Contribution
Description: This contribution deals with early literacy awareness during an interactive reading of a wordless picture-book, involving 3 year-old preschoolers and their teacher, who was previously familiarized with formal pictorial cues.
This paper follows studies underlining the relevance of interactive picture-book reading programs in day-care especially for children from low-income families (Dickinson & Neuman, 2003; Saada-Robert, 2003) and studies concerning narrative comprehension during reading sessions of a wordless picture-book with a clear narrative structure (Paris & Paris, 2003).
The purpose of this study is hence to analyze how picture comprehension skills develop during the reading session and to underline the joint semiopictorial constructive process between the teacher and preschool children, i.e. picture-based construction of meaning, which leads later on to semiographic awareness, i.e. text-based elaboration of meaning (Saada-Robert et al, 2003). This paper will focus on which components of semiopictorial knowledge are addressed by the teacher and the children and on the progression of this joint construction during the session.
Methodology: This contribution refers to the framework of didactic situated microgenesis which analyzes the ongoing joint construction of knowledge within the classroom context of socio-cognitive interactions, focusing on both the teaching and learning processes (Saada-Robert & Balslev, 2004). This co-construction relies primarily on the elaboration of a common zone of meaning by which the teacher and the children attempt to merge their own representations (Gamba, Martinet & Saada-Robert, submitted).
After a brief overview of the theoretical background of didactic microgenesis, and following its first methodological steps, this paper will focus on the main units of analysis relevant to semiopictorial knowledge, defined through a deductive approach specifying picture comprehension skills and the formal and narrative analysis of the wordless picture book prior to the reading session, and through an inductive approach allowing components of knowledge to emerge from data itself (Gamba, submitted).
The progression of knowledge will then be studied by determining, in chronological order, sequences of dominant components addressed during interaction.
Conclusions: An asymmetrical co-construction of knowledge is expected, the teacher having a higher degree of semiopictorial expertise (Gamba, 2005), and should address formal contents of pictures more systematically whereas children are expected to evolve from descriptive cues towards more narrative ones (Gamba, submitted).
As for co-construction of meaning, a more symmetrical outcome is expected, as the teacher should lean on the children's own contents of knowledge, whilst redirecting them towards more complex narrative cues.
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