Word searches: on the use of verbal and non-verbal resources during classroom talk

of pointing at pictures and moving materials towards the teacher. They are thus
directed mainly at the local visual resources that the teacher regularly uses to support
oral language teaching in small groups. That these resources are visually shared
between the teacher and the child is an important component of an oral language
lesson. Whether absence of symbolic gestures reflects the fact that a child with a
developmental language difficulty lacks a fully established linguistic and gestural
system, or whether the gestures are influenced by the local context of the interaction
(visual teaching resources), remains unclear. More data will be needed to clarify this
issue.

The findings have several implications for teaching and therapy practices and for
training providers. Sensitive withhold of a candidate lexical item or correction is
recommended in order to maximise opportunity for self-repair. The importance of
accepting children’s silence after teacher questions is already acknowledged in the
literature because of the potential to improve the quality of children’s responses
(Walsh and Sattes, 2005). Silences during word searches operate differently because
they occur at a non-completion point during the child’s turn. Tolerance of these
silences is important, especially when gaze is averted and pitch height indicates non-
completion of the turn. Adults could model appropriate direct invitation techniques
such as specific wh-questions (‘What is it called?’; ‘What does it begin with?’) and
support their use during interaction. Teachers and therapists could also model self-
repair strategies in a variety of linguistic domains. Examples from the current data
include: phonologically, an initial sound self-cue strategy; semantically, category
information; syntactically, a sentence frame fitted to the elusive noun.

22

<<   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   >>

More intriguing information