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Abstract
This article discusses how children in New Zealand make meaning in their spontaneous pretend play from kindergarten (four years old) through to their first year of primary school (five years old). The findings discussed here are taken from a wider project investigating children’s storytelling where 12 child participants were video recorded during their everyday storytelling experiences over a three-year period. This article reveals how children’s engagement in pretend play often involves playing out an impromptu storyline where ventriloquism is used to talk objects into life through paralinguistic features such as gesture, gaze and voice prosody. These findings suggest that through the act of ventriloquism in pretend play children learn to engage in complex meaning making activities in playful ways, orally formulating characters and building coherent and systematic storylines that can be identified as early literacy practices.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the children, families and teachers who participated in this research. I would also like to thank the members of the UCLA CLIC winter quarter 2016 group in Chuck Goodwin’s Co-Operative Action Lab for their exceptional insight into the data, and the members of Linköping Conversation and Interaction Analysis Group for their generous discussions around the data. Thanks also go to Friederike Kern for insightful discussions around Laver’s voice quality.