But What Do Children Really Thiffi?:,."" Discourse Analysis and Conceptual Content in Children's Talk

Loughb orou gh U niv ers ity A discourse-analytical pproach to children's knowledge is offered, focusing on extracts of classroom talk between a teacher and a kindergarten class. After rejecting the possibility of defrning concePts and memories as cognitive states prior to or underlying discourse, the talk is examined for how participans define and deal with such notions as a featuI € of the sequential and rhetorical organization of discourse. An argument is advanced for the analysis ofknowledge, reality, and edu-cation as public, interactionally managed participants ' concems 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 dehned, so that any explanatory appeal to what is beyond or behind the talk is unwananted. Discourse analyses in psychology and social psychology are usually presented as contrasting with more traditional methods such as experiments, tests, and in-terviews and, at the same time, as offering theoretical reworkings of such traditional topics as attitudes, attributions, categorization, concepts, learning, an