especially those of you who have contributed to the IRF thread, which is, I
guess, running out by now. I would just like to give some final comment on
the last of my examples (while the department is still in a holiday mood).
about my broken-toy example
>AL: Are we going to read?
>E: Sure: "Teodor the Teddybear had become old.
> He had lost an eye and an ear.
> And Mother has thrown him in the wastebin"=
>AL: =Yes! //Mo-
>E: //"because she doesn't want any broken toys around."
>AL: Noo! We don't either! When our toys break
> then we'll throw them away ar- arSELVES!
> We too are going to throw them away.
>E: Yes. Although if they're just a little broken,
> then we usually keep them.
> Cause you can play with them quite well anyway.
>AL: Yes...
>E: (goes on reading)
Rolfe asked:
>(just out of curiosity Eva, did <AL> ever come up to you afterward and ask
>if a toy was "broken enough" for the trash bin?)
-- which is the down-to-earth everyday way of asking about the somewhat
wider social context for this little fragment from that single transcript
of retroactive self-observation. As the event took place 18 years ago
before I was in any way involved in educational research I have no
systematic data... but I do have the advantage of knowing my son, Jens, and
my daughter Anna Lena as young adults. And so I know that as for throwing
things away, I can tell you all that I am a real squirrel, and that
(probably by persistent use of similar small means as in the example) I
have managed to transmit a very similar thriftiness to both of them (with,
fortunately, some personal variation). So, to give just a little more
information in everyday terms, of what might be done with the tools
suggested by Jay:
>local-semantic, but also intertextual and even social structural
-- then I read myself as responding to the zesty throw-away suggestion of
my daughter (which, I think, rather startled me) by a dosis of thrifty
moralism. While at the same time first acknowleding her Initiation (you
have a right to speak, my dear) and its contribution by a "yes" and by
formulating my "we don't throw away our toys" as a modification and
"softening" of her suggestion rather than as a contradiction. Using
qualifiers like "a little", "usually", "quite"...
Jay writes that
>_could_ also be analyzed as IRF, but I would probably not find it
>a particularly useful application of the tool in this case.
-- I agree that this would be stretching the IRF. I picked the example
because it was one of the many places where the kids broke into my reading
with comments which I picked up (if you take hers as the initiating move,
there IS an ABA structure, and she DOES sort of evaluate my moralism ,
positively, by yes-ing it). On the other hand, I do agree with your
"technical points", Jay, on the difficulties of clean decomposition and the
declining fruitfulness of squeezing too much into one analytic frame.
The observation of the phatic function of the triadic form was something
that occurred to me in the course of looking at my example through "xmca
eyes". Writing about it -- I think I was thinking of something of Eugene's
-- I forgot to mention as a balance (or imbalance) that this "dwelling
with" some favourite text seems to be a "family thing" rather than a
"school thing" (excepting possibly daycare pedagogy for small children).
"Returning to favourites" at school seems be to be more to do with songs
and music than with books and reading. (Well, hmm... poetry?)
>( -- and please don't forget the _pictures_!)
No, indeed not! In the general case of a systematic study of picture book
reading, that is. The book in my transcript was a favourite from the
library, and so all i can do about those pictures is remember them. As for
the role of the pictures in this kind of middle class "bonding by knowing",
I have just spent some interesting reading time in the holidays with
Svetlana Alpers' "The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth
century" (1983). Where she argues for the specifically Northern way of
linking *seeing* and *knowing*, bringing together Baconian empiricism, the
didactics of Comenius, the mobile-eye perspective and interest for textures
and detail that characterises Dutch art... There is at least one
illustration of a mother reading a picture book with her child: both
_looking_ _attentively_ into the book.
Actually this strong basic pattern of true knowledge as being of things
seen rather than of things told begins to explain to me the persistent
distrust of language as a means for real learning in the beginning of
numerical competence -- this "emptiness" assigned, for example to the first
uses by young children of the number word sequence... (woops, getting into
another topic!)
Back to duties!
Eva
(I mean... of course you do what _you_ find appropriate)