{"title":"Using genre to explain how children linguistically co-construct make-believe social scenarios in classroom role-play","authors":"Sarah Jane Mukherjee","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0185","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0185","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper argues that classroom role-play can be conceptualised theoretically as an oral genre, as defined within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The work draws on analysis of 15 video-recorded child-led role-plays in which groups of three 4–5 year-old children engage in five different life-like social scenarios. The study is underpinned by SFL register and genre analysis of the children’s interactions, and the findings reveal how the children’s linguistic choices have a direct impact on the dynamically unfolding role-play, and how imaginary scenarios are construed by the instantiation of individual genre stages, some of which serve to regulate the role-play and others that mimic real life social scenarios. The findings suggest that the two different types of stages construe two separate, but interwoven contexts, with the make-believe context often being dependent on the regulative context. The paper offers new insights into the ways in which SFL can reveal nuances in children’s dialogic and dynamic language in play.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.