Telephone-mediated communication effects on young children’s oral and written narratives

Abstract

This study tested the effectiveness of a telephone-mediated language intervention on enhancing young children's recontextualization processes in narrative expression. A four-week training program was incorporated into a primary school language-arts curriculum to investigate whether telephone experience designed to heighten listener awareness would augment oral and written narrative skill development. Findings supported predictions that telephone experience would affect both oral and written narrative expression. The telephone intervention enhanced oral psycholinguistic and narrative productivity over the face-to-face comparison treatment. Older students wrote significantly more sophisticated stories than younger students and the telephone enriched the written narratives of older children more than did in-person training. These findings advance theory and highlight educational benefits of a focus on recontextualization processes in distanced communication for understanding and advancing the role of audience awareness in emergent literacy development.

Peer Interaction Does Not Always Improve Children’s Mental State Talk Production in Oral Narratives. A Study in 6- to 10-Year-Old Italian Children

“…As a consequence, children’s narratives resulted in a wide variety of contents. Prior studies emphasized the influence of the context and instructions on children’s narrative production (e.g., Berman, 1995; Cameron and Hutchison, 2009), and future studies should verify whether also mental state talk depends on the instructions given and the content of the stories produced.…”

Co-constructing family identities through young children’s telephone-mediated narrative exchanges

“…More specifically, it examines the nature of recontextualization processes in distanced language usage (Cameron & Hutchison, 2009;Cameron & Wang, 1999) in the context of familiar family members' communications over the telephone. Even more specifically, the narrative exchanges investigated here involve ubiquitous construction and reshaping of identities within families.…”

“…Constraints on communicating with non-vocal strategies such as gesture, as well as dependence on a physically shared environment, necessitate explicit, generally verbal, linguistic strategies to achieve mutual intersubjective understanding (H. H. Clark, 1996). Although some of our other studies have compared telephone with face-to-face communications (Cameron & Hutchison, 2009;Cameron & Lee, 1997;Cameron & Wang, 1999), here we focus exclusively on telephone talk. Thus, our study can be located within a perspective on talk-in-interaction, mediated by a specific information/communication technology (Aarsand & Aronsson, 2009).…”

“…The study reported here is part of a multi-method research program into children's telephone-mediated dialogues conducted over more than a decade (Cameron & Hutchison, 2009;Cameron & Wang, 1999;Gillen, 2000aGillen, , 2000bGillen, , 2002Gillen, Accorti Gamannossi, & Cameron, 2005;Gillen & Cameron, 2004). Our earlier studies revealed that children aged 3 and 4 recognize that their conversant is distant and show adaptive linguistic strategies to accommodate listeners' needs; that is, they recontextualize their language usage.…”

Associations between shyness, reluctance to engage, and academic performance

“…Activities such as ‘show and tell’, team-learning projects, buddy readers, group brainstorming discussions, instantiate this pedagogical strategy. Language arts classes promoting emergent literacy are designed to support not only simply reading and writing, but also listening and speaking, the cornerstones of both the comprehension and production and the oral and written aspects of academic discourse (Cameron, Hunt, & Linton, 1996; Cameron & Hutchison, in press). …”