U214B Book1 Ch 3

U214B:Book 1
Communicating in English:
Talk, Text, Technology
Chapter 3
Growing up with English

• . Introduction
• Chapters 1 and 2 have considered a range of practices in spoken and written English involving English-speaking adults. In this chapter, we will consider how Englishspeaking children learn to take part in such practices-how they learn to make sense of the English language as a system, and how they learn to make meaning in English.
• According to Crystal, approximately one in three of the world’s population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English.
• The focus of this chapter is on how children in the preschool years, whether monolingual or bilingual, come to understand what it means to be an English user.

• This unit focuses on how monolingual and bilingual children learn to speak and write in English. We look at different explanations of how children develop linguistic and social communication skills, and how this process is influenced by the cultural environment in which they are growing up.
• Learning to talk in English:

• Crystal outlines the knowledge that children need to acquire in order to speak English: 50,000 words of vocabulary, thousand aspects of grammatical construction, hundred ways of using prosodic (the patterns of sounds) features of pitch, volume, speed and rhythm to convey meaning....

• How do infants communicate?
• Theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky was the first to argue for a so-called nativist position that language is an innate human ability which is biologically determined and follows a predictable developmental path.
• Chomsky acknowledged that there is a critical period for language acquisition. Evidence from the small number of children tragically isolated from social contact in their early years provides support for this claim.

• Obviously, no infant is pre-programmed to speak English or any other language, but it has been observed that babies are primed (prepared) even within the womb to attend to the particular melody of the language that surrounds them.
• Infants come to recognise the boundaries of English words by the frequent stress on the first syllable, and their early experimentation with babbling soon differentiates the particular sounds which are meaningful in their linguistic community from those which are not.
• You will notice how it is possible to have a one-word vocabulary and yet be capable of expressing a range of different meanings by varying the intonation and the body language.

• Anthropologists argue that children begin by learning the meaning of speech acts and only gradually learn the language that corresponds to these in the community around them.
• Gordon Wells has likened this to a conversation without words between infants and their caregivers; he argues that infants come to be able to have and express communicative intentions by being treated as if they could already have them.
• So, it could be said that learning to speak is initially a matter of learning the rules of social behaviour and meaning making and only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by which these are realised in
English or any other language.

• A baby’s first experience of language across many cultures is likely to be in dialogue with a caregiver (an adult who takes care of a child).
• When communicating with babies, adults in many
English-speaking cultures tend to use a simplified style of speech with exaggerated intonation, referred to as child-directed speech (CDS), or baby talk.
• What are the functions of CDS?
• CDS appears to serve at least three possible useful functions in learning English: First, it may help children attune (adapt) their ear to the characteristic strongweak stress pattern of English words (like function, children) by retaining this pattern in words like
(mummy, daddy).

• Second, by the 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) 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 emphasising question-and-answer exchanges and other adjacency pairs.
• Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that CDS is by no means essential to language acquisition since children are not able to acquire language in cultures where CDS is not practised.

• you may well have noticed that you use CDS with young children even if you had not been aware of this. Maybe you raised your vocal pitch or exaggerated your intonation, as well as perhaps simplifying your grammar. Many adults try to some extent to speak like a child.
• The use of CDS and the development of language through playing are by no means universal to all human cultures.

• 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 Chomsky emphasised the role of instinct (behave in a particular way using the knowledge that they were born with).
• More recent research findings have taken a step back in the direction of imitation, although much of any language is probably stored as a set of rules, there is also a large element of habit formation. In other words, children learn much of their early language in chunks (portions or amounts) as part of interactional routines with those around them.

• Cognitive perspectives on learning to talk
• Research in the cognitive tradition seeks to understand the mental processes within children’s mind, focusing on the relationship between the outward form of their utterances
(grammar & vocabulary) and what these may reveal about their developing understanding of language and the world.
• A cognitive perspective generally seeks to investigate what is common to all normally developing children, rather than what makes each child different.

• Grammatical development:
• With particular regard to how children learn grammar,
Chomsky argues that there are universal principles
(such as noun and verb) that are common to the grammars of all human languages, but the parameters of variation (such as word order or morphology) need to be set differently according to the language to which children are exposed.
• All children are born with an awareness that language is composed of certain building blocks (noun phrases and verb phrases), but they do not know how to combine these elements into sentences until they are exposed to some input in a particular language.

• One of the most widely reported phenomena is that
English-speaking children roughly between the ages of eighteen months and two years start to produce twoword (mini sentences) expressing simple semantic relations such as actions or belonging, and this is what we called telegraphic language. Function words like articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and morphological inflections are normally acquired late.
• Once grammatical inflections start to appear, it has been observed that normally 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 (she held two mice) by the application of a set of rules (she holded two mouses). • Children’s early mistakes in generalising rules are thus a sign of creative minds at play, rather than the mere imitation of adult speech.
• Drawing on Chomsky’s ideas, a distinction is often drawn between the child’s active linguistic performance
(the process of performing a task) and their underlying knowledge of the language system or linguistic competence (the ability to do something well).
• The disparity between linguistic competence and performance is particularly salient (clear) in young children, but it is a phenomenon which exists throughout life, as manifested in the slips of the tongue and incomplete grammar which characterise the unscripted speech of adults.

• Vocabulary development
• Much work in this tradition has concentrated on children’s lexical development, with the emphasis on both the size of vocabulary and the types of words produced. • It has been widely observed that young children tend to over-extended the meanings of words, as they try to maximise their limited vocabulary and develop a sense of conceptual boundaries in English.
• Psycholinguists Villiers and Villiers classify some typical over-extensions (the act of making something longer or larger) according to the apparent grounds of similarity.
For example (movement- shape- size- sound- texturefunction).

• Bilingual children

• Many children are learning English around the world quite naturally, while others acquire it as a second language in childhood in contexts outside home. Research with the latter group lends support to the idea that there may be a natural order of acquisition of grammatical structures within
English, regardless of the child’s first language.
• Indeed, many of the errors made by such children resemble the developmental stages of monolingual English speakers.
• But how do bilingual children come to know what is English and what is not? Research with infants growing up bilingual suggests that they tend first to distinguish the different sound system of their languages, followed by the vocabularies and then the grammars.

• However, the question of whether they have effectively one linguistic system or two has long been an area of research.
• The answer may well be related to the kind of language practices to which an individual child has been exposed, whether the languages are kept separate or used side by side.
• Even very young bilingual children are capable of recognising their languages as separate system.

• Social perspectives on learning to talk:
• 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.
• From an early age a child uses his voice to order people about, to get them to do things for him; he uses it to demand certain objects or services.
• Social perspectives emphasise the pragmatics of language use, focusing on how children learn to take part in conversation with others, and how they use language to perform particular speech acts and to express social identity. • Meaning making:
• Children’s early utterances are open to diverse interpretation, but 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 daddy hit),
Action-Object (hit ball), and Agent- Object (daddy ball). Linguists conclude that young children’s meaning making is restricted by the two-year-old understanding of the world.

• Formulaic ( imitative)language:
• Despite the human capacity for analysing language, much of what children are heard to say seems to be acquired simply by coping those around them.
• Children are able to deduce the meaning of whole phrases from the communicative context, without necessarily analysing them into their component parts. This is called formulaic language.

• 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 appears to reflect a deeper level of grammatical analysis.
• Wray while reviewing a range of evidence, has observed that a high level of parental education, as well as a child’s position in the family as first born, appear to correlate with referential language.
Conversely, children whose dominant experience of language has been in social interaction with older siblings (brothers and sisters) are more likely to be expressive in their own use of language.

• Even before children utter their first recognisable word, there are many ways in which the patterns of discourse between children and caregivers differ according to the culture or cultures in which they are being brought up. It is often the social routines of language that children learn first.
• Whereas more cognitive approaches to language learning focus on children’s linguistic competence, the focus of social approaches is on their communicative competence, a term generally attributed to linguist Hymes: A normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate.

• Because only a small proportion of the sentences permitted by the grammar of English are routinely used, children have to learn what is socially appropriate in the course of social interaction.
• When children interact with larger social groups, not only are turn-taking boundaries more challenging to negotiate, but children are also exposed to greater variation in role and need to design their utterances more carefully to achieve the desired effect: it’s a matter of knowing what to say and knowing the rules of interaction that allow one to say it.

• Speaking as a child
• Sensitivity to relative status in relationships is particularly apparent if we look at children’s developing recognition and use of the different ways of performing the speech acts of making requests and issuing commands in English.
It would appear that children take some time to develop sensitivity to the full adult repertoire (list) for getting people to do things. In order to choose the appropriate expression for the occasion, a child not only needs to be aware of the range of linguistic forms available to perform the speech acts of requesting or demanding, but also needs to have a sense of how likely the addressee is to comply with (obey) the request. Children can resort to indirect means of getting what they want, such as asking questions or making hints.

• It is important to remember that adult-child role relationships are not reciprocal (equal or the same). The more cognitive perspectives on the language learning process give greater prominence to analytic processes and rule formation, along with the child’s general understanding of the world, while the more social perspectives give greater prominence to imitation and habit formation, along with developing skills of social interaction. • Learning to read and write in English
Taking part in literacy practices does not depend on being able to read and write in the adult sense. Particular genres of text, such as product labels, restaurant signs, and so on, may be recognised long before individual letters are known.

• In an environment of written texts, children will use many strategies to work out what adults are doing with magazines, pens, computers and all the other things associated with literacy, and will attempt to join the adult literate world in different ways. These first discoveries of reading and writing have been described as emergent literacy.
• Cognitive perspectives on learning to read and write:
• A child’s-eye view:
• A walk in any local shopping area where English features in the environment will demonstrate the diversity of visual symbols which confront children. There may be any combination of the following:

1.
2.
3.
•.

Street signs, shop names ……. (English)
A similar array of signage using other scripts (Chinese )
Some rather arbitrary abbreviations (Co., Ltd.)
Logographs, also known as logograms (where a symbol stands for a whole word), as H for hospital, the heart shape means love … etc.
•. Pictographs, also known as pictograms (where an image denotes a phrase or concept), such as many traffic signs and pictorial symbols for male and female toilets. •. The child’s world of written texts is not limited by the adult divisions into writing and not-writing, and part of the task facing them is what to identify as English.

• Map signs, computer graphics, punctuation marks, road signs, and so on are also part of the literacy learning process and need to be worked out for their individual meaning as well as their place as part of a system.
• Children’s markings, while having many English language features, ranged from pictorial graphs to symbol-like strings.
• Is English literacy harder to acquire than literacy in other languages?
• Two principles are usually identified as the basis of the different writing systems: that symbols should represent meaning, as in logographs or pictograph, or that symbols should represent sound, as in alphabets or syllabaries.

• In addition, children need to work out how the temporal order of speech relates to the spatial (dimensions) order of writing.
• For example, English words are written from left to right, whereas in Arabic and Hebrew words are written from right to left.
• The advantage of learning to read in an alphabetic or syllabic system is that, any new word can be worked out, while the learning of new logographs has to continue for many years.
• However, alphabetic systems may represent another kind of learning challenge in terms of their spelling system or orthography.

• English writing is more complex, as there are fewer symbols in the twenty-six-letter alphabet of English than there are sounds in the spoken language. 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 and play. Within English, there are also many letter combinations which may have to be memorised as though they were logographs (knight and through). The young child learning to read and write
English seems to face a more challenging task than the child learning to write Spanish or Welsh, with their more regular spelling conventions.

• The notions of onset and rime (the start and the rest) which denote the letter combinations used respectively at the beginnings and endings of English words, as in bl-ock, st-ock, ro-ock., where bl, st, r, is the onset and –ock the rime.
• There is a major disadvantage of English orthography: It is (opaque (not clear)) in the sense that there is relatively little consistency in the grapheme-phoneme relationships, partly as a result of frozen spellings reflecting an earlier pronunciation and partly because of the large number of words imported from other languages, which makes it difficult to predict the pronunciation of a word from its written form.

• Making sense of the written word:
• Literacy in any language is not just about decoding a script or learning a conventional orthography. Children may struggle at a deeper level to make sense of the words they hear and to attempt to convey this sense in the words they write.
• Social perspectives on learning to read and write
• Engaging in literacy practices:
• The paths taken to literacy do not only vary at an individual level. In different communities, written and spoken language are related in different ways, and there is variation in both the types of practices that are encouraged and the value placed on literacy. For some children, school literacy may seem very different from the literacy found in their own homes, whereas for others it may be very familiar.

• Children are motivated to develop language in order to achieve their social purposes as Alison Sealey said.
John Field is interested in the mental processes that lie behind children’s speaking and understanding of language. However, he seeks to distinguish his cognitive approach from one which claims that language must be innate in the human mind. With regard to overlap, Sealey and Field seem largely to agree that the social and cognitive dimensions are complementary rather than contradictory. She acknowledges that the complex process of the brain working behind the scenes in processing language is an important factor that her more social approach does not focus its gaze on.

• Field describes how interaction with adults helps children to understand and develop communicative social behaviour at the same time as helping them recognise and develop the patterns of language.
• Becoming biliterate:
• It will already have become apparent that 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.

• Factors such as religion, age, schooling and social roles all affect the languages used in both speech and writing, with many people speaking and writing more than one language.
• Literacy events in the home and community will involve a complex interaction of different spoken languages and literacies. In planning a letter, for example, people might discuss the contents in one language and write the letter in another, even switching between languages and scripts within a letter.

• Biliterate children develop a wider range of visual and actional capabilities. They learn to recognise what counts as important in each script and to identify what really matters when distinguishing one letter or character from another. They learn to adapt to different contexts and in particular, to recognise that their classmates might not have the same expertise.
They develop an interest in exploring connections between their writing systems. They can use their different scripts to express a distinctive personal identity. Kenner tells us that one of the advantages that biliterate children acquire is the greater awareness of how language systems differ, in other words what is known as metalinguistic awareness.

• One of the main findings is that bilingual and biliterate children do not keep their worlds separate but inhabit them simultaneously and are constantly looking for ways to express this multiple identity especially in their writing.
• Summary of issues in the acquisition of English literacy: • When children learn to read, they also have to sort out how literacy is used in their own particular culture. They can take different paths to this understanding, but they will do so by trying to make sense of the written texts they encounter and the literacy practices they observe and become involved in. • Reading B: Young children learning different writing systems. • Selina’s representation shows us the world of a six-yearold whose life is lived in Chinese and English- a world in which symbols and concepts from two languages coexist. The institutions of British society, including primary schools, tend to separate out the languages in children’s lives. Often children are required to use only
English at school and other languages are restricted to home and community. The justification usually given is that children will experience confusion if allowed to think and write in more than one language. The linguists’ research, however, found a very different story.

• The bilingual children in our project were all aware of the differences between their languages and literacies. But they also interested in exploring connections between these systems.
• When writing, they had two sets of resources present in their minds and could draw on either or both of them to make a text.
This is the potential creativity and learning power of living in simultaneous worlds.
• Writing different scripts
• Children becoming biliterate find out that different scripts operate by different rules. Even scripts which look similar have their special attributes.
• Biliterate children widen their horizons with respect to the making and placing of marks on the page. They have to recognise what counts as important in each script and be able to produce their own version,.

• 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 (like shape, size,…..) and these will be culturally specified in the teaching experienced by the child. • Each child forms particular interpretations of what is important in the act of writing.

• The design of symbols:
• The precision of Chinese characters:
• In a British primary school, children are not expected to show fine pen control at the age of five. However, this capability is necessary in order to write in Chinese.
• Children also need to be able to recognise small differences in stroke patterns, to check that they have written each character correctly.

• Joined letter forms in Arabic:
• Arabic, like English, is an alphabetic system, so symbols do not have to be written quite as accurately as in Chinese.
• However, in Arabic a number of concerns still arise for learners about certain details of each letter, because the letters take different forms when they are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word.
• Children have to know how to produce each shape and how to join it to others. They also need to guard against letters looking too similar to each other when joined.
• At Arabic school, teachers helped children to develop their abilities for visual discrimination by writing words on the board and asking which letters they were composed of.
• If children needed help to remember these characteristics and to write the script appropriately, teachers provided support through a join-the-dots model of a word on the board.

• Teachers at Chinese and Arabic school helped children to understand significant details of this kind by emphasising them in discussion.

• Making your mark:
• Children also like to develop their own style, particularly when writing their name. Producing a signature is the most personal and self-defining act of writing, and children recognise it as such. This can explain why children’s signatures are often unconventional.
• Children often feel strongly about their particular design of a written symbol and are prepared to argue for it.

• Embodied knowledge:
• The term embodied knowledge can involves visual, actional and cognitive aspects.

• Embodied knowledge is part of understanding how a writing system works. As well as knowing what symbols stand for, children recognise that the visual characteristics of symbols and the actions needed to produce them also hold significance.
• These biliterate children seemed to adapt to different contexts, drawing on their multisemiotic resources in ways they found appropriate.
• Mainstream educators sometimes think that children will find it hard to switch between ways of writing in different scripts. For example, it is said that children who have learned the precision of writing Chinese will find it difficult to adapt to the relative freedom of the emergent writing they are encouraged to do in British schools.

Conclusion
• This chapter has shown how the processes of learning to speak and to read in English require children, on the one hand, to make sense of how spoken and written language operate as systems and, on the other, to become sensitive to the role of language and literacy practices in their communities. • Only on the basis of these insights can they begin to use the English language to make meaning for themselves. Language and literacy thus act as key instruments for socialisation into the adult world.

Chapter 4
Working in English
• 4.1 Introduction
• This chapter looks at how English is used at work. It start by looking at how English used in everyday situations can be distinguished from English used in the workplace (which could be a physical location or a virtual space), and at the special characteristics of language and interaction patterns in the workplace.
We shall see how people working together interact using structured and goal-oriented genres that have evolved over time.

• 4.2 How does workplace talk differ from ordinary conversation? • This chapter explores the special characteristics of the language used at work. Following Emmanuel Schegloff, it was noted that turn taking often has to follow institutional rules, and following Pierre Bourdieu, it was emphasised that certain speech acts can only be carried out by a holder of institutional authority. These two points are related. For example, Greg Myers observes that in a meeting, ‘turns are typically assigned ... by the chair ... and the ... chair but not others may interrupt' (Myers,
2004, p. 53): this means that the chair has the unique authority to carry out certain speech acts, including the speech acts of permitting other people to speak and of cutting them off when they have spoken for too long.

• However, it is important to recognise that much workplace talk is not structured in this way, being conversational and informal.
Discourse analysis can help us to understand the differences between more and less formal kinds of workplace interaction.
• According to Paul Drew and John Heritage (1992), 'institutional talk', as they call workplace and professional talk, differs from ordinary conversation in three ways:
1. It is goal oriented: participants usually focus on some core goal, task or identity ... associated with the institution or workplace.
2. There are constraints on what participants will treat as
'allowable contributions', i.e. on what participants may say.
3. There are inferential (it means deducting or something drawn from another) frameworks and procedures that are particular to the specific institutional or workplace context. (Drew and
Heritage, 1992, p. 22)

• In Activity 4.1 for example, we have two brief extracts: the first involves informal talk and the second is from a workplace meeting. As you read them, keep these questions in mind:
• How are the two extracts structured?
• What are the differences between them?
• What makes the second extract typical of a workplace interaction?
• Using Drew and Heritage's categories gives another way of answering the questions in Activity
4.1. Each of these characteristics of workplace interactions can be found in Extract

• 2. There are clear goals — that is, things the participants aim to achieve in the meeting — and this extract shows
Chris going over what the goals are by setting the agenda for the meeting. A result of this goal orientation is that the meeting is quite structured, with one topic (or agenda item) being dealt with at a time and speakers taking orderly turns. In Extract 1, it is more difficult to identify a clear goal, except perhaps to exchange opinions and share an anecdote. Second, there are few constraints on what the speakers in Extract 1 can say and when they can speak.
This is not the case in the meeting, where Chris, as the chair, has the right to guide the discussion and where it is expected that the participants will restrict their contributions to items on the agenda.

• The inferential frameworks the participants in the meeting draw on include their assumptions about how such management meetings in their organisation are normally conducted, as well as background knowledge about the business and its procedures, such as the database they refer to, and the contract that the new sales representative will need to sign. Related to this is the fact that special professional or technical lexis is often used, such as the terms used here relating to business or technology.

• Finally, a further feature of workplace interactions linked to all three characteristics listed above is the fact that interactions are often asymmetrical; that is, some speakers often have more power and/or special knowledge than others. Chris chairs the meeting and therefore has a more powerful role than the other speakers. However, Tom is actually the chief executive officer (or CEO) — the head of the company — so is a more powerful person in the organisation.

• Another kind of asymmetry can result from differential knowledge; for example, in interactions between professionals and lay people (e.g. a doctor and a patient), where the professional has knowledge of a specialist subject and of institutional procedures. This means that participants in workplace interactions have institutional identities (or professional roles) which interact with their personal and discursive identities
(the role they are playing at any particular time in the interaction). Although we have been looking at the special characteristics of workplace language in spoken interactions, all these distinguishing features, except turn-taking structures, are also relevant for written workplace communication.

• Another way of referring to the goal orientation of workplace interactions is to say that they are transactional, which means that participants focus on doing a particular workplace task. Extract 2 clearly involves transactional talk, whereas Extract 1 does not, and can therefore be described as relational; that is, the purpose is more of a social one.
This kind of casual talk allows the participants to bond socially, and thus contributes to building a good relationship. Extract 1 is very typical of informal talk between friends, but interestingly, it is actually an example of small talk between colleagues at work: the three speakers all work in the administrative office of a university.
This shows that not all workplace talk is transactional and that relationship building at work is important.

• Frontstage and backstage
• We can therefore distinguish between two kinds of interaction in which English can be used as a working language: • Interactions among co-workers, where people are working together in the same workplace, occupation or profession.
• Interactions between experts in an organisation or profession and members of the public, that is, between
'insiders' in particular areas of work and 'outsiders'.
This includes lay—professional encounters; for example, interactions between health professionals and patients, or service encounters, where service providers interact with customers.

• These two general types of workplace interaction correspond to two sites in which, according to the sociologist Erving
Goffman, social life can be studied: front regions (or frontstage) and back regions (or backstage). Front regions are areas 'where a particular performance is or may be in progress', whereas back regions are 'where action occurs that is related to the performance but inconsistent with the appearance fostered by the performance' (Goffman, 1959, p.
135). The dramaturgical metaphor used by Goffman implies the presence of an audience in frontstage activity, as in interactions between lay people and professionals, and a setting in which 'best behaviour' is expected. The backstage setting, on the other hand, is more relaxed and 'allows minor acts which might easily be taken as symbolic of intimacy and disrespect for others present' (Goffman, 1959, p. 129).