This volume helps parents and early childhood educators understand the nature of early literacy at home and at school. Ways in which nursery school structures support and extend childrens's literacy are explored. This volume, based on an 18-month ethnographic study of story reading and other literacy events in nursery school, describes parents' attitudes, beliefs, and values about literacy, nursery school organization of time and space, how reading and writing is used by nursery school participants and how story reading events help children learn to make sense of books and use books to...

In academic colloquia the most privileged and noble mission of universities is exercised: the advancing and testing of ideas, the production of truth and knowledge, an activity that is nothing less than the the essential sound for a place of thought. But, as ideas advance and are tested, what are people doing? What is the role for emotions and relationships? What worries do faculty and graduate students bring to this occasion? What problems do participants face as they talk with each other? How are problems made visible in talk and given attention through talk? Colloquium speaks to these...

This work originates from the need to develop an integrated dynamic model of negation in discourse that is adequate for understanding the role of negation in an extensive and complex piece of discourse. Most work on negation is strongly influenced by traditional philosopical problems, but little work has been carried out in the area of discourse.

Approaches to negation within the functional-cognitive tradition tend to focus of specific agents of negation, its function as a speech act, or its cognitive model. Few attempts have been made to propose an integrated discourse model, studies...

This book examines the use of language in face-to-face encounters between some university students and their academic counselors. It describes the role language plays in shaping institutional role identities, in accomplishing institutional tasks and activities, and in constituting associated knowledge and affective stances. It documents how the academic counselors and student clients do what they do through grammatical and interactional details. Put more generally, it investigates how certain aspects of institutional life are lived linguistically. Methodologically, this book focuses on...

Conversational analysis is an interdisciplinary field that draws on cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, pragmatics, and the ethnography of communication. These various disciplines provide both qualitative and quantitative foundations for conversational analysis. The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate what communication is: what its goals are, why people talk, and how conversational goals are achieved. The primary concerns of this study are to investigate the interactions among cognition, emotion, and social norms, using the floor model proposed by Edelsky (1981) and...