Young students’ language puzzling and linguistic reasoning

This study explores how young learners’ linguistic reasoning can be scaffolded and come to expression. Conducted within a larger project on early writing, the study is based on video-recorded dialogues with eight students (aged 7–8) engaged in a playful syntactic puzzle activity, based on their own written texts and scaffolded by an adult dialogue partner. Thematic analyses reveal that the students are able to manipulate and reflect on various linguistic structures and their rhetorical effects. Notably, they demonstrate how linguistic reasoning may be expressed without formal metalanguage, rather employing informal talk, gestures, intonation, and physical manipulation of language structures. A key premise is a linguistically knowledgeable dialogue partner. By focusing on primary school students, these findings may contribute to widening the scope of linguistic reasoning as well as offering insights into language and literacy education.