This research deals with the discourse of young children during peer interaction in pretend play in the wake of reading stories and examining the relation between the characteristics of that discourse and the children's literacy skills. The purpose of this study is to describe children's negotiations in developing their play and the way children perform the transformation in order to construct their imaginary activity.

The data were collected in Kindergartens and first and second grades. The pre-service teacher read a story to a group of four or five children and thereafter encouraged them to play it. Discourse analysis was carried out on the basis of a coding scheme designed to categorize thirty transcripts.

The findings show that children are capable of collaborative negotiation in peer interaction concerning the play frame while improvising and proposing innovative ideas. In doing so, they often need to make symbolic representation according to the requirement of the particular plot (role, artifacts, scenario, and so on).

A quantitative analysis shows that most of the children’s negotiations takes place in a “meta-play” domain and are about artifacts and role-taking. The performance of symbolic representation (transformation) appears in two phases: the planning and the acting out of the transformation. A considerable portion of the representational content of the transformations is devoted to characters in the story. Looking at the representational medium of transformation, various means of symbolic representation can be seen: verbal statement, expression by gesture, use of artifacts and the use of the characters' language in the story.

To sum up, children's peer interaction during pretend play is an activity with great potential for social and cognitive learning, and can be an opportunity to foster literacy skills, such as negotiations and symbolic representation.

This research deals with the discourse of young children during peer interaction in pretend play in the wake of reading stories and examining the relation between the characteristics of that discourse and the children's literacy skills. The study's aim is to describe children's negotiations in developing their play and the way children perform symbolic representation in order to construct their imaginary activity. This paper is based on a study that has been on-going on for the last three years in the Early Childhood Department of a teachers' college. The study was motivated by the need felt by the staff to propose an educational approach to emergent literacy appropriate to young children's developmental needs.

Peer discourse takes place during face-to-face interaction between children without adult intervention, thus creating oral culture (Blum-Kulka, 2005; Corsaro, 2003; Sawyer, 2001). Children's peer discourse has been found to scaffold discourse abilities in general as well as encourage the emergence of various genres of literate discourse (Blum-Kulka and Snow, 2004).

Our research is based on the assumption that there is a relation between peer interaction (pretend play) and the development of cognitive, social and literacy skills (Pellegrini, 1980; Roskos, 2000; Harris, 2000; Dickinson & Tabors, 2001). Harris (2000) claims that pretend play is an optimal context for the development of abilities involved in processing written texts, since it requires the players to temporarily set aside ongoing reality and take the imaginary hero's point of view.

Research has pointed out that pretense involves "out of play frame" negotiation between players with differing views, role-play requiring acting out others' thoughts and actions Sawyer, 1997; Lillard, 1998).

Pretend play often requires the ability to deal with symbolic representation, thus transforming objects and actions (Goncu and Klein, 2001; Smith, 2005). It is furthered by interactive social dialogue and negotiation and it involves role taking, script knowledge, and improvisation (Bergen, 2002). When children pretend, they transform and focus on an object's abstract properties rather than its concrete attributes. They invent new uses for familiar toys and props when they play scenario requires it (Cook, 2000), sometimes describing missing prop by using words and gestures. In doing so, they become aware of different symbolic systems that will serve them later when they start mastering letters and numbers (Pellegrini and Galda, 1991; Williamson and Silvern, 1991; Einarsdottir, 2000).

Aims of the study

1. Negotiations by young children during peer oral discourse.

2. Symbolic representation (transformation) during pretend play.

The specific questions asked were:

1. What are the characteristics of the children’s negotiation during pretend play?


2. To what extent and how do children use symbolic representation (transformation)?

Procedure

The data were collected in Kindergartens and first and second grades. The pre-service teacher read a story to a group of four or five children and thereafter encouraged them to play it. The children played for about twenty minutes. “Neutral” artifacts were provided for the children to use at will. The entire children's activities during the “story playing session” were videotaped and documented by the observer (both speech and gestures).

Method

Discourse analysis was carried out on the basis of a coding scheme designed to categorize thirty transcripts, each with an average of 200 turns (a total of 5854 turns). Negotiations were divided into four categories: 1) artifacts 2) role-taking 3) the plot of the story and   4) time and place of the imaginary play.

In coding the transformation we realized the need to draw a distinction between the representational medium and the representational content (Matthews, 1977; Perner, 1991).

Findings

* The findings show children are capable of collaborative negotiation concerning the play frame, while improvising and proposing innovative ideas. They develop literate and cognitive skills, apparently because of the need to plan and convince others to accept their proposals. This is done while maintaining the story structure and sequence.

Most of the children’s negotiations take place in a “meta-play” domain ("out of frame").

Quantitative analysis shows that the negotiations are divided into four types: 1) about artifacts (36%); 2) about role-taking (34%) 3) about the plot of the story just read to them (20%) and 4) about time and place of the imaginary play (10%).

*The findings show children have the ability to do transformation on objects and actions in symbolic and creative modes, thus performing symbolic representation. The data encoding reveals that transformation occurs in two phases: the planning of the transformation, and the acting out of the representation.

Quantitative analysis shows that 17% of the children’s turns during their play relate to transformation (these data do not include the planning of transformation).

Looking at the representational content of the transformation, it can be seen that a considerable portion of the transformations is devoted to characters in the story (70%). One-fifth of the turns were devoted to artifacts (22%), and 8% to phenomena and situations arising from the plot.

Looking at the representational medium of transformation, various means of symbolic representation can be seen: 1) verbal statement (34%) 2) expression by gesture (29%)

3) use of artifacts (24%) and 4) use of the characters' language in the story (13%).

To sum up, children practice their cognitive and social skills in peer interaction during pretend play in the wake of a story. In doing so, they often need to negotiate and act out their roles, to explain their "pretend" behaviors to other participants and to regulate compliance with the rules. At the same time they often need to make symbolic representation according to the requirement of the particular plot (role, artifacts, scenario, and so on).

Educational Implications

Children's peer interaction during pretend play is an activity with great potential for social and cognitive learning, and can be an opportunity to foster literacy skills, such as negotiations and symbolic representation.

Our findings indicate that the discourse characteristics associated with pretend play in the wake of a story are such that it might be worthwhile to design educational programs to foster literacy by these means.