But What Do Children Really Think? Discourse Analysis and Conceptual Content in Children's Talk

Abstract

A discourse-analytical approach to children's knowledge is offered, focusing on extracts of classroom talk between a teacher and a kindergarten class. After rejecting the possibility of defining concepts and memories as cognitive states prior to or underlying discourse, the talk is examined for how participants define and deal with such notions as a feature of the sequential and rhetorical organization of discourse. An argument is advanced for the analysis of knowledge, reality, and education as public, interactionally managed participants' concerns that can be studied as discursive practices. It is argued that the study of discourse does not ignore nondiscursive realms of mind and reality but permits analysis of how those things are defined, so that any explanatory appeal to what is beyond or behind the talk is unwarranted.