This study is concerned with social semiotic theories of learning and literacy with respect to the development of understandings about the purpose, nature and interpretation of semiotic objects to which children are introduced when very young, and which retain long term educational significance. The focus of the study is on the multimodal nature of children's activity around such texts. A high level of independent control over the interpretative process and the process of learning itself is demonstrated. The hypothesis that this involves an epistemological disposition, a need to mean, underlies the analysis in the thesis. The main data are derived from a video film of a twenty three month old child's interpretative activity as she shares a book, makes a mothers' day card and plays with sorting games in collaboration with her father. Three questions are addressed: the nature of the semiotic resources drawn on and the means by which these are mediated; the process of selecting and combining the resources in order to achieve interpretative effectiveness; and the relationship between resources and social environment. The research is conducted by means of an analysis of sections of the video tape. A structural semiotic analysis is applied to selected episodes, demonstrating the mediation of meaning through the modes of language, vocalisation, gesture, gaze and action; this is followed by a micro level description and discussion of the analysis. It is shown that semiotic resources are derived from material experiences, are multiply constituted, and are selected, combined and transformed to be used for symbolic purposes. The modes of mediation are also shown to be multiply constituted and used in refined, independent and motivated ways to place selected constituents of resources in the right place at the right time for the most effective achievement of meaning.

This thesis examines teachers' beliefs or orientations in relation to literacy teaching. Two studies are presented. The first is a small-scale, in-depth study which examines Reception teachers' beliefs of how children learn to read and how these relate to classroom practice. Furthermore, it examines the relationship between academic theories of how children learn to read, including instructional practices, and teachers' own beliefs. While recognising the debate which has characterised the teaching of reading in polemic terms, the author argues that teachers' beliefs have largely been neglected within this debate. An attempt is made to discover whether this dichotomy applies to teachers' own beliefs and their practice. Researchers studying teacher cognition acknowledge difficulties in eliciting beliefs. In the present study due consideration was given to validity and reliability issues. A triangulation of methods including a Statement Sorting Task, classroom observation and assessment of children was employed to address weaknesses identified in previous research. Whilst it was possible to identify the existence of some shared beliefs between teachers who agree with certain propositions pertaining to a particular theoretical position, none of the classrooms observed typified practice that could be considered exclusive to one theoretical orientation. Nevertheless, in some classrooms practice reflecting one theoretical stance predominated. Some cases of 'mismatches' between teachers' elicited beliefs and their observed practice were also found to exist. The Statement Sorting Task was also used in the second study. This examined 10 Reception and 12 Y5 teachers' beliefs in relation to the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). The findings suggest teachers' views are in line with the content of the NLS in some respects. However they are much less in favour of the pedagogy which the NLS propounds. Reception teachers in particular did not find any of the statements about the NLS pedagogy came close to their views. By contrast, Y5 teachers' views were more in line with statements about NLS pedagogy. Response patterns suggest that, after almost a year's experience of the NLS, primary teachers show a degree of acceptance towards its content, but not to its pedagogy.

This thesis investigates the extent to which the acquisition of literacy during the eighteenth century arose independently of and thus separately from formal schooling. It further examines what counted as 'literacy' during the eighteenth century and how it was connected to orate forms of communication and expression. The thesis uses a wide variety of sources in order to demonstrate that there is scope for extending the historiography of literacy and communicative practice during the eighteenth century. It is argued that recent developments in digitized data-bases have opened up new opportunities for further research. The thesis argues that literacy was spread more broadly both geographically and socially in eighteenth century England than is often recognized. The thesis begins by setting public literacy in its broader social and historical contexts. The term 'public' is used because throughout the thesis literacy is viewed as a social act of communication and as a set of social practices. This view is rooted in two distinct critical traditions. One derives from the American historians Bailyn and Cremin who argued that understanding education required relocating learning into wider social setting. The other derives from the new literacies movement which seeks to understand literacies as complex social phenomena rather than as simple acquired basic skills. There is a focus throughout upon the social and cultural settings that gave rise to a distinctively educated public during the eighteenth century which, by the close of the century, had started to spread into and across all social classes. The three empirically based chapters develop this theme and show how certain public and social contexts offered opportunities for both individuals and groups to engage in a range of literacy practices. Through a study of the way that communications were structured in coffee houses the thesis reveals the profoundly educative impact that these institutions had particularly in the earlier decades but also, continuously across the century. Following this, and through a study of interlinking biographies of self-taught men who made their mark upon the society, it is shown that many commoners managed to acquire degrees of learning other than through formal instruction. Finally, there is a focus upon the emergence of an independent and authentic set of literacy practices among common readers during the later part of the century, a movement that helped to shape future of broad working class organizations in the following century and one which at times was perceived by the state to be tantamount to treasonable practice.

This thesis explores children’s developing awareness of regional accents, a relatively under-researched area of socioperceptual work. A series of four experiments are run with children in York between the ages of 2 and 9. These experiments are designed in order to investigate the process by which children progress from the ability to recognise familiar speakers to the ability to group speakers according to their regional accent. The Identification experiment establishes pre-school children’s ability to recognise familiar speakers, while the Recognition experiment finds that features of a familiar speaker’s accent forms part of the recognition process. The Grouping experiment goes on to investigate pre-school children’s ability to group speaker guises according to phonological regional variables based on a Yorkshire/Standard Southern British English (SSBE) accent distinction. Finally, the Second Grouping experiment explores older, primary school children’s ability to group different speakers according to phonological regional variables based on different accent distinctions (Yorkshire/SSBE, Yorkshire/Scottish and Yorkshire/North East). Throughout these experiments, independent variables relating to the children’s backgrounds are found to play a role in their abilities in the tasks. Generally, the girls perform better than the boys and there is an improvement throughout the ages. Furthermore, the children’s exposure to regional variation is found to significantly affect their performance in the Grouping and the Second Grouping experiments. Children with regular exposure to non-local speakers are found to perform better in these tasks overall. It is proposed that the findings from all four experiments are best explained by interpreting them through an exemplar theoretic account. In such an account, speaker categories develop from the abstraction across social-indexical properties of phonetic variation which accumulate through an individual’s experience with variation in their linguistic input.

This thesis explores meaning-making in children's peer-led classroom role-play and considers its contribution to learning during the first year of school. The aims of the research are to understand, firstly, how children of 4-5 years through their lexicogrammatical choices enact social roles and construe role-play scenarios that are reminiscent of real life, and secondly, what opportunities in these peer-led collaborative dialogues there may. be for learning language, learning through language and learning about language. The methodological and analytical approach draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the Vygotskian construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). I focus on linguistic and other semiotic data collected from children's interactions in fifteen video- recorded small group classroom role-plays, and ten audio recorded teacher role-play introductions with the whole class. Classroom role-play is reconceptualised theoretically as a genre (as defined within SFL) enabling a deeper understanding of children's meaning-making in this context. The findings show that the construal of the social scenario is based on the children's dialogic interaction and ability to eo-create individual genre stages. Offering insights into these stages, I show evidence of the children's sophisticated and creative linguistic and other semiotic choices. Through an interactional analytic framework, I consider how the children are able to extend their ZPD in six learning areas that have been linked to longer term social and academic learning. Findings show that the teacher introductions prime the children's learning which is then consolidated further in serendipitous opportunities forged by the particular nature of the child-led extended dialogic interaction of classroom role-play.

In 2003 Belfast Education and Library Board introduced an intervention programme COMET (Communication and Education Together) to tackle poor communication skills and language deficiencies among primary school children from socially disadvantaged background. As children’s language and communication skills can exert a significant influence on their learning as well as their social and emotional development, addressing this issue is of crucial importance. Applying a mixed-methods approach, this longitudinal study evaluates the effectiveness of the COMET intervention and examines its impact on the children’s development of oral language skills as well as their reading performance. The quantitative data demonstrated the children involved in the programme had exhibited the higher levels of oral language skills as well as reading and reading-related abilities than the children who had not participated in the intervention. The children involved in the programme improved at a faster rate and had caught up with, or exceeded their peers who had not followed the COMET approach. The effectiveness of the COMET intervention was also confirmed by the qualitative data. The interviews with the principals, literacy coordinators, teachers and learning support assistants revealed that the intervention was an effective, valuable and very informative initiative that was manageable and functioned well in a highly complex and busy school environment. The findings of this study suggest that the COMET intervention is an effective and successful initiative, which not only assists the children in their development of oral language skills and reading abilities, but also positively contributes to reducing the gaps that exists between the children, providing them with a solid foundation and a greater chance for experiencing a school success.

Fast mapping describes the cognitive skill of mapping new information onto its appropriate referent, from minimal exposure. It has been researched primarily in the field of word learning and evidence suggests that a pre-school child can link a novel word with its referent and retain this link up to 1 month later (e.g. Markson & Bloom, 1997). In 4 experiments, I investigated the retention of fast mapped novel words and facts after 1 week in 3- and 4-year-old children. In the fifth and final study, I investigated extension of object labels and facts. In study 1, participants demonstrated an impressive rate of retention of a link between a novel object label and its referent novel object after one week. In contrast, retention of colour labels, shape labels, texture labels and linguistic facts was no better than chance, despite good short-term performance. These data suggested that object labels are retained more easily than other word types and facts. Studies 2, 3 and 4 investigated why facts were not retained after one week in Study 1. Studies 2 and 3 explored whether fast-mapped facts are only retained in the long term if they are associated with novel rather than familiar objects. Neither study found any significant differences between conditions suggesting that the familiarity of the referent object has limited effect on the long-term retention of fast mapped facts. Study 2 evidenced poor retention whereas, Study 3 found good long-term retention in all conditions. Study 4 examined whether the experimenter’s naming of familiar objects and the participant selecting the target object, during exposure to a novel fact, affects retention. Retention of facts was weak and no different from chance in all conditions. These results indicated that long-term retention of fast-mapped words and facts was much more difficult than the early literature suggested. A thorough analysis suggested several factors may have affected retention e.g. repeat testing and gestural cues. A final study examined extension of object labels and facts to other similar-shaped novel objects. Children spontaneously extended a newly learned novel object label, but not a specific fact ("my uncle gave this to me"). However, they extended a more generalisable fact, ("it comes from a place called Modi") to other members of the same object category, to the same extent as object labels. This indicated that facts can be as extendable as words and supports the conclusion that learning words and facts utilize similar cognitive mechanisms.

No description available.

In the present study, a total of two experiments constitute a follow up study of the development of communication: referring expressions and other aspects of discourse in pre-school urban Algerian children. In the first experiment, the focus is on the differences between the use of definite and indefinite noun-phrase, in two conditions (freeplay/ structured play), and differences between the use of person pronouns (I, You) which are essentially deictic and the ones which are essentially intralinguistic or cohesive (3rd p: he, she, it) within the two conditions. The demonstrative pronouns and adverbs which are added in the grouping are less important with regard to the main factors of interest (definite vs. indefinite NP, and 1st and 2nd p. vs. 3rd p.), but in the global analysis they are of some interest as to the continuity from the more indexical function to the more intralinguistic or cohesive use of referring expressions. The categories which are of interest in the second experiment, are those which, strictly speaking, are used anaphorically. The person pronouns (I,You) and the demonstrative adverbs (or locatives: here, there) which were under scrutiny in the first experiment, are dropped in the second experiment. These categories of discourse are hardly found, because of the nature of the experiment, the purpose of which being the evaluation of the more intralinguistic uses of referring expressions. Unlike the first experiment which was designed to tackle both the deictic and intralinguistic uses of referring expressions by pre-school children, the second experiment was, thus, designed to measure the extent to which pre-schoolers engaged in some specific tasks (tasks which might prompt the use of some aspects of discourse), use referring expressions in their anaphoric sense, and track down these uses to their significance. Overall, the results of the present study, together with examples from other experimental data, indicate that the function of the definite article may initially be predominantly exophoric or deictic, in as much as this function signals a particular object or the actions of one salient object singled out from a group of others, in the extralinguistic context. The results of the first experiment showed a predominant presence of a developmental function (the nominative use of the definite reference) and a consistency in the appearance of such a function across categories (the deictic uses) developmentally associated with this function. The person pronouns '1"you' are typically 'exophoric' since they refer to aspects of the non-linguistic context and, by contrast 3rd p. pronouns (he, she, it, they) are essentially intralinguistic or cohesive. Similarly in the second experiment the results concerning the definite NP do agree with some recent findings about the deictic function of the definite article (which sometimes is used correctly when the object is alone, and at some other time it is used incorrectly in the instance of a non-specific reference). This, in fact, is quite different from an anaphoric or intralinguistic function: it grew out from the present data, that the apparently correct use of the definite NP is tied to situationally introduced referent and it is not truly anaphoric.

The research studies children's syntactic and textual transformations in the latter stages of primary school. Previous research has established that children transform their writing in response to participation in ever-changing communication contents and in the school context, in response to reading and writing texts which represent the world relatively abstractly. While much is understood across disciplines about the broad differences between children's and adult's writing, little is understood about the linguistic and conceptual evolution of the 'synoptic' mode in children's writing and their 'interests' in representing knowledge and experience from this perspective.