The National Diffusion Network: A career education bonus

Bill Guise is Assistant Director, Washington National Diffusion Network Facilitator Office.     

Using socio-dramatic play to support a beginning writer: ‘Daniel,the doctor and the bleeding ball’

This article reports on a case study of a young child (aged five) at a very early stage of his journey as a writer, evidencing ‘pre-alphabetic tendencies’, who has not yet internalised the construction of his name. Analysis of a ‘baseline’ piece of Daniel's writing demonstrates his awareness that the production of random letters conveys a simple message. However, Daniel does not recognise yet the relationship between spoken language and the corresponding grapheme–phonemes. At present he is not making the connections between his aural, oral and visual concepts of how words as text are constructed. In addressing the development of early years writing, the practitioner should be aware of the learning needs of the child as the child develops as an emerging writer in a highly complex problem-solving activity. The complexity of the structural and developmental processes needed to become a writer requires that the child is taught not within a predominantly whole-class structure with its demands for completion within fast-paced time limits. The emerging writer requires sustained recursive opportunities to engage with the experiences, which take the child from the steps of ‘mark making’ to the abstractions of written composition. The decision was made to use the strategy of socio-dramatic play as the framework for the intervention with Daniel. The use of a play/literacy connection (socio-dramatic play) serves to unlock and support the child's writing/spelling development. The child is being supported in his development by the teacher strategically easing the cognitive load, i.e. in this case, through scribing for the child.     

Infants' Reliance on a Social Criterion for Establishing Word-Object Relations

The language children hear presents them with a multitude of co-occurrences between words and things in the world, and they must repeatedly determine which among these manifold co-occurrences is relevant. Social factors—such as cues regarding the speaker's referential intent—might serve as one guide to whether word-object covariation should be registered. In 2 studies, infants (15–20 months and 18–20 months in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) heard novel labels at a time when they were investigating a single novel object; in one case the label was uttered by a speaker seated within the infant's view and displaying concurrent attention to the novel toy (coupled condition), whereas in the other case the label emanated from a speaker seated out of the infant's view (decoupled condition). In both studies, subsequent comprehension questions indicated that infants of 18–20 months registered a stable link between label and object in the coupled condition, but not in the decoupled condition, despite the fact that covariation between label and object was equivalent in the 2 conditions. Thus, by 18–20 months children are inclined to establish a mapping between word and object only when a speaker displays signs of referring to that object.