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. Two user studies were conducted. The first suggests that paired children of different SES use different social and linguistic strategies to establish cohesion and that purely syntactic measures of narrative coherence are not sensitive enough to describe children's collaborative language play. A second pilot study investigated how groups of children used TellTale. Although results are not conclusive, TellTale also seems to be an engaging interface for group authorship.