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Language Development and Literacy

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L
Language Development and Literacy The route to linguistic literacy is then
Ruth A. Berman
Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University,
Ramat Aviv, Israel
Overview
The linguistic knowledge and language use of
high school adolescents is discussed as demon-
strating a turning point in later, school-age lan-
guage development, reflected by the ability to
deploy a rich repertoire of the lexicon and gram-
matical constructions of speaker-writers’ first lan-
guage in different types of discourse and varied
communicative settings. To start, the key notions
of “adolescence” and of “linguistic literacy” are
defined, as background to a survey of research-
based findings for text construction abilities in
different genres, taking into account both local
linguistic expression and global discourse organi-
zation. This is followed by consideration of the
cognitive underpinnings of discourse construc-
tion, in the conviction that general socio-cognitive
abilities both underlie and enhance linguistic
knowledge and language use during the period
in question and that they are crucial to developing
literacy. This forms the basis for consideration of
the thematic content of adolescent discourse in
different discourse genres, and the ability to
express a more objective or distanced perspective
on events and states of affairs at later school age.
# Springer International Publishing AG 2017
R.J.R. Levesque (ed.), Encyclopedia of Adolescence,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_19-2
reconsidered in terms of developing abilities in
reading and writing – the canonic media of edu-
cated, literate language usage – with mastery of
written language as a hallmark of literacy
extending well beyond grade school age The
final section considers developments “beyond
adolescence” as reflected by educated adult mem-
bers of a given speech community, highlighting
the long developmental route from initial emer-
gence via acquisition to mastery of linguistic
structure and language use. The paper concludes
by underlining the interplay between facets of
general socio-cognitive development consolidat-
ing in adolescence – such as divergent thinking
and perspective taking – and the language-specific
skills in lexicon and grammar needed for effective
communication.
Introduction
This overview considers the linguistic knowledge
and language use of high school adolescents, as a
turning point in later, school-age language devel-
opment (Berman 2007), reflected by the ability to
deploy a rich repertoire of lexical and syntactic
devices skillfully and flexibly both in isolation
(Kaplan and Berman 2015) and in extended dis-
course and in different communicative settings.
Berman 2016a; Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2007;
Rimmer 2008). These developments prove to be
critical for achievement of “linguistic literacy”
2 Language Development and Literacy
(Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002) and becoming a
literate member of a given speech community
(Berman 2016b; Ravid and Berman 2009b). The
term “adolescence” is used here with reference to
the period corresponding to the upper grades of
high school in English-speaking and European
countries, between 15 or 16 and 18 or 19 years
of age. Some scholars identify students in the
preceding, middle school years as adolescents
(e.g., Heller 1999), but for present purposes, the
age-range of 11–14 is defined as “preadoles-
cence,” representing a transitional stage between
grade school middle childhood and high school
adolescence (Davidi 2014). The age-schooling
level considered below is recognized as a period
of significant changes in social, cognitive, and
moral development and in a range of abilities
that emerge in middle childhood and flourish in
adolescence (e.g., Case 1985; Flavell et al. 1993;
Kohlberg 1984; Moshman 1998; Selman 1980).
Current research in developmental psychology
and neuroscience highlights adolescence as a
time of major transition in “the shift from a
caregiver-dependent child to a fully autonomous
adult” (Paus 2005, p. 60), one that reflects devel-
opments attributed to increased higher-order cog-
nitive capacities (Proverbio and Zani 2005),
greater executive control (Kluwe and Logan
2000), and the assembly of an advanced “execu-
tive suite” of abilities (Steinberg 2005). The key
theme of the discussion that follows is that such
general processes both underlie and enhance lin-
guistic knowledge and language use during the
period in question and that they are crucial to
developing literacy.
This overview derives from investigation of
later language development – growth in knowl-
edge of linguistic forms and how to use them
across the school years – as a burgeoning domain
of contemporary inquiry (Berman 2004; Nippold
2007). Research in different languages highlights
adolescence as a major turning point in develop-
ing sophisticated command of linguistic expres-
sion in both speech and writing (Berman and
Ravid 2009), in mastery of text construction abil-
ities (Berman 2008), and in processing and com-
prehension of different genres of discourse
(Kaplan 2013). Adolescence is also a critical
period in the consolidation of literacy, going
beyond the “emergent literacy” of early childhood
and acquisition of writing as a notational system
(Pontecorvo 1994; Tolchinsky 2003), on the one
hand, and the role of “functional literacy” in dif-
ferent sociocultural contexts (Verhoeven 1994),
on the other. Rather, concern here is with “linguis-
tic literacy” (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002) as both
a prerequisite for and a consequence of ready
access to a wide variety of language resources,
particularly written materials – from Internet
entries to newspaper reports, from short stories
to encyclopedic texts. Production and comprehen-
sion of extended discourse in different genres
(narrative and expository, descriptive, and infor-
mative) emerges as of particular relevance to
school-based language and literacy activities in
the high school years. Interactive, socially moti-
vated language use of adolescents in different
communicative settings warrants separate atten-
tion, beyond the confines of the present overview.
Text Construction Abilities: Local
Linguistic Expression and Global
Discourse Organization
A major finding of a large-scale crosslinguistic
project on developing text construction abilities
from school-age into adulthood (Berman and
Verhoeven 2002; Berman 2005, 2008) was that
results clustered together in the two younger age-
groups investigated – 9-to-10-year-olds in middle
childhood and 12-to-13-year-old preadolescents –
with a significant cut-off between the latter and
16-to-17-year-old high school adolescents. This
pattern was consistent across the domains that we
analyzed, from local-level linguistic expression in
lexicon and syntax to global-level text quality,
thematic content, and overall discourse stance
and across the variables of discourse genre
(personal experience narratives and expository
discussion), medium of production (speech and
writing), and target language typology (across
seven different languages). For ease of presenta-
tion, findings in this overview derive mainly from
English and Hebrew as two languages that differ
Language Development and Literacy
significantly in historical development, lexical
composition, and morpho-syntactic structure.
In the first place, striking advances emerged in
the quality of lexical usage of high school adoles-
cents compared with middle school preadoles-
cents. This was reflected in reliance on more
sophisticated, low-frequency vocabulary items
typical of higher registers of language use – in
English, by significantly greater use of polysyl-
labic words and items of Latinate origin (Bar-Ilan
and Berman 2007; Nir-Sagiv et al. 2008); in
Hebrew – by more complex derivational morphol-
ogy and use of elevated, less everyday vocabulary
(Ravid 2004a; Ravid and Berman 2009a); and in
both languages – by broader use of abstract nouns
with general rather than specific reference (Ravid
2006). Corresponding age-related findings
emerged for a significant increase in use of com-
plex syntax among students of high school age
compared with younger children in different
languages – including English, French, Hebrew,
and Spanish. The adolescents made greater use of
both finite and nonfinite subordination; ((Berman
and Nir-Sagiv 2009a; Gayraud et al. 2001); their
texts revealed longer and more complex noun
phrases (Jisa and Tolchinsky 2009; Ravid and
Berman 2009b); and they availed themselves
increasingly of passive voice and other construc-
tions that function for downgrading of agency and
present a distanced, less subjective perspective on
events (Jisa 2004a; Reilly et al. 2005; Tolchinsky
and Rosado 2005).
Analyses of global-level text construction abil-
ities confirm findings from earlier research to the
effect that by middle childhood, children aged 9 or
10 years old are able to produce well-structured
narratives, both in speech and writing, describing
events in chronological sequence, with a rela-
tively well-defined beginning, middle, and end
to their stories (Berman and Katzenberger 2004;
Tolchinsky et al. 2002). The grade school children
in the crosslinguistic study were also able to dis-
tinguish between the two genres of personal expe-
rience narratives compared with expository talks
and essays that they constructed on topics such as
violence in schools and interpersonal conflict in
general. They expressed this distinctiveness both
linguistically – in the lexical and syntactic forms
3
they used – and even thematically – by recounting
dynamic events in their stories as against making
generalized statements in their essays (Berman
and Nir-Sagiv 2004, 2007; Kupersmitt 2006). In
contrast, mastery of expository discourse at a
global level of organization and conceptualization
emerges much later, typically only in high school,
both in text production (Berman and Nir-Sagiv
2009b, c) and comprehension (Kaplan 2008). In
discussing an abstract topic, it evidently takes
until adolescence for students to be able to process
and construct a coherent set of core propositions
or “top-down” generalizations to express key
ideas that are elaborated by specific, illustrative,
and motivational material.
Cognitive Underpinnings of Discourse
Construction
The contrast between the relatively early ability to
recount concrete, sequentially organized events in
narratives compared with the later consolidation
of nonnarrative discourse in adolescence is con-
firmed by studies showing that it takes until high
school for students to reach a relatively mature
level in understanding and constructing informa-
tive, encyclopedic type texts (Kaplan 2008; Ravid
and Zilberbuch 2003). These convergent findings
can be attributed to both the earlier and broader
experience of preliterate children with narratives
as a universal mode of discourse (Berman 2009)
and to the cognitive burdens imposed by dis-
course in the “logico-scientific paradigm” under-
lying nonnarrative modes of thinking (Bruner
1986). An expository text, rather than describing
events that have or could have occurred, needs to
create its own content, so to speak, so that, in
addressing an abstract topic like interpersonal
conflict, the organization and content of a piece
of discourse are intertwined, with the result that
the quality of an expository discussion “depends
not only on how the flow of information is orga-
nized but also on the logical consistency and
originality of the propositional content that it con-
veys” (Berman and Katzenberger 2004, p. 89).
Another cognitively anchored development in
discourse abilities that first consolidates around
4 Language Development and Literacy
adolescence is what is termed the shift from
“dichotomy to divergence.” The markedly distinc-
tive forms of expression used in producing narra-
tive compared with expository texts are attenuated
with the shift to adolescence. The younger chil-
dren’s texts tend to be monotonic: Their narratives
consist almost entirely of descriptions of dynamic,
highly specific events anchored in the past; and
their expository texts are almost entirely confined
to generalities and judgments concerning familiar
states of affairs. This reflects a clear grasp of what
is involved in each of the two genres as distinct
types of discourse, but it also shows that younger
children have difficulty in expressing multiple
perspectives on events or issues in producing
extended discourse. In contrast, the narratives
produced by speaker-writers from high school
tend to be more mixed or divergent, including
expository-like generalized propositions and eval-
uative commentary; correspondingly, in their
expository texts, adolescents and adults may elab-
orate on core propositional elements by means of
narrative-like illustrative episodes and reference
to specific situations or personal experiences. Lin-
guistically, this means that from adolescence
onward, narratives may include verbs in the time-
less present or future tense and conditional or
other moods relating to hypothetical contingen-
cies rather than to concretely dynamic events,
while in their expository discourse, students may
use action verbs in past tense or perfective aspect
in presenting specifically concrete illustrative
episodes.
Taken together, these developments in text
construction abilities demonstrate the intimate
connection between cognitive development, the
growth of linguistic knowledge, and advances in
language use in adolescence. As Karmiloff-Smith
has argued for development of knowledge of lan-
guage (as of other domains), “children first con-
solidate each of the systems (the
morphophonological, the syntactic, and the
semantic) separately, only later does one system
constrain another” (Karmiloff-Smith 1992,
p. 181). Relatedly, a leitmotif of earlier work on
children’s developing narrative abilities in differ-
ent languages was the observation that being a
proficient language user requires both
“(1) knowledge of the overall resources of the
linguistic forms and rhetorical options of the
native language, and (2) the ability to work with
all these various systems and keep all of them
active simultaneously, within a continuing and
continually updated, representation of the lis-
tener’s (or reader’s) current state of knowledge”
(Berman and Slobin 1994, p. 609). This leads to
the conclusion that the cognitive task involved in
gaining proficient command of the interrelations
between linguistic forms and discourse functions
is extremely complex, one that has a long devel-
opmental history, continuing at least through
adolescence.
Thematic Content and Perspective
Taking in Extended Discourse
Cognitive developments in divergent thinking and
perspective taking combine with affective and
social developments and expanded life-
experience to affect not only how adolescents
express themselves, but also what they relate to
when constructing extended discourse. For exam-
ple, the narratives of older students, from adoles-
cence onward, include longer, more detached, and
more elaborate background information in the
opening parts of the stories they tell in different
languages (Berman 2001; Berman and
Katzenberger 2004; Tolchinsky et al. 2002). This
is consistent with the shift observed in late ado-
lescence in the overall discourse stance expressed
by speaker-writers of different languages: from
highly involved, personalized, and subjective atti-
tudes and orientations to more distanced, general-
ized, and objective points of view, taking into
account more of the listener-reader’s interests
and knowledge base (as documented for different
languages in the papers in Berman 2005).
Research on narrative evaluation, in the sense of
the interpretive commentary and subjective per-
spectives that speakers provide on the events
recounted (Labov 1972), shows that among youn-
ger children, this is largely affective; it is more
socially oriented in preadolescence and becomes
more cognitive and reflectively interpretive in
later adolescence and adulthood (Ravid and
Language Development and Literacy
Berman 2006; Reilly 1992). Segal’s (2008) study
of Hebrew speakers’ accounts of an experience
recalled from the Gulf War revealed similar age-
related shifts in attitudes: The 11-to-12-year-old
preadolescents related mainly to concrete facets of
everyday routines, 15-to-16-year-old adolescents
talked more about the social interactions involved
and the emotional stress they experienced, while
adults commented cognitively on their interpreta-
tion of the events and speculated on their possible
consequences.
Developments are thus clearly evident in the
thematic content of narratives produced on the
shared topic of interpersonal conflict. Grade
school children talk and write mainly about fights
or quarrels about physical objects and posses-
sions, at home or school, while adolescents relate
increasingly to social issues and relationships
(Berman 2000). Linguistically, these changes are
reflected in the “narrative lexicon,” where youn-
ger children refer mainly to animate agents and to
concrete situations, while adolescent speaker-
writers relate to more general and more distanced
topics expressed by means of abstract nominals
such as disagreement, controversy, and reaction
(Ravid and Cahana-Amitay 2005). Linguistic
expression in expository discussions of similar
themes (violence in schools or interpersonal con-
flicts in general) also reflects changes in the direc-
tion of less subjectively involved attitudes. For
example, Tolchinsky and Rosado (2005) conclude
from their analysis of Spanish constructions for
downgrading of agency that “account must be
taken of the fact that the emergence of passives
and the increment in use of other forms occur
together with a change in the thematic content of
the texts.” A similar conclusion is reached by
Reilly et al. (2005) analysis of passive construc-
tions in expository essays in English, to the effect
that “agents in the passives used by adolescents
and adults frequently take the form of abstract
nominals as opposed to the animate agents (often
to be inferred) typical of the younger children’s
texts.” This interrelation between use of grammat-
ical constructions and expression of particular
types of thematic content is mirrored by Ravid
and Cahana-Amitay’s (2005) finding for a devel-
opmental shift in Hebrew texts, from largely
5
verbal predicates to nominal types of predication
that relate to “more generalized and distanced
topics.” Lexicon and syntax thus interact with
age-related changes in overall attitudes expressed
in discussing a socially relevant theme. The
expository texts of grade school children and pre
adolescents consist almost entirely of generalities,
divorced from concrete instances or individual
attitudes and personal experiences. High school
students, in contrast, are able to combine a
generic, abstract perspective on the topic of inter-
personal conflict with personalized commentary
on how they view such situations or how these
affect them as individuals. At the same time, the
overall perspective of older speaker-writers, even
in their narratives, most particularly in their
expository essays, is by and large more distanced,
detached, and objective than that of the younger
children.
These developmental differences in perspec-
tive taking are markedly reflected in the way that
high school compared with grade school students
use modal expressions such as may, might, could,
be able to, should, have to, ought to, must, and
other linguistic means of encoding propositional
attitudes that relate to hypothetical contingencies
(Kupersmitt 2006; Reilly et al. 2002, 2005).
Across the board, such expressions are far com-
moner in expository than in narrative texts, since
they refer to possible states of affairs and the
circumstances attendant on them rather than to
events that actually took place. Nine-year
speaker-writers of different languages typically
make use of such terms with a “deontic” import,
to express attitudes that reflect socially prescribed
norms, in the form of prohibitions and stipulations
(e.g.,“ People shouldn’t just ignore violence, hit
back”, “If someone hurts you, you must face up to
him”; “When there is violence, don’t just sit there,
do something!”). In contrast, adolescents use
modal elements in an “epistemic” sense, taking
into account various alternatives and hypothetical
states of affairs to express cognitively motivated,
mentalistically anchored, individual conclusions
in relation to a given state of affairs (e.g., “such a
situation is liable to have serious consequences, if
people cannot step back and . . .”; “If there is
6 Language Development and Literacy
sufficient goodwill on all sides, then conflict may
be avoided altogether”).
Reading and Writing in the
Development of Linguistic Literacy
Largely convergent findings for those
documented above for text construction abilities
have emerged from recent research on later
school-age reading comprehension. Students
from middle childhood to adolescence (in grade
school, middle school, and high school) were
presented with narrative and informative texts at
differing levels of difficulty, and then required to
answer questions designed to tap different levels
of text comprehension (Kaplan 2013). These
ranged from literal understanding of explicitly
mentioned factual material to deriving inferences
from text content, followed by the ability to inte-
grate top-down and bottom-up facets of the text to
construct novel categories of knowledge and men-
tal representations, and on to the highest level of
meta-level interpretations derived from text-
external world knowledge and implications. The
two higher levels of discourse processing were
attained primarily by adolescents and adults, but
by hardly any of the younger students,
irrespective of genre or level of difficulty of a
given text. The preadolescent seventh graders
demonstrated the effect of an expanded knowl-
edge base and their greater exposure to literacy-
based activities so that they were able to tackle the
demands of factual and inferential questions better
than younger children in the 9-year-old group.
However, Kaplan found few qualitative changes
in the strategies and functions met by the broad-
ening basis of prior knowledge between grade and
middle schools. It took until high school adoles-
cence for students to deploy the cognitive flexi-
bility required for integrating top-down
generalizations with bottom-up specifics, to
apply metacognitive processing and abstract
thinking in order to interpret the hidden meanings
of a text. These convergent findings for a spurt in
adolescence in comprehension as well as produc-
tion of extended discourse shed light on the pro-
cesses of reading and writing as two interrelated
facets of language and literacy that develop in
tandem across the school years (Heller 1999).
Literacy as defined here thus assigns a
privileged role to written language as a means of
becoming fully accommodated to the cognitive as
well as the social and economic demands of con-
temporary postindustrial society (Olson 1994,
2006a, b; Ong 1992, 2002). Learning to write is
more than “just learning to express your ideas in
an alternative medium to speech” (Strömqvist
2006). Rather, becoming literate means gaining
command of written as well as oral language and
being able to move skillfully between the two
modalities as alternative, and complementary,
sources of input and modes of expression. Studies
comparing texts produced by the same partici-
pants in both speech and writing demonstrate
that, again, high school emerges as a cut-off
point in the distinction between oral and written
language (Berman 2016b; Berman and Nir-Sagiv
2010; Berman and Ravid 2009). Grade school
students in middle childhood are capable of pro-
ducing narrative and expository texts in both
modalities, but they write very much as they
speak. Middle school preadolescents emerge as
an intermediate group in this respect, with some
facets of their lexical and syntactic usage showing
greater differentiation between the two modes of
expression. Only from high school onward, how-
ever, is there a clear and marked distinction
between the linguistic means deployed and the
rhetorical devices that are used in the two modal-
ities, revealing adolescence as a watershed in the
ability to treat written language “as a special style
of discourse” (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002;
Strömqvist et al. 2004).
From this point of view, too, adolescence con-
stitutes a milestone in achieving command of
“book language” (Blank 2002) and the academic
style of expression necessary for school-based
achievements (Jisa 2004b; Snow and Uccelli
2009). What Slobin (2004) has termed “thinking
for writing” consolidates only in adolescence, as a
period that combines increased world experience
and exposure to different types of written mate-
rials with greater cognitive flexibility and more
skillful deployment of a full repertoire of
Language Development and Literacy
linguistic devices in controlling and shaping the
flow of information in extended discourse.
Beyond Adolescence
The final issue addressed here is “so what is left
for adults?”, given the characterization of adoles-
cence as a developmental watershed between
middle childhood and preadolescence, on the
one hand, and high school and adulthood, on the
other. So far, discussion – like most research on
later language development – has focused on
changes in linguistic knowledge and language
use during but not beyond the school years.
Although adult participants were included in
many of the studies reviewed above, they were
not perceived as a “control” group in the canonic
sense of the term. This is because, in practice, in
the diverse types of extended discourse consid-
ered here and the complex nature of the tasks
involved, there is no one “correct answer,” nor is
a particular product necessarily the “best.” Earlier
research of this author on oral Hebrew-language
narratives all based on the same children’s picture
book story led to the conclusion that it was not
possible to pinpoint a particular narrative type as
reflecting an adult “model” . . . (and that) mature
manipulation of this (as of other discourse) varies
greatly from one individual to another (Berman
1988).
Besides, in principle, language and literacy,
possibly other knowledge domains as well, have
no clear end state but are constantly evolving and
developing throughout the life cycle, or until such
time as dementia sets in – as recorded, for exam-
ple, in the “nun studies” documented in Kemper
et al. (2001) and Mitzner and Kemper (2003).
Rather, the adults investigated in the studies
referred to here, mainly university graduates in
their late 20s and early 30s, serve primarily as a
point of reference as well-educated, literate, but
non-expert speaker-writers of a standard dialect,
since they are not professional language teachers,
writers, or journalists.
In highlighting the unique status of high school
adolescence as a developmental cut-off point in
mastery of language and literacy, the research
7
cited in this overview affords little in the way of
detailed comparisons between the adolescent and
adult participants. Partial exceptions are the stud-
ies of Reilly et al. (2005) on English and of Ravid
(2004b) on text production in Hebrew, both of
which note in passing that the language used by
adult speaker-writers of the standard language
differs significantly from that of high school
seniors. Further, while a basic grasp of the distinc-
tion between what is said and what is meant crit-
ical to understanding nonliteral language is
achieved by early childhood and flourishes
around adolescence (Berman 2007; Tolchinsky
2004), reading poetry, as the highest form of non-
literal use of language, has been shown to consti-
tute a heavy cognitive burden even for
adolescents, with mastery of this genre achieved
only in adulthood, if at all, possibly demanding
specialized training (Davidi 2014; Peskin 1998;
Peskin and Olson 2004).
The following comments on what develops
beyond adolescence are suggestive of initial
insights and potential domains for further investi-
gation rather than based on hard-and-fast research
findings. First, while various metalinguistic abili-
ties are well established by adolescence, meta-
textual capacities may require greater maturity
and reintegration of a range of cognitive capaci-
ties. Meta-textual processing of extended dis-
course means that readers are able to go beyond
a text and consider it from outside itself, to apply
their text-external world knowledge and value
systems, so as to assign a well-informed, original,
and individual interpretation to the information it
provides, the ideas it expresses, or the events it
recounts. In writing an essay or giving a talk, as in
telling a story, it may take until adulthood for
speaker-writers to provide their own commentary
on the ideas expressed or the events recounted,
linking them concurrently both to general text-
external states of affairs and generalizing from
their own life history and experience. This
requires sophisticated abilities in establishing
interconnections between diverse categories and
knowledge systems – along the lines of the later
levels (E3 and E4), and possibly even uniquely
level E4 re-representations in Karmiloff-Smith’s
(1992) developmental model of metacognition.
8 Language Development and Literacy
A second idea hinted at in prior research is that
increased command of and experience with read-
ing and writing means that for literate adults,
written language will have an increased impact
on the spoken (Jisa 2004b; Strömqvist 2006). That
is, educated adults can – in suitable
circumstances – use the language of writing
when they speak so that the distinctiveness
between speech and writing that is the hallmark
of developing literacy may become blurred or at
least attenuated – analogously to what was noted
earlier for the shift from dichotomy to divergence
in relation to different discourse genres. This idea,
as noted, requires further study, supported by
appropriately detailed, and innovative, research
designs (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2010).
A third possible development that may take
until adulthood to achieve (again, if ever) is con-
solidation of an individual rhetorical style of
expression. In a study of developing oral narrative
abilities in different languages based on the same
picture book adventure story, a peculiar type of
U-shaped curve was observed (Berman and
Slobin 1994). The accounts of the youngest par-
ticipants, 3-to-4-year-old preschoolers, were
highly diverse, varying considerably from one
child to the next – a finding that was attributed
to the fact that they had not yet established a
narrative mode of discourse. The schoolchildren
aged 9–10 years, in contrast, provided largely
stereotypical, conventionalized accounts, evi-
dence of their having internalized a narrative
schema, but without consolidating an individual
style of narrative performance (Reilly 1992). The
adult participants – and they alone – told stories
that were, like those of the younger children,
extremely varied in style and content, even though
all were based on the same fictive picture book
events: Like the 9-year-olds, the adults relied on a
shared, top-down organization of narrative struc-
ture, but in some cases, this was elaborated by a
rich network of evaluative, meta-textual commen-
tary, and text-external generalizations; in others,
they summarized all the various search events in
the story in a few short encapsulations to produce
a bare bones, precisely economical account. Indi-
vidual variation was also reflected in the wide
range of text lengths of adult narratives, from
40 to 160 clauses (Berman 1988). Clearly, extra-
linguistic factors such as social conventions, peer
pressure, schoolroom prescription, and so forth
underlie these age-related shifts from juvenile
variability to (pre)adolescent commonalities and
on to adult individuality (or “post-
conventionality” in terms of Kohlberg’s 1984,
model). This suggests a valuable domain for fur-
ther investigation of how linguistic knowledge,
language use, and literacy develop in and beyond
adolescence.
Conclusion
In the different domains of linguistic knowledge
and discursive skills reviewed above, adolescence
emerges time and again as a developmental turn-
ing point, with “the process of gaining mastery of
written language as a hallmark of literacy
extending well beyond grade school age” (Jisa
2004b). Taken together, the research surveyed
here demonstrates that it takes until adolescence
to become a literate member of a given speech
community, commanding ready and informed
access to a large variety of written materials in
different genres and styles of discourse. The shifts
noted in use of vocabulary and syntax, in dis-
course organization, and in the thematic content
and social attitudes expressed by adolescents
compared with younger school-age children
underscore the interplay between use of lexical
and grammatical constructions and the communi-
cative purposes that they serve. As such, they
indicate that the (linguistic) form/(discursive)
function approach proposed by Slobin (2001) for
early phases of language acquisition provides a
valuable perspective for research on later lan-
guage development as well. And they consistently
reflect the interaction between facets of general
cognitive development such as divergent thinking
and perspective taking and the language-specific
ability to deploy a varied and appropriate reper-
toire of linguistic devices at the service of
extended discourse. The human capacity of
“thinking for speaking” that Slobin’s (1996)
crosslinguistic research has shown to emerge in
early childhood combines with “thinking for
Language Development and Literacy
writing (and reading)” to demonstrate a long
developmental history that continues from early
school-age into and possibly beyond late
adolescence.
Lacunae in the research presented here include,
first, the need to go beyond extended (largely
written) discourse to consider oral interactive
communication of adolescents – with their peers,
in the classroom, and in family settings (see, for
example, Blank 2002; Blum-Kulka 1997).
Another is the need for suitably designed studies
comparing the language use and literacy practices
of adolescents with that of adults – possibly
divided between young, college-age, and more
mature populations. A third direction would be
the clinical and pedagogical implications of
research on high school students with language-
learning disabilities – as suggested in Scott’s
(2004) work with 11-to-12-year-olds. Finally,
cross-cultural comparisons might go beyond the
largely mainstream, middle-to-upper class
populations figuring in this survey to investigate
the nature and role of language and literacy among
adolescents from different social backgrounds and
in more or less literate communities.
Acknowledgments Grateful thanks are extended to the
editor of the encyclopedia for his constructive feedback
and to Bracha Nir and Batia Seroussi for their valuable
comments on an earlier version. The author alone is
responsible for inadequacies that remain.
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