I did my homework:
>In my perception of myself as a reading MC parent I did not as much
>stop-and-ask-questions
>as pick up what the children commented on and respond/ /augment to it.
>I do not have a large
>set of data on this, but have one reading session taped and transcribed.
>Not here, but I will
>check my impression as to the proportion of initiatives over the weekend
>-- I may be wrong.
Well, yes and no. First I had misremembered the date: the transcript says
1977 instead of -76 so my son is five and a half and my daugther three and
a half. Then, I was very right about the assymmetric participation between
the younger and the older child.
As was to be expected I did ask quite a lot of questions after all (I sort
of expected to be misremembering this. I think misperceiving one's own
acting may even be part of the IRE pattern.) The questions were
concentrated mostly in three or four rounds of going through the rich
illustrations of some page and looking for all the story characters. On the
other hand, there _are_ a lot of comments made by the children -- i.e.
_they_ bring some topic into the spotlight of our attention. I know that
our "family style of reading" sometimes disturbed visiting children, who
did not think it was appropriate to interrupt into the reading with
comments. (What I have called comments are all related to the text/
/story.)
In the transcript my son makes 22 comments that I respond to, 7 that are
not responded to, and two more that are anticipations of the text I am
reading. He answers 17 questions that I ask, and 6 questions that are in
the text. He also asks 4 questions that I answer and one more that I
respond to by a counter-question. In two of these instances _he_ performs
the I and the E of an IRE sequence. (He's learning!) Three times he urges
me to go on reading.
My daughter makes 10 comments that I respond to, 3 that her brother
responds to, 13 that are not responded to, and one that is an anticipation
of the text. She asks 4 questions that I answer. One question that is not
responded to she answers by herself. (Finding something in the picture).
I make 13 comments that my son responds to, 7 that are not responded to and
4 that my daughter responds to. I ask 17 questions that are all answered by
my son, as are the 6 questions where I act as a mouthpiece for the text.
One question of mine is not responded to.
I might add here that literacy has not been my field of research -- I'm on
the numbers side.
Eva