Reflective Talk Research Articles

Investigating children's meaning-making and the emergence of musical interaction in group improvisation

This paper describes what improvising came to mean to a group of 12-year-old children who, as members of a weekly lunchtime ‘Music Creators' Soundings Club’, were watched, listened to, and invited to reflect upon the process of group improvisation. Focusing on musical interaction as it emerged in the earliest stages of this work, this paper shows the relationship between children's actions and their reflective talk. It identifies emerging principles in a sequence of musical examples that portray children making music together and shows the nature of group improvisation as socially and musically inclusive. These children valued group improvisation most for its immediacy and continuity. Ways of delighting in how children behave musically and reveal their musical learning through conversation are discussed.

Constructing Knowledge About and With Informational Texts: Implications for Teacher-Librarians Working With Young Children

Although young children's developing understandings of the concept of story have been thoroughly researched, children's information literacy development has gone largely unexamined. This article reports a study of young children's understandings of informational texts and offers a grounded theory of their information literacy development. Six broad conceptual categories of children's talk emerged from the data analysis: informational text knowledge; world knowledge; representing meaning; building connections; reflective talk; and relational talk. These categories represented the various facets of children's engagement with nonfiction texts and revealed how these children constructed meaning about and with this type of text. The findings from this study have implications for early childhood education and affect the teaching of information literacy and the role of the teacher-librarian.

“I've Seen You Read”: Reading Strategies in a First-Grade Class

This study reports on first-graders' differentiated values of reading strategies that emerged within a multiethnic urban classroom over the course of 20 weeks. The researcher served as a participant observer during the language arts block four days a week, conducted formal interviews with each child, and met weekly with the teacher. At the end of the study, the findings were shared with the children. They responded in writing, orally in a whole class discussion, and orally in small group meetings with the researcher. The paper focuses on the ways students revealed their assumptions about appropriate reading strategies through both behavior and reflective talk. Tensions that developed during these weeks between strategies that rely on the “pieces” of language, such as phonics, versus those that relied on the “wholes,” like memory, are also addressed.