ABSTRACT
Confident children are often leaders of socio-dramatic play. They may well use the telephone and draw others into complex play that develops their oral skills. An essential part of developing orality is the ability to select language appropriately according to context. Pretence telephoning is a useful way of developing telephone discourse. An especially useful characteristic of telephone discourse is its patterning at beginnings and ends, surely often witnessed by most children from infancy, and thus giving them a template as it were with which to practice initially. Author's study of telephone talk in play shows that children are extending their register capabilities. Analysis of this study data of telephone talk from young children has shown that the telephone talk of girls is not more complex or indeed simply more frequent than that of boys. This could be linked with its great familiarity as a cultural object and its qualities as both a piece of technology and prompter for social conversation.
