Children's Language Interaction in Several Different Contexts - Case Study Example

A Comparison and Analysis of Children’s Language Interaction in Several Different Contexts Introduction Children`s interaction with adult is acknowledged as the source from which the child learns language and thus literacy development. However, its importance in the language literacy development has only recently been emphasized. This is reflected in numerous studies over the past decade which have revealed that, unlike speech among adults, language addressed to children is semantically and syntactically simple, fluent, repetitive and related to shared environmental and verbal context (Barrett, 2000). Thus, it appears to be a very important feature from which the child could learn language and develop language literacy. How adults` use of language influence the child's language development has been a matter of much interest. Certain features of these child-adult interaction have been found to be highly correlated with the child's rate of language learning. In particular, it appears to be the adult's willingness and capacity to take verbal turns with the child, together with the content and function of these turns that may be important for the child's language development (Barrett, 2000). This analysis has considered what can the child do through language to make meanings and what in the adult’s language use might either facilitate or frustrate children’s language development, and the effect of this factor on the child's language learning. Those factors cited as influencing the linguistic adjustments when talking to children include child variables such as age, cognitive maturity and linguistic competence (Bellinger). Other influencing variables include the adult's perceptions of the child's needs), as well as their interactional intent when talking to the child (Bates, et. al.,1989). The following key features I believed are very important about language and literacy development: Adult Controlled Utterances Since the children in all of these conversations were at a lower level of language development, the adults took control of the conversation with sequential topic related utterances. This greater responsibility taken by the adult in continuing and maintaining the conversation with the children is probably the result of the limited contributions that children at this stage of language development make to the topic maintenance of the conversation. The adult, therefore assumes a primary role in maintaining a topic from turn to turn with the less sophisticated language users (the children). Adult controlled utterances, for the most part, did not appear to be designed to divert the child's attentional focus. The use of these utterances were related to the child's focus of attention. Furthermore, a majority of these utterances were questions or directives which functioned to elicit behavioral or linguistic responses from the child. Thus, they were apparently used to maintain the interaction and the conversational exchange with the child. It should be pointed out that the adult variation in the use of adult controlled utterances for the conversations from Hasan (2009), between the Mother and Amy baking together, and the Mother cleaning the room, David playing, looking on or helping was great. It may be that the adult in these conversations was more willing than the adults in Transcript 3 (b) and the Classroom Two, transcript 2 (a), to exert control over the conversation with many children. Ready Made Responses A complementary finding to the adults' frequent use of adult controlled utterances with the children in each conversation is the relatively lower use of simple routine-like ready-made responses with these groups. Alternately, the Transcript 3 (b) and Classroom Two, Transcript 2 (a) children received many more ready-made responses. These routine-like responses carried little propositional content and were primarily responsive to a child's question or comment. Unlike the adult controlled utterances, these utterances placed little constraint on the conversational topic and appeared to function to maintain the adult turn in the conversational exchange with the child while allowing more responsibility for the child in producing a propositional utterance. They also are probably responsive to the school child's apparently greater use of questions requesting this feedback from the adult. Examples of the complementary nature of adult controlled and ready-made responses are given in the following exchanges between the mother/adult and child: Example (Hasan, 2009, lines 98-124) - Adult controlled (sequence of utterances) Mother Child Yeah you can do yours OK everyone?... Oh no you don`t lick the spoon Until you`ve put all the cake mix in come on.. oops!/ Oh!...now pour it in …that`s it spoon it in there That`s a girl it`ll fall off the spoon just hold the spoon up see?... oh yuk! Do you want me to do it then? Right..fill another one you got a couple more woops!**oh yuk! Example (Child and mother transcript, lines 23-26) - Ready-made responses Mother Child Oh, right./ No, I was up to *What`s the game about?/ *Right. / What`s the game about, asked DW/ The above examples lend evidence to the increasing responsibility taken by the more linguistically sophisticated child in the conversation and the different nature of the maternal responses. Self-Repetitions The mothers' and adults' higher proportion of self-repetitions with the lower language level children is consistent with the findings of previous studies ( ). This redundancy in mother and adult speech may be in response to the child's lower level of receptive syntactic comprehension which was at least one standard deviation below the mean when compared to age peers on a standardized measure of grammatical comprehension (). Thus, an adult may provide repetition to the lower level language users because of the child's inability to process or respond to the original utterance ( ). The higher level language users ( children in the classrooms) heard fewer repetitions presumably as a result of their better abilities to attend to and respond appropriately to the adult utterance. This redundancy may also be a by-product of the mothers' and adults' motivation to maintain conversation with the child. An utterance understood by the child is more likely to receive a response, thus maintaining the conversational exchange. Directives and Assertives The results of this analysis indicate a complementary relationship in the use of directives and assertives for the adults on one hand and the children on the other. For the lower language level children (from Hassan, 2009), directives were proportionally more frequent than assertives, whereas the opposite relationship existed for the Transcript in the classroom children. These results are consistent with those of Newport who found a decrease in imperatives and increase in declaratives (the categories of directive and assertive roughly corresponds to Newport's sentence form categories) with increasing age of school-age children. Newport, however, claimed that these differences in mothers language to children of different ages were a result of cognitive differences in the listeners, i.e., the younger, less cognitively mature child required more direction than the older child. These findings do not support this claim. Rather, they provide support for the notion expressed by White and White (1984) that directives can be useful conversational ploys with a language limited partner. White and White emphasize that direct imperatives are short, stressed, in the "here and now" and usually accompanied by a gesture so they are more easily processed. Furthermore, they function to maintain contact with the listener without requiring a verbal response, The role of directives in child language learning is somewhat controversial. Most researchers have found a negative relationship between the use of directives and language learning (Kaye and Charney, 1981). Barnes et. al. point out that maternal input features associated with progress in children's language probably change as children mature. At the restricted age range of the children in the Barnes, et. al. study, directives may have a particularly important linguistic function in pointing up the relationship between form and situated meaning. Alternately, at a later age, an emphasis on directing and controlling the child's behaviors may limit rather than aid language acquisition. Assertives, on the other hand, are generally comments and they function for various specific purposes such as to provide -information, express feelings, state rules, explain or describe. In each of these cases the adult maintains contact with the listener without necessarily eliciting a verbal or nonverbal response. For the child with lower language abilities who does not supply contingent responses these would then be less useful in maintaining the interaction. On the other hand, for the higher language level children, the child may be more likely to supply a contingent response (Beitchman, et. al., 1996) thereby influencing the adult to provide a higher proportion of these utterances. Continuing Utterances Both teachers provided, on average, fewer than two utterances per conversational turn. This indicates that the teachers does not dominate the conversational turn regardless of her partner's limited linguistic abilities. Cross () notes that the use of fewer than two utterances per turn may increase the perceptual salience of the information contained in any single utterance and that it also gives the child ample opportunity to practice his/her developing linguistic abilities. Conclusion Adult-child conversational interaction is characterized by reciprocal, sequential linguistic contributions. That is, adults and children take turns in the conversation even though there is assymetry in each interactant's linguistic abilities and contributions particularly during the language learning years (Beitchman, et. al., 1996). Based on the findings of this comparison and analysis, the adults' discourse and functional contributions to the conversational exchange appear to be largely responsive to the child’s language level. References Barrett, M. (2000). Early Lexical Development. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook o f Child Language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bates, E., Thai, D., Whitesell, K., Fenson, L., & Oakes, L. (1989). Integrating Language and Gesture. Developmental Psychology, 25, I004-10I9. Beitchman, J. H., Wilson, B., Brownalie, E. B., Walters, H., Inglis, A., & Lancee, W. (1996). Long-Term Consistency in Speech/:Language Profiles: II. Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Outcomes. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 35, 825. Read More