L201 B Chapter 12 summary notes

Growing up with English

by the Course Chair Dr Hayat Al-Khatib

How children learn to use their first language
(English here)
 How children learn to use their first language (English here) isn’t straightforward:
 Some researchers treat it primarily as a cognitive question about how the human mind
works and how children make sense of the world.
 While others treat it primarily as a question about how children socially interact with the
people around them.
 Children have to acquire both linguistic competence and communicative competence.
Emergent grammar

 Emergent grammar is the beginnings of grammar, for example an attempt to form the past

tense of ‘go’. The term is used to refer to aspects of language rues that start emerging in

the language used by young childr.en

Cognitive and social aspects

 The chapter also considers how children learn to read and write English and points out
that, like spoken language, this involves both cognitive and social aspects: children learn to
distinguish English writing from other kinds of written symbols in the environment, as
well as to participate in the literacy practices of their home and their community.
 Many children learn to read and write English alongside other languages and so need to
develop an extra awareness of how languages and scripts differ from each other, as well as
the different ways that written texts are used in different communities.
 How children learn to talk?
 Interest in how children learn to talk has a long history across a range of academic disciplines,
including linguistics, psychology, sociology, biology, neurology, anthropology and philosophy.
 Prior to the 1960s, the dominant understanding was that children learn to speak largely by imitation
of the language modelled around them.
 Subsequent work in the tradition of theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky (e.g. 1986) claimed the
existence of an innate universal grammar that is able to generate the sets of rules needed to form
grammatically correct sentences (a ‘generative grammar’).
 Followers of Chomsky argue that due to the ‘impoverished input’ children are exposed to and their
ability to make sense of language, they must possess an innate understanding of language and
grammar which Chomsky termed the ‘language acquisition device’.
 Since the 1990s, however, linguists have instead emphasised the role of a range of factors that shape
language learning including experience, input, frequency, and memory. This is often termed the
usage-based approach to language learning. Within this approach, some theorists emphasise the role
of cognition in language learning, while others focus on the role of social interaction.
 In general, researchers from each perspective recognise the importance of the other, seeing each
perspective as working together to jointly build an explanation for how children learn language.
Usage-based approach: the cognitive aspect
 Usage-based research focusing on the cognitive aspect of learning to talk seeks to
understand the mental processes within children’s minds, focusing on the relationship
between the outward form of their utterances (especially their grammar and vocabulary)
and what these may reveal about their developing understanding of language and the
world.
 One of the most widely reported phenomena in children’s language development is that
English-speaking children roughly between the ages of eighteen months and three years
start to produce two-word ‘mini sentences’ or telegraphic language expressing simple
semantic relations such as actions or belonging.
From imitation to grammar rule application

 Early ‘sentences’ usually consist of content words only, with functional or grammatical
words omitted (mummy work rather than ‘mummy is working’). It seems that function
words, from closed word classes, such as articles (a or the), pronouns (my), prepositions
(of) and auxiliary verbs (is or has), as well as morphological inflections (like -ing or -ed or
possessive -’s), are typically acquired relatively late. This has been attributed in part to the
stress patterns of English.
 Once grammatical inflections start to appear, it’s been observed that typically
developing English-speaking children actually appear to move ‘backwards’ in their
learning and start making more mistakes. This is because they gradually replace simple
imitation of chunks of language (as in she held two mice) by the application of a set of
rules (as in she hold-ed two mouse-s), before finally settling on their local variety of
English.
Analyze

 Father: Where’s mommy?

 Frederick: Mommy goed to the store.
 Father: Mommy goed to the store?
 Frederick: NO! (annoyed) Daddy, I say it that way, not you.
 Father: Mommy wented to the store?
 Frederick: That’s right, mommy wennn … mommy goed to the store.
Overextension
 Children’s hypothesis-testing is also apparent in their acquisition of word meanings. It’s
been widely observed that young children tend to ‘over-extend’ (or less commonly ‘under-
extend’) the meanings of words, as they make the most of the linguistic resources they
have available and develop a sense of conceptual boundaries in English.
 Drawing on a range of diary studies of children’s early word use, psycholinguists Peter de
Villiers and Jill de Villiers classify some typical over-extensions according to the apparent
grounds for similarity:
 movement (the word bird used to refer to any moving creature)
 shape (moon for round objects such as cakes, postmarks, the letter O)
 sound (koko for music of all kinds)
 kind (bee for any insect)
Usage-based approach: the social aspect

 Whereas cognitive perspectives on language learning focus on processes internal to the

child’s mind in making sense of language as a system, social perspectives focus on the role
of language in social context, with the emphasis on communicative function.
 According to this view, language learning is seen as part of the child’s socialization into a
community with distinctive language practices, and language itself is seen as a resource
for its users.
 A focus on social interaction therefore entails consideration of elements of the wider social
context, including how children learn to take part in conversations with others, and how
they use language to perform particular functions.
 So it could be said that learning to speak is initially a matter of learning the rules of social
behavior and meaning making and only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by
which these are realised in English or any other language.
 Young children and range of meanings
 Roger Brown (1973) was one of the first to attempt to classify the range of meanings he observed
young children trying to express.
 Brown identified what he believed to be the eight most basic semantic relations expressed by children
at the two-word stage including Agent–Action (as in mail come or daddy hit), Action–Object (want
more or hit ball) and Agent–Object (mommy sandwich or daddy ball) (Brown, 1973, pp. 114, 173).
 Building on Brown’s seminal work, de Villiers and de Villiers (1979) established that typically
developing two-year-olds favour a limited range of meanings in their first sentences:
 English-speaking children talk about actions, what happened to what and who does what: Me fall.
Car go vroom! They are concerned, not to say obsessed, with the relationship of possession: My
teddy. Mommy hat.
 Equally prevalent is the relationship of location: Cup in box. Car garage. Among other early
meanings that find frequent expression at this stage are recurrence, labelling and nonexistence.
 De Villiers and de Villiers concluded that young children’s meaning making, regardless of the
language they’re learning, is constrained by their gradually developing understanding of the world.
Child directed speech (CDS)

 The language used by parents and other caregivers when speaking to children is known as
child directed speech (CDS).
 CS is characterized by simplified speech when talking to young children, raised vocal pitch
or exaggerate stress patterns and intonation, as well as perhaps simplified grammar.
 Patterns of engagement are also noticed in CDS where the caregiver asks questions to
engage the child and describe what they’re doing to teach them simple vocabulary aided by
action to facilitate understanding. Sometimes exaggerated facial expressions and gestures,
particularly for babies and very small children are used to maintain the attention of the
child.
 While directed at the child, CDS doesn’t mean children are passive learners; on the
contrary, child-directed speech is also directed by the child’s attention and by what the
child is doing, meaning that the child is effectively leading the topic of conversation.
 Advantages of using CDS
 CDS, although not universal, appears to serve at least three possible useful functions in learning
English.
 First, as Usha Goswami (2010, p. 112) has observed, it may help children attune their ear to the
characteristic strong–weak stress pattern of English words (like function, children and pattern) by
retaining this same pattern in diminutives like Mummy, Daddy and baby and extending it to other
words like doggie and milkie.
 Second, by use of exaggerated stress at the sentence level, CDS may serve to direct the child’s
attention to the key elements (usually the content words, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs,
rather than the function words) in an utterance.
 Third, by means of exaggerated intonation patterns involving rising or falling pitch, CDS may
also help to facilitate turn-taking in conversation by emphasizing question-and-answer exchanges
and other adjacency pairs.
 In sharp contrast to the generativist view, then, CDS isn’t low-quality input but is instead finely
tuned to the child’s current needs and provides scaffolding for language learning as well as
prompts to continue talking
 Read and notice
 1 Susie: Oh, look, a crab. We seen – we were been to the seaside.
 2 Babysitter: Have you?
 3 Susie: We saw cr – fishes and crabs. And we saw a jellyfish, and we had to bury it. And we – we did
holding crabs, and we – we holded him in by the spade.
 4 Babysitter: Did you?
 5 Susie: Yes, to kill them, so they won’t bite our feet.
 6 Babysitter: Oh.
 7 Susie: If you stand on them, they hurt you, won’t they.
 8 Babysitter: They would do. They’d pinch you.
 9 Susie: You’d have to – and we put them under the sand, where the sea was. And they were going to the
sea.
 10 Babysitter: Mhm.
 11 Susie: And we saw some shells. And we picked them up, and we heard the sea in them. And we saw a
crab on a lid. And we saw lots of crabs on the sea side. And I picked the – fishes up – no, the shells, and
the feathers from the birds.
 12 Babysitter: Gosh, that was fun.
Formulaic language

 Language produced as chunks is generally referred to as formulaic language, socially

contextualised chunks.
 Children are able to deduce the meaning of whole phrases from the communicative
context, without necessarily analysing them into their component parts.
 Children in second language learning contexts have also been found to learn through this
means.
Think and analyse

 In what ways do you think formulaic language differs from the examples of telegraphic
language you met earlier (i.e. utterances containing lexical rather than grammatical
morphemes)?
Check your knowledge

 In what ways do you think formulaic language differs from the examples of telegraphic
language you met earlier (i.e. utterances containing lexical rather than grammatical
morphemes)?
 The two processes seem to operate simultaneously, but from different bases.
 Formulaic language is reproduced holistically by imitation, with the emphasis on its social
function, whereas telegraphic language is generated independently of any adult model and
is built up by the child from individual lexical items in their vocabulary, showing evidence
of their rule-testing.
Cognitive or social aspect?

 As you’ve seen in this section, the cognitive aspect within the usage based approach to
language learning gives greater prominence to analytic processes and rule formation, along
with the child’s general understanding of the world, while the social aspect gives greater
prominence to copying those around them in learning about social behaviour and meaning
making, along with developing skills of social interaction.
 These parallel accounts, which reflect a relative emphasis on linguistic structures or on
communicative practices, work in a complementary way within the usage-based approach,
enabling us to view the language learning process through different lenses.
 Emergent literacy
 First explorations of reading and writing are commonly referred to as emergent literacy (e.g. Neaum,
2018; Neumann, 2018) as children participate in the literacy activities of their families and
communities.
 Emergent literacy skills provide a foundation for children to build upon through formal education.
 street signs, posters, shop names, notices and leaflets which use the Roman alphabet (as in English)
 various abbreviations (e.g. Co., Pte., Ltd.)
 logographs, also known as ‘logograms’ (where a symbol stands for a whole word), as in the Arabic-
based numeral system (1, 2, 3 …), various weights and measures and company logos; for example, 1K
for ‘£1000’, H for ‘hospital’, M for ‘McDonald’s’, or the heart shape sometimes used to mean ‘love’
 pictographs, also known as ‘pictograms’ (where an image denotes an entire phrase or concept), such as
many road traffic signs and pictorial symbols for male and female toilets.
Heath’s study on pre-school literacy practices

 A classic ethnographic study by Shirley Brice Heath (Heath, 1982; 1983) was influential in
revealing differences in preschool literacy practices among three communities in the
Piedmont Carolinas (in the Eastern United States) that she called Maintown, Roadville and
Trackton.
 Her focus was on ‘any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the
participants’ interactions’
 Scenario 1
 Children in Maintown, described by Heath as representing ‘mainstream, middle-class school-
oriented culture’ (p. 49), lived in an environment filled with print and with information derived
from print.
 From six months on, these children heard and responded to books and referred to book related
incidents in their interactions.
 As they got older, Maintown children learned certain rules about book reading, such as the types
of questions that can be asked and the fact that interruptions are allowed.
 They also learned ways of talking about texts and began to use the types of language structures
more often heard in books than in speech.
Scenario 2

 In Roadville, a white working-class community, books also played a central role in

children’s lives, and their rooms were full of alphabet friezes, mobiles and the like.
 However, books were widely regarded as teaching ‘opportunities’ (p. 58), times when
children got it right, rather than as opportunities for stories to be explored.
 The world of books was distinct from ‘real life’(p. 58), and book reading was less
interactive between adult and child than in Maintown, especially when a child reached
school age.
Scenario 3

 Children from Trackton, an African American working-class community, didn’t experience

the baby paraphernalia of mobiles, friezes and pop-up books.
 The rich language opportunities came not from books, but from adult talk and oral
narratives.
 Reading in Trackton wasn’t a private affair, it was highly social, a time for discussion and
negotiation of meaning.
 A letter, a set of instructions or a story might be interpreted, reshaped and reworked
through a lot of talk.
 Analysis
 In Heath’s words, the three communities introduced children to different ways of extracting meaning
from literacy events.
 Each of the communities intertwined talk and writing in very different ways that challenge any simple
oral–literate division. For example, Maintown and Trackton valued imagination and fictionalisation,
while Roadville did not.
 Direct teaching about language was valued in Maintown and Roadville but not in Trackton.
 Negotiation over the meaning of a book or letter happened in Trackton and to some extent Maintown,
but was not valued in Roadville.
 Children were seen as needing their own specially designed reading materials in Maintown and
Roadville but not in Trackton.
 When these children, with their different experiences of interacting with print, enter school they’ll find
that only some of their literacy practices are valued.
 For some children, then, school literacy may seem very different from the literacy found in their own
homes, whereas for others it may be very familiar.
Implication

 Since Heath’s foundational work, there’s been a great deal of research focus on the effects
of home literacy practices on the development of emergent reading and writing skills in
preparation for school, challenging previous ‘normalised’ perceptions of children’s
language development.
 In addition to learning to read and write in English and perhaps another language, children
are now also learning how to communicate digitally
 Is English literacy harder to acquire?
 One critical task in the early stages of learning to read is to work out which unit of speech is
coded by any particular language. Two principles are usually identified as the basis of the
different writing systems: that symbols should represent meaning, as in logographs or
pictographs, or that symbols should represent sound, as in alphabets or syllabaries (a phonetic
writing system where symbols represent syllables rather than individual sounds or phonemes).
 English words are conventionally written from left to right, whereas in Arabic, which is also
alphabetic, words are written from right to left. In Chinese, which is predominantly logographic,
logographs are written from top to bottom and right to left, and in Japanese, which may be
written with syllabic or logographic symbols, writing may be either vertical or horizontal.
 The advantage of learning to read in an alphabetic or a syllabic system is that, once the initial
breakthrough in understanding happens, any new word can (more or less) be worked out, while
the learning of new logographs has to continue for many years.
Sound to letter relationship

 Alphabetic systems may represent another kind of learning challenge in terms of their
orthography (or spelling system).
 In some languages – for example Spanish, there’s a very close relationship between the
phonemes and the letters. This means that a fluent reader familiar with alphabetic systems
would soon be able to read aloud in Spanish.
 English writing is more complex, as there are fewer symbols in the 26-letter alphabet of
English than there are sounds in the spoken language, and the standard orthography does
not correspond precisely to any particular accent.
Inconsistencies

 Children learning to read and write English have to become aware of many
inconsistencies. For example, some symbols are used to represent more than one sound,
such as the letter <a> in the words cat, play and are.
 Within English, there are also many letter combinations which may have to be memorised
as though they were logographs (e.g. knight, through) and others as though they were
morpheme or syllable based (e.g. the ending -tion).
 The young child learning to read and write English seems to face a more challenging task
than, say, the child learning to write Spanish, with their more regular spelling conventions.
Problems facing biliterate children

 All children experience a range of forms and functions of writing. However, children
acquiring literacy in bilingual or multilingual communities are additionally faced with
working out the particular forms and functions of a variety of different scripts or
orthographies.
 Kress (1997) explains that all modes of representation offer different potentials and
limitations. Each writing system uses the visual and actional modes in particular ways.
When children produce written symbols they have to pay attention to a number of different
facets – the type of stroke to be used, directionality, shape, size, spatial orientation,
placement on the page – and these will be culturally specified in the teaching experienced
by the child.