Michal Hamo, Shoshana Blum-Kulka & Gonen Hacohen
From observation to transcription and back: Theory, practice and interpretation in the analysis of children’s naturally occurring discourse
Our article grew out of ongoing discussions among our research team during the first year of a project exploring the emergence of different discourse genres in young children's peer talk. This year of data collection in preschools – a new and complex field for us – served us with the opportunity to reflect on our methodological and theoretical premises, their inter relations and respective contributions. The current article discusses this reflexive process, arguing for the wedding of ethnography with CA methods for transcription as crucial elements in a multidisciplinary approach advocated for the study of child discourse.
Michal Hamo is a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include applying discourse pragmatics and conversation analysis to media discourse, with a focus on the relations between popular televisual texts and cultural ethos, and to child discourse.
Shoshana Blum-Kulka is Carl and Matilda Newhouse Professor in the Department of Communication and School of Education at the Hebrew University. Her research interests are in the fields of cross-cultural pragmatics, pragmatic development, interlanguage pragmatics, language education, family discourse and media discourse. Her most recent books are Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization (Lawrence Erlbaum,1997) and Talking with Adults: The Contribution of Multiparty Talk to Language Development (2002, Lawrence Erlbaum, co-edited with Catherine Snow). She is currently working on a book on Child Discourse, which grew out of an ongoing longitudinal ethnographic and discourse analytical study of pragmatic development.
Gonen Hacohen is a doctoral student at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research interests revolve around the relations between interaction and culture.
