Children's Voices

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 1-8

3. Setting the Scene

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 9-31

4. Context, Genre and Frames

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 32-53

5. Dialogue and Collaboration: Girls and Boys

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 54-74

6. Reported Voices and Evaluation

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 75-95

7. Articulating Dialogue: Agency and Gender in Children’s Anecdotes

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 96-114

8. Narrative Reflections and Moral Complexities

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 115-139

9. Schooled Voices

   • Janet Maybin

   Pages 140-159

10. Official and Unofficial Literacies

    • Janet Maybin

    Pages 160-183

11. Conclusion

    • Janet Maybin

    Pages 184-189

12. Back Matter

    Pages 190-207

    PDF

Janet Maybin investigates how 10-12 year-olds use talk and literacy to construct knowledge about their social worlds and themselves. She shows how children use collaborative verbal strategies, stories of personal experience and the reworked voices of others to investigate the moral order and forge their own identities.

• evaluation
• identity
• socialisation

'It is not often that you are gripped by an academic book. I read Janet Maybin's book through in almost one reading, gripped by the range of insights she offers into children's off-record talk, her judicious use of social and cultural theory, her many new insights into the significance of styling and voicing emotion and evaluation in everyday dialogue, her careful building of new ways of talking about and describing talk among children. This is a highly significant contribution to language in education, to our understandings of language use and multiple but hitherto unnoticed aspects of the ways knowledge is constructed. It is a book that is likely to refocus educational research for many years to come, shifting the research landscape to the importance of talk outside the classroom for our understanding of 'official' talk inside the classroom. It is a book that is written in a lively and engaging style. In fact, it is a book that is not just gripping; it is genuinely groundbreaking.' - Ron Carter, Professor of Modern English Language, Nottingham University, UK

'Most impressive are the ways in which the work brings to life hybridity, emotion, and moral evaluation...Children's Voices serves as an important exemplar of the artful ways young people fashion lives and learning through dialogue, and of the compelling need for ethnographers, educators and linguists to find equally artful ways to render their accounts of language and learning.' - Deborah Hicks, Professor of Education and Women's Studies at Duke University, North Carolina, USA

'This book will be a valuable resource for educational researchers as well as teachers seeking to understand the importance of informal talk and the complexities of different forms of children's talk across official and unofficial school spaces and throughout the school day.' - Dennis Kwek, Language and Education, 22:2, 2008

JANET MAYBIN is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication at the Open University, UK. She has written extensively for Open University courses on language, literacy and learning, and also researches and writes on children's and adults' informal language and literacy practices. She originally trained as a social anthropologist.

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