We propose a theoretical view of peer talk as a ‘double opportunity space’, functioning concurrently on the plane of meaning making within childhood culture, as a locus for the co-construction of children’s social world and peer culture, while at the same time affording opportunities for the development of discursive learning (Blum-Kulka, 2005; Blum-Kulka et al., 2004: 308). In the present article, we provide further evidence for this twofold concept by analyzing peer talk in preschoolers’ genre of argumentation in natural interactions. We show that argumentative events, identified in peer talk, indeed display affordances on both planes. On the plane of childhood culture, we pinpoint the ways argumentative events maintain and/or transform the social order and display features of children’s culture. On the developmental plane, we show how children’s argumentative moves and discursive strategies incorporate innovative child-unique strategies, as well as strategies which echo discursive conventions from the adult culture, allowing for the refinement of both types of strategies through interactional display. These findings illustrate the integration of a cultural and a developmental approach within one model of peer talk discursive events.
Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were analyzed, as well the different text structure quality of children’s argumentative texts. The results indicate that that both literacy ability and text structure quality increase with age. However, not all the increases in the different literacy abilities are significant. Text structure quality—a measure of text organization and ideation—becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality text structure in fourth and fifth grades in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. The predictive power of the different literacy abilities to sustain a better-structured text varies across ages.
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