School of Education research seminar by Brooke Scriven

Brooke Scriven is presenting a seminar this Wednesday, 20th September at 3-4pm in the School of Education research seminar series. The seminar can be attended in person in Wagga Wagga, and via video conference in Albury.

Brooke's presentation draws on her doctoral research investigating how a young child accomplishes digital literacy practices through family interactions during technology use at home. She recently delivered a version of her presentation at the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis conference in Kolding, Denmark.

Title: "Hello Barbie": The social organisation of a young child's telephone conversation in pretend play with digital technologies

Abstract: Conversation analytic research of telephone conversations has generated significant discoveries of the orderly and sequential nature of talk. Recent findings of video recorded telephone conversations have shown how talk is connected to ongoing activity continuing beyond the call (Mondada, 2008). However, little is known about how young children orient to the orderliness of talk in pretend telephone conversations, or how their talk relates to the ongoing activity of their play. This presentation considers a young child's pretend telephone call as she views the music video Queen of the waves (from the film Barbie in a mermaid's tale) on YouTube. Data are drawn from a video recording made by the child's mother in their home. The perspective of ethnomethodology and the analytic method of conversation analysis were used to sequentially examine the child's pretend telephone conversation with Barbie. The child dials Barbie's telephone number and talks to her using a toy mobile phone. Her talk is touched off by objects onscreen and named in the song lyrics of the music video. Discussion considers how the child orients to and uses the digital technologies (the YouTube video on the laptop and the toy mobile phone), and draws on her understandings of how people interact over the telephone, to socially organise a telephone conversation with Barbie in her pretend play.

Reference:

Mondada, L. (2008). Using video for a sequential and multimodal analysis of social interaction: Videotaping institutional telephone calls. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(3). Retrieved from www.qualitative-research.net