When talking to children, imitation and reinforcement play a huge part in their language development. A child must be aware of what the correct form of English is and what is grammatically incorrect. By doing so, caregivers repeat what a child has said, they recast the utterance displayed by the child and respond to the language shown. It is an important factor needed, most definitely amongst early life stages. This is a concept conjured by Skinner.
Throughout Text A, we see many examples of the mother recasting and correcting Toms speech. 'i sitting on the bike (.) it make noises''. Firstly Tom delivers an elliptical construction, missing the stative verb 'am' in 'I sitting on the bike'. To follow, Tom re-displays this child language feature. 'It make noises', the declarative utterance contains a missed inflection, missing out the inflection 's' at the end of 'make'. This feature is most common amongst the telegraphic stage. The telegraphic stage is the final stage of child's language acquisition and is a concept that explains the utterances children produce should contain 3-4 word sentence; enough to make sense. In response to this,Tom's mother recasts toms speech and states 'it makes noises', recasting what tom has stated. The desired result of a recast is that the child would realise the mistake, correcting it next time.
Within Text B, many of the same example is shown. However, using response to reinforce instead. Tom (firstly displaying a false start) states 'is (.) is dat your talker?' the deictic reference shows Tom's speech has still not developed to correct standard. The immature pronunciation of 'dat' suggests his language has not completely developed as of yet. In response, Toms mother replies 'my talker? yeah (.) that's a tape recorder. Using a contrast of both response and reconstruction, she shows that she does understand what Tom is referring too. Like the Piaget theory, Tom is classifying the object as a single feature- most commonly seen from children ages 2-7. This is extremely relevant to Tom who is 2 years and 7 months old.
To conclude, within both text A and text B Toms mother often changes and corrects Toms language to standard English in the hope that he will understand his mistake and will display mature language development in the future.
Good to notice patterns ("many examples") - you need more quotes to support that pattern, exploring how they are subtly different and linking that to theories and contexts e.g. age, accent etc.
ReplyDeleteGood level of terminology (I don't get to say that much!!! Well done!).
Check the homophones to/too/two and you need to ensure you use possessive apostrophes where needed.
It's always best to write out the title/question and you must return to it in every paragraph.
There needs to be more connection/contrast of the theories and see how far the data supports the significance of them.