Contribution
Description: The present paper is related to a research for a PH.D. in educational sciences. The research concerns the entry in writing culture through activities of reading-comprehension around albums in classrooms of French maternal school when children are still non-readers. The study takes into account the institutional form of the maternal school (through official instructions, curricula…). It focuses how objects related to writing culture (such as the discovery of functions of writing and the sound reality of language, the construction of a first literary culture…) are taught, constructed and appropriated in situation by children during preschool age. The population concerned children of 2 to 6 of age. The institution is divided in 3 sections corresponding to children aged 2-4, 4-5 and 5-6. The progressive entry in writing culture around albums is realised through the mediation of teachers' reading and through the specific characteristics of the album where images play a great role in the form of the activity of comprehension settled. It implies a complex process of meaning-making which needs to be shared in reference to the objects aimed at teaching.
The theoretical framework comes from three main disciplines: psychology through the historico-cultural conception of Vygotsky, didactics and semiotics. Vygotski's thought concerning the process of teaching-learning and the specificity of preschool development is the core of our approach, signifying that the psychic development is determined by the culture and its tools as well as by the institutional form of the institution concerned. Besides, following Vygotsky, we consider that teaching and learning are tightly linked.
Consequently, we award a central place to the work of the teacher and to the taught object (cf. Geneva School of Didactics) in relation to the way the activity of comprehension of children is built and how the process of acculturation to written language takes place thanks to the album in situation. Our work, registered in the field of the sciences of the education, leans on a descriptive methodology directed to the observation of ordinary situations in classroom. The situations retained for the observation which we qualify as situations of reading-comprehension around the album come from observations realised all along the scolarisation at maternal school.
The analyses will explore the question of the plural character of semiotic mediation, the linguistic one (through the oralised reading made by the teacher) and the non-linguistic one (through the illustrations of the album) together with the various codes implied in both. In respect to the work of the teacher, the research focuses teaching and its institutional specificities where the semiotic dimensions of mediation are embedded, which play a key-role in the process of meaning-making of children in the process of comprehension and is a condition of the acculturation at reading culture aimed in this kind of situations where children are still non-readers.
As we are in an exploratory phase, our paper will be based on the presentation of our theoretical framework and questions of research together with the methodology design. A first illustration of our analyses based on a first collection of data will be done.
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