Special Issue: Peer Talk and Pragmatic Development

[Shoshana Blum-Kulka]

Announcement:

Issue 3 of Discourse Studies in 2004 is a special issue on Peer Talk and
Pragmatic Development, edited by Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Catherine E. Snow.
The issue is devoted to the topic of child-child interactions in an attempt
to resuscitate interest in the study of naturally occurring peer talk.
Attention to the nature of peer talk, and to the consequences of peer talk
for children's social and linguistic development has been sparse,
intermittent, and scattered since the initiation of the topic in the late
seventies of the last century.  The five papers in this issue span an array
of cultures, languages, and settings, but all study natural language and
display the opportunities peer talk offers young children to negotiate
complicated social challenges using language, and thus to develop more
sophisticated language capacities. Ultimately, the editors hope this special
issue will contribute to laying the theoretical and methodological
foundation for the systematic study of naturally occurring peer talk among
children.



Table of Contents:

Discourse studies

Volume 6 Number 3

SPECIAL ISSUE: Peer talk and Pragmatic Development

Guest editors: Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Catherine E. Snow

Editorial:  Why study peer talk?
Shoshana Blum-Kulka and Catherine Snow

ARTICLES

The social and discursive spectrum of peer talk
Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Deborah Huck-Taglicht and Hanna Avni

Building peer relations in talk: Toddlers' peer conversation in childcare
Jane Katz

'When your powers combine: I am Captain Planet': The developmental
significance of individually and collaboratively composed stories
Ageliki Nicolopoulou and Elizabeth S. Richner

Repetition and joking in children's second language conversations: Playful
recycllings in an immersion classroom
Asta Cekaite and Karin Aronsson

Explanatory discourse in young second language learners' peer play
Vibeke Grover Aukrust