Editor: Viv Edwards (University of Reading, UK)
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Volume: 16 Number: 1 Page: 48–61
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Finding a Voice: Language and Play in the Home Corner
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Wendy Martin and Henrietta Dombey
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Much research in children's spontaneous social role play assumes a clear distinction between play based on lived experience and that based on fiction, and between contributions made in role and those made
out of role, with a particular focus on the accuracy of role portrayals in terms of features of adult speech. In this paper we suggest that children are actively engaged in recreating, rather than reproducing,
playful versions of adult roles, in continual negotiation with their play partners. In this they sustain multiple, concurrent identities as they draw on a variety of voices as both narrators and narrated
characters, telling stories about themselves and other players, and becoming part of the stories told by others. These voices are in turn shaped by the wider social practices in which the play is embedded.
Play develops not so much through explicit deliberation as through uncertainties, ambiguities and ellipses, through what is left unsaid as much as through what is spoken, thus allowing different stories
to be told simultaneously. As such, home corner play affords opportunities for players to be active in creating texts, and in constructing and contesting their meanings.
© Multilingual Matters 2002
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