The Meaning Makers

Learning to Talk and Talking to Learn

Gordon Wells

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847691989
• eBook ISBN: 9781847699275
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Meaning Makers is about children's language and literacy development at home and at school. Based on the Bristol Study, "Language at Home and at School, " which the author directed, it follows the development of a representative sample of children from their first words to the end of their primary schooling. It contains many examples of their experience of language in use, both spoken and written, recorded in naturally occurring settings in their homes and classrooms, and shows the active role that children play in their own development as they both make sense of the world around them and master the linguistic means for communicating about it. Additionally, this second edition also sets the findings of the original study in the context of recent research in the sociocultural tradition inspired by Vygotsky's work and includes examples of effective teaching drawn from the author's recent collaborative research with teachers.

Chapter 1

The Children and Their Families

‘It’s half past nine. Where’s Rosie?’

‘She got a knife in her hands, Dad’

‘Oh, my God!’

This was our first meeting with Rosie. Up to that point unnoticed, as she sat quietly under the table playing with a knife, she became briefly the focus of attention. Then, the knife removed, she was left once again to her own devices.

Rosie

It was shortly after breakfast on 27 July 1973, and we were making our first observation of Rosie. But an observation with a difference. The only evidence of our interest in Rosie was a slight bulge under her dress at the front and a rather larger hump between her shoulders at the back. This was the bugging device – a pair of miniature microphones and a battery-operated radio transmitter – left in her home on the previous afternoon. Her elder brother and sisters were naturally intrigued. A little later, when Rosie had fallen asleep on the sofa, Kelvin (age eight) and his friend Mike took a closer look.¹

Mike:	What’s it connected to? her ears or her mouth?
Mother:	Eh? No, she just got it on . she got a square thing over her shoulders and round to the back
Kelvin:	Mike, look at this . there it is . look
Mother:	The round thing there is the microphone
Mike:	How does the noise come out, then, if it ain’t in her mouth?
Mother:	I don’t know . you see there’s a wire going over there and a wire going over that side
Mike:	Is there a wire in her mouth?
Mother:	No . there’s another microphone there . when she speaks it goes on that recorder in there [pointing to a box in the corner of the room]
Mike:	Can you hear her speak?
Mother:	No . they’re coming tonight to play it back … and if there’s anything comes out what we wants rubbed off, they’ll rub it off

Like most of the children, at 15 months Rosie wasn’t saying much that we could interpret with confidence. She also slept for quite a lot of the day. But this first recording gave the family an opportunity to get used to having the recorder in their home (there were very few references to the equipment on subsequent recordings). It also gave us our first glimpse of them and of their relationships with each other.

Rosie and her family lived in the inner city in a small terrace house built in the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Father, a labourer, was not regularly employed and spent most of his time around the house. So, with two adults and five children – ranging from Kelvin, age eight, to Donna, only a year older than Rosie – as well as a large dog, there was not much space in the house when all of them were at home. With little money, providing for the children was a fairly constant preoccupation and so, although they were clearly fond of Rosie and concerned for her welfare, her parents did not find time to give her a great deal of individual attention. As she grew older, however, her brother and elder sisters included her in their activities, and by the time she went to school, she and Donna were almost inseparable.

Abigail

Abigail, whom we first met a few weeks later, was another child with several older siblings. She, however, lived on the other side of the city centre in a spacious four-floor house in a Regency terrace with a large garden. Like Rosie, though, she tended to get overlooked when all the family was at home – at least until she had learned to take part in the conversation. On one occasion, her mother found her in one of her sisters’ bedrooms, playing alone with materials for tie-and-dye.

Abigail:	[asking about the bottles of dye] What’s those?
Mother:	Did you take anything out?
Abigail:	Yeh
Mother:	[under her breath] Oh, my God … oh, Christ . [then, to Abigail] open your mouth

Fortunately, it was a false alarm. Abigail had not tried to drink the dye.

What both these narrow escapes illustrate (though more dramatically than usual) is just how much of parental speech to the one- to two-year-old is likely to be concerned with the child’s safety and welfare, particularly when, with older and more verbal children competing for their attention, parents only notice what the youngest is up to when the damage is done. In fact, for many of the children at this age, controlling utterances, together with exclamations and endearments, provided the majority of the speech addressed to them. While Mother is talking to Rosanna, Abigail has gone into the garden with no shoes on and stepped in a puddle.

Abigail:	[shouts with glee]
Mother:	[looking out of the door] Oh, Abby! for goodness sake! . you’ve come out in your tights after I’ve just dressed you . taken ages to get you ready
[She picks Abigail up, takes her inside, and returns to her conversation with Rosanna.]

Notice, though, that such controlling utterances can also provide quite a lot of information about the way things are – or, perhaps, about the way they should or should not be. As we eavesdropped on these families, we came to realize very clearly that learning to talk is just one facet (albeit probably the most important one) of learning to be a member of a particular culture, with all the taken-for-granted assumptions of what is important, what is approved or disapproved of, and what that entails. Here is another example.

Abigail, now 21 months old, has been to the supermarket with her mother. On the way home, Abigail has been exploring the box of groceries and has found a packet of stock cubes. She is now sucking one of them.

Abigail:	*
Mother:	Oh, yucky! . oh, where’s the packet gone, darling?
[No response, as Abigail continues to suck the cube.]
Mother:	It’s for cooking, sweetheart . look, it’s for putting in a cooking pot to make a stew

Abigail’s parents, both professional people, were involved in a Franco-British society and, on several of the occasions when we observed her, there were young French people staying in the house. This led to many interesting conversations about places and customs that the visitors had remarked on or that were drawn to their attention. Thanks to her microphone, we were able to eavesdrop on these conversations, just as Abigail was. What she made of them we cannot tell, but there is no doubt that, compared with many other children, the range of language to which she was exposed as a listener was extremely wide and varied.

By 24 months, Abigail had acquired sufficient linguistic resources to begin to join in the conversation, provided the other person gave her his or her full attention. In the following extract, she was talking with her father about the jigsaw puzzle that they were doing together.

Abigail:	[referring to a figure in the puzzle] Mummy
Father:	[confirming] That’s Mummy . and who’s that?
Abigail:	Man
Father:	Very good .. and who’s that?
Abigail:	Bike
Father:	Bicycle
Abigail:	Bicycle
Father:	And that?
Abigail:	And car
Father:	And a car .. oh, look!
Abigail:	Man
Father:	Lots of men

Three months later, she was well on her way to mastering the adult language. In the following extract, we find her alone with her mother, engaged in drawing and colouring.

Abigail:	There Teddy . there ‘tis
Mother:	Is that your teddy?
Abigail:	Yes it is
Mother:	Do you want to draw a teddy?
Abigail:	[referring to a crayon] I have...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue to the Second Edition
• Introduction to First Edition
• Notes on Transcriptions of Dialogue Extracts
• 1 The Children and Their Families
• 2 Learning to Talk: The Pattern of Development
• 3 Learning to Talk: The Construction of Language
• 4 Talking to Learn
• 5 From Home to School
• 6 Helping Children to Make Knowledge Their Own
• 7 Differences Between Children in Language and Learning
• 8 The Centrality of Literacy
• 9 The Children’s Achievement at Age 10
• 10 The Sense of Story
• 11 A Functional Theory of Language Development
• 12 Toward Dialogue in the Classroom
• 13 The Interdependence of Practice and Theory
• Epilogue: Making Meaning Together
• Appendix 1: The Bristol Language Development Scale
• References
• Index