Between stories and play: the development of explanatory discourse at home during early childhood
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35305/revistairice.vi46.1850Keywords:
children’s discursive development, explanation, storybook reading, playAbstract
This paper aims to contribute to the study of the acquisition of explanation as a form of extended discourse during childhood. The explanatory talk produced in storybook reading and play situations with 30-month-old children and their caregivers was analyzed. Participants lived in middle income argentinean homes in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The explanatory discourse units were analyzed according to the type of explanation, who initiated and produced them, and their level of distance from the immediate environment of the situation. The results showed that in both activity contexts, participants produced different types of explanations, primarily initiated by the mother. During play, children independently produced more explanations (vs. storybook reading). In these situations, there was also a tendency towards a predominance of high-level explanations that contributed to the use of non-immediate speech of high relevance for children's cognitive and socio-emotional development. Taken together, the study findings provide additional evidence about the relevance of early childhood experiences at home for discursive development, and contribute to account for the specificity of the two activity contexts considered to promote the development of explanatory discourse.
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