sixth graders in a within‐subject design. Word reading efficiency, vocabulary knowledge and prior knowledge predicted children's digital comprehension scores, while working memory did not. Reading comprehension was equal for linear text or hypertext. However, the presence of an overview facilitated reading comprehension for readers with lower prior knowledge. It can be concluded that hypertexts with basic digital text features and accompanying comprehension questions are not more difficult for children than linear digital texts, that similar individual factors predict reading comprehension of linear text and hypertext, and that a graphical overview helps when prior knowledge is low.     

Networking around The Waterhole and other tales: the importance of relationships among texts for reading and related instruction

This article explores ways in which children's picture books form networks of relationships, and their implications for readers and classroom teachers. In this exploration, reading is seen to involve making connections within and beyond the text at hand. These connections, evoked differently across readers, shape readers' interpretations of text. Many possible meanings may arise from just one text, reinforcing the idea that no single correct meaning resides in a text. This article demonstrates tools for exploring textual connections with readers, and the value of such explorations for opening‐up reader interpretations of a text.     

Preschool children's exposure to story grammar elements during parent–child book reading

Twenty‐three preschool‐age children, 3;6 (years; months) to 4;1, were videotaped separately with their mothers and fathers while each mother and father read a different unfamiliar storybook to them. The text from the unfamiliar storybooks was parsed and coded into story grammar elements and all parental extratextual utterances were transcribed and coded for (1) their relationship to the story grammar elements found within the storybook, and (2) the natural strategies parents used to direct their children's attention to these elements. Children's overall exposure to story grammar elements during book reading was also explored for its relationship to their language abilities. Results indicated that parents focused significantly more on the resolution, attempt, and consequence compared to the initiating event and plan, and most frequently used the text and pictures as strategies for recruiting their children's attention to the story grammar elements within the book. In addition, the frequency of parental utterances related to story grammar elements was negatively correlated with children's language abilities. This study did not examine the complexity or depth of parental utterances related to story grammar elements. These findings provide initial evidence that children may derive their understanding of story grammar at least in part through their parents' extratextual discussions during parent–child book reading.     

The Effect of Articulatory Suppression on Greek Children's Reading of Greek

Abstract The objective of this study was to investigate the role of phonological recoding in young children's reading of Greek. For this, third‐grade Greek children were asked to read and comprehend text while they were concurrently suppressing subvocal articulation. Their performance (in terms of reading times and free recall) was compared to that of a control group of normal reading. The results showed a disturbing effect of articulatory suppression on the subjects’ reading latencies and retention of text. These findings were taken to imply that third‐grade children's reading of text was partly based upon pre‐lexical phonological representation and also that their retention of text partly depended upon a phonological memory code.     

Exploring the eye‐movement patterns as Chinese children read texts: a developmental perspective

This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low‐frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word‐based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye‐movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text.     

Intention and Meaning in Young Children's Drawing

In this article I present some ideas, based on qualitative research into young children's drawing, related to the developing discourse on young children's thinking and meaning making. I question the relationship between perception and conception and the nature of representation, challenging traditional ideas around stage theory and shifting the focus from the drawings themselves to the process of drawing, and thus to the children's own purposes. I analyse examples of my observations (made in naturalistic settings within a nursery classroom) to reveal the range of representational purposes and meaning in children's drawing activity. My analysis shows that, rather than being developmentally determined, the way children configure their drawings is purposeful; children can recognise the power of drawing to represent, and that they themselves can be in control of this. I explore aspects of the process, including transformation and talk to show the importance of understanding drawing in its specific contexts. I show how children's drawing activity is illuminated by the way in which it occurs and the other activities linked to it, presenting drawing as part of children's broader, intentional, meaning‐making activity. As an aspect of the interactive, communicative practices through which children's thinking develops, representation is a constructive, self‐directed, intentional process of thinking in action, through which children bring shape and order to their experience, rather than a developing ability to make visual reference to objects in the world. I suggest that in playing with the process, children are actively defining reality rather than passively reflecting a given reality.     

A case study of questioning for reading comprehension during guided reading

This case study explored how a teacher's questioning during guided reading scaffolded six children's understanding of reading. Observations and interview data conveyed that questioning statements and the teacher's involvement as a respondent prompted children's engagement and understanding of the text. Insufficient wait time and open questions with a closed intent seemed to stifle children's understanding of reading. Conclusions suggest teachers' relaxation of questioning to a conversational manner may enable guided reading to be an opportunity to develop children's comprehension on all levels.     

Birds, frogs, blue skies and sheep: an investigation into the cultural notion of affordance in children's meaning making

This article draws on an ethnographic research study of children's text making in the home, as well as interviews with visual artists in South Yorkshire, to explore the idea of affordance as cultural (Kress 1997; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). The article draws on Kress and van Leeuwen's concept of the affordance of a mode, and argues that in the case of children's meaning making, affordance has to be seen as being shaped by culture. This means attending to children's cultural and physical spaces, their worlds, in order to trace back and understand meanings inside their texts. The article takes particular instances of practice and then traces back their meaning, in order to show how cultural meanings sediment into texts. The article argues that English teachers can use this lens of texts as traces of practice to make sense of the multimodal texts children produce in classrooms.     

“Ah,I know why…”: children developing understandings through engaging with a picture book

This article describes part of a study that explored the responses of nine‐ and ten‐year‐old children during a picturebook read aloud in a small group setting in a New Zealand classroom. The read aloud was interactive, where the participants were encouraged to respond to the book and to each other throughout the session. The authors created a framework for analysing the responses, adapting the model of Lawrence Sipe (2008) with its five categories of literary understanding, by expanding on the analytical category to enable a finer analysis of the responses. This article discusses the children's depth of thinking and the understandings they developed as they engaged with the read aloud. It also describes how the adapted framework allowed a closer analysis of these understandings, including the way the elements of art used in the illustrations contributed to the children's ideas. The findings suggest ways picturebooks can be used to promote children's thinking and how teachers can guide discussion about a complex text. Implications for use of the framework in further research are discussed.     

The Roles of Intuition and Informants’ Expertise in Children's Epistemic Trust

This study examined how children's intuitions and informants’ expertise influence children's trust in informants’ claims. Three‐ to 8‐year‐olds (N = 192) watched videos in which experts (animal/biology experts or artifact/physics experts) made either intuitively plausible or counterintuitive claims about obscure animals or artifacts. Claims fell either within or beyond experts’ domains of expertise. Children of all ages were more trusting of claims made by informants with relevant, as opposed to irrelevant, expertise. Children also showed greater acceptance of intuitive rather than counterintuitive claims, a differentiation that increased with age as they developed firmer intuitions about what can ordinarily happen. In summary, children's trust in testimony depends on whether informants have the relevant expertise as well as on children's own developing intuitions.     

Comparative research on young children's perceptions of play—an approach to observing the effects of kindergarten educational reform

Kindergarten children's perception of play is a reflection of their life and experiences, which can be used as an index of the quality of pre‐school provision and the influence of kindergarten education reform that began in the 1980s in mainland China. Therefore, based on this hypothesis, the current authors argue that to examine young children's perceptions of play is to examine the experiences of their life in kindergarten and, indirectly, the effects of kindergarten education reform. Using photo classification and on‐site interviews, the current research explored 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children's perceptions of play. This article reports on research comparable to previous research which aimed to examine the effect of the 15‐year kindergarten education reform. One of the principles which the reform advocated was that kindergartens and early years practitioners should respect young children's rights to play, emphasizing and providing play over group lessons as the basic activity in kindergarten settings. Similar to the results of previous research, the current research showed that group lessons remained the main reference used by young children to judge the nature and meaning of activities in kindergartens. However, the activity in the interest corners/areas, which has been a main method of organizing children's activities in kindergartens advocated by the top‐down approach to kindergarten educational reform since 1989, was found to be a new criterion in young children's judgements. The current research revealed that kindergarten education reform had achieved some positive effects as expected.     

Question‐posing and question‐responding: the heart of ‘Possibility Thinking’ in the early years

Drawing on research that sought to explore the characteristics of ‘Possibility Thinking’ as central to creativity in young children's learning, this paper considers question‐posing and question‐responding as the driving features of ‘Possibility Thinking’ (PT). This qualitative study employed micro‐event analysis of peer and pupil–teacher interaction. Events were sampled from two early years settings in England, one a Reception classroom (4‐ to 5‐year olds) and the other a Year 2 classroom (6‐ to 7‐year olds). This article arises out of the second stage of an ongoing research programme (2004–2007) involving the children and practitioners in these settings. This phase considers the dimensions of question‐posing and the categories of question‐responding and their interrelationship within PT. Three dimensions of questioning were identified as characteristic of PT. These included: (i) question framing, reflecting the purpose inherent within questions for adults and children (including leading, service and follow‐through questions); (ii) question degree: manifestation of the degree of possibility inherent in children's questions (including possibility narrow, possibility moderate, possibility broad); (iii) question modality, manifestation of the modality inherent in children's questions (including verbal and non‐verbal forms). The fine‐grained data analysis offers insight into how children engage in PT to meet specific needs in responding to creative tasks and activities and reveals the crucial role that question‐posing and question‐responding play in creative learning. It also provides more detail about the nature of young children's thinking, made visible through question‐posing and responding in engaging playful contexts.     

Unkindest Cuts? Some effects of picture editing on recall of television news information

Research into picture effects on encoding of verbal material has paid little attention to the effects of picture changes. In this experiment, it was found that adults’ recall of the spoken text in a TV news item was impaired by mid‐sentence picture editing. In contrast, both 11‐12 year old and 14‐15 year old children's recall was enhanced by rapid cutting, so long as the accompanying pictures were relevant to the verbal text. Both adults’ and younger children's recall was better with some of the experimentally‐manipulated material than it was with the original broadcast version of the news item. However, 14‐15 year olds performed best with the original version.

It is suggested that viewers are differentially sensitive to unintended production effects and that their processing of verbal information can be disrupted by inappropriately‐timed picture cuts. Research on picture‐text relationships in audio‐visual material needs to take account of picture‐timing, as well as picture content, and television editing procedures may need to be tailored more specifically to suit the intended audience.     

Reading self‐concepts and task choices for children with reading difficulties

Abstract

This project examined the personal and the social basis of children's self‐concepts about reading. Study 1 [N= 55] was a correlational study. Results suggest a stronger personal than social basis for children's self‐concepts about reading. In particular, children made stronger comparisons among content areas than gender groups. Study 2 [N= 18] was an intervention study. The focus was on the personal basis of self‐concepts, for children with reading difficulties. Results showed that self‐concepts were responsive to the intervention, with associated change in task choices. Findings support a self‐categorization approach to understanding children's self‐concepts, and imply that this approach would be useful in motivating children about reading.

Reading is regarded as integral to general living skills and is central to children's learning across many areas of schooling. This means that we need to understand more about the self‐concepts that motivate children to take up and persist with reading activities. H is a particularly pressing issue for children who experience difficulties with reading. This project therefore examined the personal and social basis of children's self‐concepts about reading. The focus was the salience of children's personal and social categorisations about reading that underpin reading self‐concepts and associated choices of reading tasks.     

Preschool teachers’ literal and inferential questions and children's responses during whole-class shared reading

This study examined the extent to which preschool teachers used literal and inferential questions during classroom-based shared reading. Specific foci included (a) investigating the association among the level of literal or inferential language in the text, teachers’ text-related questions, and children's responses using sequential analysis, and (b) examining the relation between teachers’ inferential questioning and children's vocabulary outcomes. Participants included 25 preschool teachers and 159 four-year-old children. Teachers videotaped their whole-class shared reading of an informational narrative text. Teachers and children's extratextual talk was analyzed and children completed standardized vocabulary assessments in fall and spring of the academic year. When reading this informational narrative text, teachers posed, on average, slightly more inferential questions than literal questions. Significant sequential associations were observed between the level of teachers’ questions and child responses, with inferential questions consistently eliciting inferential child responses. Few characteristics of teachers’ questions were associated with children's vocabulary outcomes. Results suggest that preschool teachers can use inferential questioning to encourage children to participate in conversation at complex, inferential levels; informational texts appear to provide a successful context for this inferential discourse. Implications for teachers and allied professionals are discussed.     

The influence of children's gender and age on children's use of digital media at home

This study is the first to systematically investigate the influence of child gender and age, on parents’ perceptions of UK children's digital media use at home. It provides an in‐depth exploration of how children's age and gender influence the balance between children's use of digital and non‐digital media at home. The data draw on 709 parents’ responses to an open‐ended question asked in the context of a national survey investigating the digital reading habits of children, conducted in 2015. Parents’ responses were analysed using content and thematic analysis, which yielded eight main categories, collapsed into three major themes: control, child's healthy development and diversity of experiences. Quantitative analyses evidenced that more parents of boys were concerned about the health implications of their children's digital media use and this was a concern especially for parents of the youngest (0–2‐year‐old) children. More parents of 6–8‐year olds cited the appeal of technology as the main reason for the perceived imbalance in their children's engagement with digital media. The study provides a more secure understanding of the factors that influence parental perceptions of their children's digital media use at home, which has implications for policy‐makers, digital designers and early years professionals.