Growing up with EnglishChapter 3

The focus of this section is - how English speaking children learn to

make sense of the English language as a system.

- how they learn to make meaning in English ? - what extra processes are involved in learning to crack the code of written lang ?

- Whether writing and spelling systems of English pose any challenges to learners ?

Learning to talk in English Crystal outlines the knowledge that

children need to acquire in order to speak English: (A 3.1)

20 vowels 24 consonants Over 300 ways of combining these An active vocab of 50000 words A thousand aspects of grammatical construction Several hundred ways of using prosodic features A large number of rules through which sentences

can be combined into spoken discourse A large number of conventions governing the

ways in which varieties of English differ A large number of strategies governing the ways

in which all the above rules can be bent or broken to achieve special effects.

How infants Communicate ? Chomsky(1980) holds a ‘nativist’ position that

language is an innate human ability which is biologically determined and follows a predictable developmental path.

There is a ‘critical’ period for language acquisition linguistically deprived children neither spontaneously

develop language in isolation nor go on to develop normal language competence beyond a certain stage of maturation.

It has been observed that before and after birth, babies are primed even within the womb to attend to the particular melody of language that surrounds them. (A 3.2)

Anthropologists Elinor and Bambi(1979)argue that children begin by learning the meaning of speech acts and only gradually learn the lang that corresponds to these in the community around them.

Gordon Wells (1985) speak of ‘conversation without words’ b/w infants and caregivers.

Learning to speak is initially a matter of learning the rules of social behaviour and meaning making and only later, a matter of learning grammatical rules of language.

A baby’s first experience of lang is in dialogue with the caregiver.

Adults tend to use a simplified speech style with exaggerated intonation, known as Child-directed speech (CDS) or baby talk (A 3.3 & 3.4)

CDS has three useful functions in learning English: 1.It may help children attune their ear to the characteristic strong-weak stress pattern of English words by retaining this pattern in diminutives like (mummy, daddy).2. By use of exaggerated stress at the sentence level, CDS may serve to direct the child’s attention to the key elements (the content words) in an utterance.3. 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 able to acquire language in cultures where CDS is not practised.

How children learn to talk has a long history. Prior to 1960s the belief was that children learn

to speak by imitation of the language around them.

But Chomsky insisted on the role of instinct. More recent research has taken a step back in

the direction of imitation, any language is probably stored as a set of rules, a large element of habit formation.

children learn much of their early language in chunks as part of interactional routines with those around them.

Cognitive perspectives on learning to talk Studies reveal the mental processes within

children’s mind, focusing on the relationship between the outward form of their utterances (esp. grammar & vocabulary) and what these reveal about their developing understanding of language and the world.

A cognitive perspective investigates what is common to all normally developing children, rather than what makes each child different.

Grammatical development Chomsky argues, 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.

English-speaking children roughly between the age of 18 months - 2 years start to produce ‘two-word’ mini sentences (want Teddy) expressing simple semantic relations such as actions or belonging. This kind of emergent grammar is called telegraphic language.

Function words like articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and morphological inflections are normally acquired late.

Once grammatical inflections start to appear, it is observed that normally developing English-speaking children appear to move backwards in their learning and make more mistakes. This is because they gradually replace simple imitation (she held two mice) by the application of a set of rules (she hold-ed two mouse-s).

Drawing on Chomsky’s ideas, a distinction is 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).

Vocabulary development It is 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- texture- function).

Bilingual children Many children learn English quite naturally,

while others acquire it as a second language. Research with the latter group 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.

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.

Social perspectives on learning to talk Social perspectives focus on the role of

language in social context, with the emphasis on communicative function.

It emphasises 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: Brown identified 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)

Formulaic language 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.

Whereas 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

Learning to read and write in English 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

English features in the environment will demonstrate the diversity of visual symbols which confront children. There may be any combination of the following:

1. Street signs, shop names ……. (English)2. A similar array of signage using other scripts

(Chinese )3. 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……

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.

Map signs, computer graphics, punctuation marks, road signs, and so on are also part of the literacy learning process

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 order of writing.

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, and the standard orthography does not correspond precisely to any particular accent.

Disadvantage of English orthography: It is (opaque) 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.

Advantages include : Homophones with different etymologies (like

knight and night) may be distinguishably by spelling

Morphemes may retain the same surface form in different contexts; like plural –s in rocks and rods.

Literacy in any language is not just about decoding a script or learning a conventional orthography.

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 intertwined 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, where

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 as for others it may be very familiar.

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. (Mukul Saxena , 1993)

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.

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.

Study of Seymour (2003) on the investigation of written word recognition skills at grade 1 showed that children in European countries who were learning to read English performed far worse than the children of any other nationality at reading both real words and non-words.

Study of Hummer (1990) reveals word recognition skills of children learning to read English take longer to develop than those children from countries such as Austria, Croatia, Greece, Germany, Italy Turky and Spain.

How Young children learn different writing systems?

Selina’s representation shows us the world of a six-year-old whose life is lived in Chinese and English- a world in which symbols and concepts from two languages co-exist.

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 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 bi-literate find out that different

scripts operate by different rules. Even scripts which look similar have their special attributes.

Bi-literate 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 symbolsPrecision 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 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.

In this section we saw, 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.

These insights can help them to make meaning for themselves while using English language.

Language and literacy act as key instruments for socialisation into the adult world.

Dr. Shaju Nalkara Ouseph E-mail: snalkara@arabou.edu.sa