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Making a statement: an analysis of teacher‐pupil talk within ‘child conferences’ in the Primary Language Record
Author(s) -
Stierer Barry
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
the curriculum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.843
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1469-3704
pISSN - 0958-5176
DOI - 10.1080/0958517950060305
Subject(s) - formative assessment , pedagogy , literacy , mathematics education , pupil , psychology , scale (ratio) , physics , quantum mechanics , neuroscience
This research focuses upon a very particular instance of teacher‐pupil discourse in primary school classrooms, viz. one‐to‐one ‘child conferences’ between individual primary school pupils and their teachers, carried out as part of the Primary Language Record (Barrs et al., 1988). Child conferences were developed to enable teachers to discuss with individual pupils aspects of their background, experience, interests and learning in the language and literacy area. The rationale for the research relates to the significance of the child conference as a type of informal assessment, and as an example of a particular kind of spoken language in the classroom. This article reports on the first stage of the research, which comprised an analysis of one teacher's conferences with six of her Year 3 (7‐8‐year‐old) pupils. The purpose of this analysis was to develop a range of possible conceptual perspectives for analysing teacher‐pupil talk within the child conference, as a basis for a larger‐scale project involving a larger number of teachers and schools and a wider age range of children. The article sets out these analytical perspectives, illustrated with examples from transcripts of the six tape‐recorded conferences. The discussion evaluates the usefulness of ‘formative assessment’, ‘classroom discourse’, ‘teaching and learning’ and ‘speech and writing’ as perspectives for gaining a greater understanding of the talk within these examples of child conferences. Issues emerging from this analysis which will be examined in the larger study include: the extent to which the conferences inform future teaching; the ‘ground rules’ governing teacher‐pupil talk within the conferences; the function of the conference as a setting for teaching and learning; the negotiation of pupil identities within the conference; and the relationship between the spoken language within the conference and the written language of the resulting record.