Education Doctoral Students: Bruner

Perception -- Thought -- Skill in infancy -- Representation in childhood -- Education.
Includes bibliographical references.

How does a child acquire language, and what may facilitate this learning? To carry out his investigations, Bruner went to the child's own setting for learning rather than observing children in a contrived video laboratory. For Bruner, language is learned by using it. Central to its use are what he calls "formats," scriptlike interactions between mother and child, in short, play and games. What goes on in games as rudimentary as peekaboo or hide and seek can tell us much about language acquisiton. But what aids the aspirant speaker in his attempt to use language? To answer this, the author postulates the existence of a Language Acquisition Support System that frames the interactions between adult and child in such a way as to allow the child to master the basic but necessary steps in learning to talk. It underlies the fine tuning involved in orderly language learning and allows the child to proceed from learning how to refer to objects to learning to make a request of another human being. - Back cover.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ntroduction / Jerome Brunner and Helen Haste -- Understanding feelings: the early stages / Judy Dunn -- Taking roles / Paul Light -- Some benefits of egocentrism / George Butterworth -- The transactional self / Jerome Bruner -- The origins of inference / Margaret Donaldson -- The early emergence of planning skills in children / Judy S. Deloache and Ann L. Brown -- Thought from language: the linguistic construction of cognitive representations / Carol Fleisher Feldman -- Social representations of gender / Barbara Lloyd -- Growing into rules / Helen Haste.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

The growing child comes to understand the world, makes sense of experience and becomes a competent social individual. First published in 1978, "Making Sense" reflected the way in which developmental psychologists had begun to look at these processes in increasingly naturalistic, social situations. Rather than seeing the child as working in isolation, the authors of this collection take the view that 'making sense' involves social interaction and problem-solving. They particularly emphasize the role of language; its study both reveals the child's grasp of the frames of meaning in a pa.

The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know-that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them. The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man's sense of self: creativity, the search for identity, the nature of aesthetic knowledge, myth, the learning process, and modem-day attitudes toward social controls, Freud, and fate. In this revised, expanded edition, Bruner comments on his personal efforts to maintain an intuitively and rationally balanced understanding of human nature, taking into account the odd historical circumstances which have hindered academic psychology's attempts in the past to know man. - Publisher.