Playful verbal manifestations in the school

Abstract

This article attempts to situate a variety of childrens linguistic manifestation within school time situations: the existence of verbal play is reflected in the use of the phonetic and the rythmic aspects of speech; as well as the lexical and semantic aspects of language (metaphors, homonyms, new words), and finaly the context of conversation itself.
The study is based on two groups of children (respectively 30 and 32 pupils) who were at the time in the last year of kindergarten. The center was a private  school oricnted towards participatory teaching. The language used in all the lwarning exercices was catalan.
Information was gathered in periodic observations of twenty minutes in
Iength, both in the classroom and in the school-yard, during eight months.
A total of fifty-eight observations were carried out. In this first intent at es-
tablishing some basic working categorics on word play.
Thc author limited herself exclusively to the study of the verbal interaction sustainee by the children, between each othcr, within the framework of
the classroom.