Enhancing Pre-schoolers' Reasoning Skills: An Intervention to Optimise the Use of Justificatory Speech Acts During Peer Interaction

Abstract

It has long been acknowledged that justificatory speech is linked with both social and cognitive development. Yet many studies suggest that pre-school children might lack the ability or experience to produce such discourse in routine interaction. In contrast, researchers such as Eisenberg and Garvey (1981) have found evidence of pre-schoolers' justifications in conflictual play contexts. Although this has positive implications for child development, the conflictual context may sit uneasily with parents' and teachers' expectations. It is encouraging therefore that McWilliam (1999) has demonstrated that pre-schoolers can produce justificatory dialogue in both conflictual and nonconflictual situations, even if occurrence in the latter context is less frequent. Based on this, the aim of the present study was to encourage pre-schoolers' production of justificatory discourse during peer exchanges in a non-conflictual context. Twenty-two dyads from a state-run nursery were subject to verbal modelling of either justificatory speech (experimental condition) or a more commonly used alternative (control condition) in daily ten-minute sessions over five consecutive days. All interactions were videorecorded for subsequent coding and analysis. Results showed that both 'why' questions and 'justifications' were significantly higher in the experimental condition, indicating that pre-schoolers' explanatory speech can be effectively enhanced by a cooperative intervention programme.

Transforming Talk And Phonics Practice: Or, How Do Crabs Clap?

“…Alongside changes in view of language is a shift to more academic English as children are encouraged not only to respond to a general question, but also to justify their responses. Research has shown that such interventions can be effective with young children (McWilliam & Howe, 2004;Wegerif, Mercer, & Rojas-Drummond, 1999). What we see so clearly from this study are the drawbacks of surface justification when compared with legitimised, meaningful justification of responses.…”

Thinking skills in the early years: A literature review

“…A particular feature of reasoning described by McWilliam and Howe (2004) is the use of 'justificatory speech'. This is the kind of speech that substantiates and justifies assertions and opinions.…”

Metapragmatic comments indexing conversational practices of preschool children in institutional discourse

“…Preschool teachers are considered to be significant interlocutors among the range of communicators within the children's social network outside home. The quality of the interpersonal relations in the teaching-learning situation has an important role in promoting the development of linguistic and cognitive skills and in being a major step towards appropriating decontextualized and other forms of extended discourse (Dickinson, 1994;Dickinson & Tabors, 2002;Kontos & Wilcox-Herzog, 1997;McWilliam & Howe, 2004). Snow, Tabors & Dickinson (2001) and others found significant associations between the nature of children's conversations with teachers in preschool classrooms and the development of their language literacy abilities in later years.…”