Desirable Literacies

Approaches to Language and Literacy in the Early Years

Jackie Marsh, Elaine Hallet, Jackie Marsh, Elaine Hallet, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781847872821, 9781847872814
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903739
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

What are the ways in which young children learn to communicate? Collating their extensive experience of language and literacy in the early years, the contributors explore key aspects of this topic, linking practical ideas for early years settings and classrooms to relevant theory and research.

This second edition is updated to take into account important developments in research, policy and practice, and now covers the 0-8 age range. It also addresses developments in new media and the impact this has upon literacy in young children, and offers chapters on new areas which have emerged in recent years, such as multimodality, media literacy, creative arts and literacy.

Explored in the book are:

- the relationship between play and literacy;

- the role environmental print has in early literacy development;

- the language and literacy development of young bilinguals;

- ideas, suggestions and justifications for the use of poetry;

- a two-year research project, funded by Creative Partnerships; and

- key issues relating to family literacy.

1

Learning to talk, talking to learn

Jim McDonagh and Sue McDonagh

We can take it for granted that by the time a child enters nursery he or she will have acquired much of the grammatical system of his or her native language, much of the sound system and a substantial vocabulary. Although there will be individual differences between children, all will have used language to express meanings, to communicate with others and to make sense of the world in which they are growing up. In using language they also learn about language, their own and the language of others.

This chapter focuses on the important role speaking and listening activities have in the life of the young child. It begins with an overview of the child’s early language acquisition and the different perspectives offered by those researching language, and goes on to discuss the role of the adult in developing a child’s spoken language. The complexity of the acquisition process can only be lightly sketched here, the emphasis being on the importance of interaction in learning and learning to talk. This is followed by suggestions for classroom- or home-based activities.

Language acquisition – differing perspectives

Until the late 1950s the prevailing views on language acquisition were largely influenced by behaviourism until the work of Noam Chomsky marked a turning point in theories about the nature of language and the nature of language acquisition. The behaviourists’ claim that language is learned through the acquisition of linguistic habits and that imitation of adults’ speech plays an important role in learning is strongly countered by Chomsky’s assertion that language is ‘creative’, that is, human beings produce novel utterances when they speak, rather than imitations of what they have heard before:

The normal use of language is innovative in the sense that much of what we say in the course of normal language use is entirely new, not a repetition of anything that we have heard before, and not even similar in pattern – in any useful sense of the terms ‘similar’ and ‘pattern’ – to sentences or discourse that we have heard in the past. (Chomsky, 1972: 12)

To account for this ability to produce and understand novel utterances Chomsky claims that human beings possess an innate capacity to acquire language through the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a mental mechanism specifically concerned with language. According to Chomsky, the adult utterances a child is exposed to are often too ill-formed and incomplete to serve as a suitable model to imitate. A child learning his or her first language will abstract rules from this rather shapeless language he or she encounters and incorporate these into his or her production/understanding of language, and will do so in a relatively short space of time.

It appears that we recognise a new utterance as a sentence not because it matches some familiar pattern in any simple way, but because it is generated by the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalised. Chomsky asserts that natural languages are governed by complex rules that are not apparent in ‘surface structure’, the actual utterances of a language. If a child acquiring a language had to rely solely on the snatches of language heard in his or her environment he or she would not be able to abstract, and so acquire, the rules. Evidence that children do not acquire language through imitation of adults can be seen from the ‘overgeneralisations’ evident in their speech; for example, ‘It got broked’, ‘She putted it on the carpet’. In one experiment McNeill (1966: 61) effectively demonstrated that if a child is not ready he or she will not be able to imitate an adult’s utterance:

Child:	Nobody don’t like me.
Mother:	No, say ‘Nobody likes me’.
Child:	Nobody don’t like me. [Eight repetitions of this exchange]
Mother:	No, now listen carefully: say ‘Nobody likes me’.
Child:	Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.

If anything, an adult will imitate a child’s utterance, although few sober adults would ever say ‘All-gone milk’ or ‘I sawed two mouses’.

Chomsky’s ideas on language led to important studies of children’s acquisition of language in the 1960s. Evidence was provided that a child’s language develops through hypothesis-testing, that is, the child is actively involved in acquiring the mother tongue, and not just a passive recipient, as some behaviourists would claim. Through testing out hypotheses the child’s language develops, ‘by successive approximations passing through several steps that are not yet English’ (McNeill, 1966: 61). The aim of first language acquisition studies was to describe these successive approximations or interim grammars.

Research, such as that of Brown (1973) and deVilliers and deVilliers (1973), demonstrates that children follow a natural sequence of development in their acquisition of language. Although the rate of development might vary between children, the order in which language is acquired remains invariant. If we look at just one area that has been extensively studied, that of sentence structure, we can see that by the age of three or three and a half years, the child is acquiring complex sentence structure with the use of coordinating conjunctions such as ‘but’ and ‘and’ as well as subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’. Comparative forms emerge (‘this is bigger’; ‘this is more better’) and we see the beginnings of relative clauses: ‘This is one what Mummy got’. Over the next year or so the child will acquire many of the irregular forms of verbs and nouns and make fewer overgeneralisations in their speech. However, many overgeneralisations will persist until much later in a child’s development. It is not uncommon for eight year olds to say ‘I hurted my knee’, for instance. Pronouns are largely acquired during this stage, auxiliary verbs such as ‘can’, ‘will’ and so on, and the beginnings of passive forms of the verb: ‘I got smacked’. The creativity Chomsky mentioned as characteristic of human language is very much in evidence during this period with children producing unique utterances (Pinker, 1994).

Communicative competence

In his writings Chomsky is concerned with discovering the mental reality behind actual behaviour, arriving at an understanding of a native speaker’s competence. In Chomsky’s view a grammar of a language is a model of the linguistic abilities of a native speaker of that language, which allow him or her to speak/understand that particular language. This is the speaker–hearer’s competence; the speaker–hearer’s knowledge of her or his language which is distinguished from Chomsky’s notion of performance; the actual use of language in concrete situations (Chomsky, 1965: 4).

For Chomsky, the actual use of language in concrete situations is rather untidy and not deemed worth of serious study. Others have argued, however, that language is dependent on the social context and that interaction plays an important role in language acquisition. Micheal Halliday (1976) has proposed a ‘functional’ view of children’s language development and contends that:

Learning language is learning the uses of language and the meaning potential associated with them; the structures, the words and the sounds are the realisation of this meaning potential. Learning language is learning to mean. (in Kress, 1976: 8)

Halliday’s ‘meaning potential’ is akin to Hymes’s (1972) notion of ‘communicative competence’, but differs from Hymes’s in that Halliday is not interested in ‘the artificial concept’ of competence, that is, what the speaker–hearer knows. His concern is with what the speaker–hearer does with language in sociolinguistic or functional terms.

Hymes (1972) and Campbell and Wales (1970) both recognise the limitations of Chomsky’s definition of ‘competence’, and propose the notion of communicative competence as encompassing a range of ability broader than just grammatical knowledge. Campbell and Wales (1970), in a discussion of developments in language acquisition theory, define competence as:

The ability to produce or understand utterances which are not so much grammatical but, more important, appropriate to the context in which they are made. (Campbell and Wales, 1970: 247)

‘Competence’ then is extended beyond exclusive grammatical knowledge to include contextual or sociolingual competence, knowledge of the rules of language use.

The importance of interaction

Chomsky’s claim that the linguistic input children received from adults was ‘degenerate’ and not worthy of analysis, and that the only interface between input and output was located in the child’s mind, has been challenged by those researchers who have examined the interactions children have with their ‘caretakers’. Those who have studied first language acquisition from an ‘interactionist’ perspective, like Jean Berko Gleason (1977; 2004), emphasise the contribution of external as well as internal factors to language acquisition. She argues that children do not acquire language all by themselves:

They are not simply miniature grammarians working on a corpus composed of snatches and fragments of adult discourse. (Gleason, 1977: 199)

By examining interactions between children and their mothers (or other ‘caretakers’) researchers have established the existence of ‘motherese’, speech that is produced by an adult (or older child) in interaction with a child whose linguistic competence and cognitive development are perceived as limited. Mother’s, caretaker’s or child-directed speech is simple and redundant; it contains many questions, many imperatives, few past tenses, few coordinating or subordinating conjunctions, few disfluencies; and is pitched higher with an exaggerated intonation (Snow, 1995; Snow and Ferguson, 1977).

Motherese varies according to the communicative demands of the situation, and even experienced caretakers cannot produce adequate motherese if the child is not present to cue him or her. Landes (1975) highlights that parents and other caretakers modify their speech in various ways until the child is at least 10 years old. From the research into motherese we find claims that the best input for a child is one step beyond the stage the child is at (Gleitman, Newport and Gleitman, 1984).

In addition to the presence of the LAD (Language Acquisition Device) proposed by Chomsky, Jerome Bruner (1983) suggests that there is also a LASS (Language Acquisition Support System). According to Bruner, adults provide a framework of ‘scaffolding’ which enables the child to learn. In contexts that are familiar and routinised, the adult, one step ahead of the child, cues the child’s responses. By providing ritualised dialogue and constraints through questioning and feedback to the child, the adult prepares the cognitive base on which language is acquired. Cazden (1983) also uses the term ‘scaffolding’ to refer to the adult’s role but makes a distinction between vertical and sequential scaffolding. Vertical scaffolding involves the adult extending the child’s language by, for instance, asking further questions. Sequential scaffolding occurs in the routinised activities adults and children share, for example during games, ba...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Learning to talk, talking to learn
• 2 Living in two worlds: the language and literacy development of young bilinguals
• 3 White cars like mice with little legs: poetry in the early years
• 4 Signs and symbols: children’s engagement with environmental print
• 5 Early reading development
• 6 Developing writing in the early years
• 7 Multimodal literacies
• 8 Looking with a different eye: creativity and literacy in the early years
• 9 Play, drama and literacy in the early years
• 10 ICT and literacy
• 11 Media literacy in the early years
• 12 Family literacy: past and present
• 13 Going fishing: observing, assessing and planning for literacy development in young children
• Index