Children's Voices

Drawing on ethnographic research inside and outside the classroom, Janet Maybin investigates how 10- to 12-year-old children use talk and literacy to construct knowledge about their social worlds and about themselves, as they negotiate the transition from childhood into adolescence. Through the analysis of examples of talk, 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.

A linguistic ethnographic account of 10- to 12-year-olds' use of informal language practices to construct knowledge and identity.

JANET MAYBIN is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication at the Open University, U.K. 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.