Teacher children interaction and concept-development.

ROSEMBERG, C.R. Y SILVA, M.L.

Discourse Processes

Routledge,Taylor & Francis Group

Lugar: Philadelphia ; Año: 2009 vol. 46 p. 572 - 591

1532-6950

This paper analyzes the interaction between teachers and children in kindergarten classrooms, in order to identify and describe the teachers? discursive moves that retrieve the children?s previous utterances to clarify and delimit concepts represented in them. The perspective of the study assumes that cognition, discourse and social context are interrelated. (Vygotsky, 1964, 1978, Bruner, 1977, 1986; Rogoff, 1993; Wertsch, 1991, 1998; Nelson, 1996; del Río & Alvarez, 2000). The body of data consists of 90 teacher-children situations of interaction that took place in seven kindergarten classrooms of 4- and 5-year old children. The classrooms are in community schools located in marginal urban neighborhoods in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires. The analysis follows a qualitative procedure, the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1991). This leads to the identification and description of different ways in which the teachers re-conceptualize information offered by the children, helping them not only to specify, define and characterize the underlying concepts of the words they use with a limited meaning, but also to understand the differences and relationships between concepts, ultimately promoting the generalization process and the construction of hierarchical taxonomies.