Discursive practices in family dinner talk and classroom discourse: A contextual comparison

The present study investigates the interplay of communication, socialization practices and educational opportunities by reconstructing the discursive practices of the same children in different contexts: family dinner talk and classroom interaction. From a rich corpus of naturally occurring interactions of eleven children before and after school enrollment, two cases are selected for presentation. The microanalytic reconstruction demonstrates how discursive practices are socio-culturally situated and differ in terms of communicative genres, topics and communicative demands, both between families and contexts. When the teacher does not make communicative investments to bridge divergences in teacher-student interactions, children lack the external resources necessary for utilizing discourse as a means of learning, both from a microgenetic and ontogenetic perspective.