Redrafting conclusions/evaluations

Diligents,

when redrafting, play close attention to the skills you need to show, not simply stating what you found.

Conclusions/Evaluations

The following paragraph has instructions/considerations in italics to show how you can show off vital skills. See how ideas need to link/flow using carefully controlled complex sentences, avoiding stating the obvious by showing the connections beween ideas.

• Link back to the analysis to give overview e.g. Although open questions were the most frequent type of interrogative across the transcripts (see Table 2), and they were found to elicit the longest responses, on average (see Table 3), they were only effective in doing so substantially more often than two other key techniques when combined with pauses (see column three in Table 3). Without the pauses, prompt questions and 'I wonder' declaratives came close to matching the effectiveness in terms of MLU responses, perhaps because they function in a similar way (to open questions) in child-led discourse: to encourage the child to explore what they have already shown an interest in. Be tentative in exploring contextual explanations e.g. Perhaps open questions may sometimes miss the mark in terms of meeting a child's interests, as they rely on predictions/guesswork on the part of the caregiver, whereas prompt questions often encourage Z to explore something he has set the agenda on e.g. "Z: ... and three things in the banana H: three things?" and exploit an already proven interest. Bring in relevant theory e.g. The length of the MLU that comes from these particular caregiver responses could be seen to support Vygotski's idea of scaffolding (rather than the more general interaction theory of Bruner or Skinner's operant conditioning) because considered, high-quality strategies to promote child-led discourse seem to be more effective than just any response e.g. an agreement, although this would need to be tested consider how the experiement could be refocussed/tweaked/expanded e.g. perhaps by a control situation where H's responses were limited to minimal or monosyllabic responses (although this would skew the data as the other conversations are much more typical of Z's interactions with H and his participation might be affected, not by the strategies, but by the contrasting behaviour of the caregiver which might lead him to feel uncertain and repond unnaturally; it might be better to simply record more speech that was as close to natural as possible to obtain a similar number of low-input responses from H so that the results could be contrasted clearly).