Supporting children's collaborative authoring: practicing written literacy while composing oral texts

This paper presents the theory, design and evaluation of a new type of computer-supported collaborative interface intended to help young children practice certain oral language skills critical for later written literacy acquisition. Based on a theory of “emergent literacy”, this paper describes a toy – TellTale – designed to let young children create, share and edit oral language in a way similar to how they will eventually create written language. One user study was conducted with children of different socio-economic strata. Their use of TellTale suggested that children of different SES seem to use different social and linguistic strategies to establish cohesion and that purely syntactic measures of narrative coherence are not sensitive enough to reveal all aspects of children’s collaborative language construction. A second pilot study investigated how groups of children used TellTale during oral language play; while the results are not conclusive, they seem to suggest that TellTale is an engaging interface for group authorship.