Talking to Adults: The Contribution of Multiparty Discourse to Language Acquisition

360 Pages·2002·1.28 MB·English

by  Shoshana Blum-Kulka

TALKING TO ADULTS
The Contribution of Multiparty
Discourse to Language Acquisition
Edited by
Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Catherine E. Snow
Harvard University
Copyright ' 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talking to adults : the contribution of Multiparty Discourse to Language Acquisition / edited by
Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Catherine E. Snow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8058-3660-8 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-8058-3661-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Language acquisition(cid:151)Parent participation. 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Parent and
Child. 4. Pragmatics. I. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. II. Snow, Catherine E.
P118.5 .T35 2002
401".93(cid:151)dc21
2001051294
Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper,
and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.
Printed in the United States of America
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Editors(cid:146) Introduction 1
PART I: ISSUES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXTENDED
DISCOURSE: NARRATIVES AND EXPLANATIONS
1 Deciding What to Tell: Selecting and Elaborating 15
Narrative Topics in Family Interaction and Children(cid:146)s
Elicited Personal Experience Stories
Diane E. Beals and Catherine E. Snow
2 Greek Children and Familiar Narratives in Family 33
Contexts: En Route to Cultural Performances
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
3 (cid:147)What Did You Do in School Today?(cid:148) Speech Genres 55
and Tellability in Multiparty Family Mealtime Conversations
in Two Cultures
Vibeke Aukrust
4 (cid:147)Do You Believe That Lot(cid:146)s Wife Is Blocking the Road 85
(to Jericho)?(cid:148): Co-Constructing Theories About the World
With Adults
Shoshana Blum-Kulka
5 Peer-Group Culture and Narrative Development 117
Ageliki Nicolopoulou
PART II: THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT AND HUMOR:
PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVES
6 Socialization of Affect During Mealtime Interactions 155
Christine HØrot
iii
iv CONTENTS
7 Cognitive Expressions and Humorous Phrases in Family 181
Discourse as Reflectors and Cultivators of Cognition
Ruth Nevat-Gal
8 Language Games in the Strict Sense of the Term: Children(cid:146)s 209
Poetics and Conversation
Alessandra Fasulo, Vivian Liberati, and Clotilde Pontecorvo
PART III: ISSUES OF CONTEXT AND CULTURE
IN PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT
9 Everyone Has to Lie in Tzeltal 241
Penelope Brown
10 Voice and Collusion in Adult(cid:150)Child Talk: Toward 277
an Architecture of Intersubjectivity
Karin Aronsson and Mia Thorell
11 Bilingual Context for Language Development 295
Hiroko Kasuya
12 From Home to School: School-Age Children 327
Talking With Adults
Catherine E. Snow and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Author Index 343
Subject Index 349
Editors(cid:146) Introduction
THE PRESENT VOLUME
History
The question of how adults(cid:146) speech to children affects the process of lan-
guage acquisition has attracted researchers(cid:146) attention since the late 1960s,
when the first studies characterizing the nature of input to young language
learners were undertaken. An edited volume entitled Talking to Children,
published in 1977, brought together much of that early work, including a
number of chapters devoted to the topic of baby talk, anthropological lin-
guists(cid:146) descriptions of the special lexical and grammatical forms used with
young children. Thus, Talking to Children (edited by Snow & Ferguson, 1977)
in a sense constituted a bridge between an old tradition of research into
(cid:147)sociolinguistic registers(cid:148) including baby talk and new work that analyzed
similar data in new ways. The newer work was carried out within a theoreti-
cal context defined by freshly formulated questions about language acquisi-
tion that drew attention to the nature of linguistic input to language learners
as one factor influencing language development.
The body of research on input to young children, and on related topics
such as input to second language learners, teacher talk in preschool class-
room settings, adjustments in talk to children with various disabilities, and
social and cultural differences in the nature of talk addressed to children,
1
LEA(cid:150)THE TYPE HOUSE (cid:150) TALKING TO ADULTS (BLUM-KULKA/SNOW)
2 EDITORS(cid:146) INTRODUCTION
expanded quickly. By the early 1990s, a second edited volume was pub-
lished, entitled Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition (edited by
Gallaway & Richards, 1994) devoted to providing an overview of the full
array of research findings concerning input. In contrast to Talking to Chil-
dren, which was a collection of original research reports, Input and Inter-
actionconsisted of extensive reviews of literature, reflecting the enormous
growth of interest in these topics. The forward to Input and Interaction
describes it explicitly as follows:
[It(cid:146)s] an up-to-date statement of the facts and controversies surrounding
(cid:147)Baby Talk,(cid:148) its nature and likely effects. With contributions from lead-
ing linguists and psychologists, it explores language acquisition in differ-
ent cultures and family contexts, in typical and atypical learners, and in
second and foreign language learners. It is designed as a sequel to the
now famous Talking to children.
Input and Interaction contained 10 chapters summarizing and analyzing
the work that had been carried out in the period since Talking to Children,
and included references to well over 500 original research papers. It is clear
from reading the chapters in Input and Interaction in Language Acquisi-
tionthat the notion of input had been redefined and enriched, whereas much
of the work reviewed and reported in the 1977 book was purely descriptive.
The papers in the 1977 book operated from the presumption that character-
istics such as phonological clarity, grammatical simplicity, and redundancy
were the crucial defining features of (cid:147)baby talk.(cid:148) By 1994 input was seen as
conversational, interactive, transactional. The papers in Gallaway and Richards
provide richer descriptions and more problem-focused analyses of the inter-
actions in which children and other language learners engage, with a primary
emphasis always on the question of how these interactions simplify the prob-
lem of language acquisition for the learner.
Though enormously informative, the work reported in Gallaway and
Richards (1994) is limited in a number of ways. First, the data being ana-
lyzed were almost all derived from two-party interactions(cid:151)a child alone
with a parent or a learner(cid:150)teacher dyad isolated from a classroom context.
Many of the studies analyzed interaction during fairly structured tasks, but
even those that adopted naturalistic observational methods, for example,
recording conversations at home during the normal course of daily life,
typically limited the focus of their analysis to dyadic relations. Similarly,
even the studies that went beyond the mother(cid:150)child dyad to consider the
role of siblings and fathers in language acquisition (such as those reviewed
by Barton & Tomasello, 1994) mostly used the dyadic setting with these
alternate conversational partners. Dyadic interactions probably do not domi-
nate the experience of most children, so the degree to which the situa-
EDITORS(cid:146) INTRODUCTION 3
tions typically analyzed inform us fully about the nature of input to language
learners can be questioned.
The work in Gallaway and Richards (1994) could be said to reflect the
dominant paradigm within research on input to language learners(cid:151)an ap-
proach influenced by the procedures and preferences of laboratory psycholo-
gists. The very important question this research addresses is what sort of
information about the nature of the adult language system is available to the
learner(cid:151)are there aspects of input that can be related to relatively rapid and
trouble-free acquisition? This question has dictated an analytic approach, an
approach that characterizes the child as someone acquiring skills through
exposure to certain language structures.
An alternative conception of the child language learner can be encountered
in the work of researchers who have taken a more anthropological approach
to collecting data about interaction with young children. This approach is
exemplified in the work of researchers such as Heath (1983), Scheiffelin (1990),
and Ochs (1988), who have collected ethnographic data in naturalistic set-
tings, focusing as much on the participation structures into which children
can enter as on the exact nature of the language used by them. Researchers
within the more anthropological paradigm see language as a cultural prac-
tice, and thus describe language acquisition as a socializing process(cid:151)a pro-
cess played out through language of acquiring the language use skills, rights,
and values that constitute membership in a group. For such researchers, is-
sues such as who may talk to whom, what language performances are highly
valued, what cultural norms link language to social context, and what parents
believe about how children learn to talk are very important. The descriptions
they provide include rich evidence about the opportunities children have to
learn certain sorts of social practices, but typically less documentation con-
cerning what learning has actually occurred for a particular child as a result
of a particular experience. Nor does this research normally provide a basis
for estimating the frequency of various sorts of opportunities to learn about
the social practices of interest, thus excluding the possibility of relating quan-
tity or quality of exposure to speed of acquisition.
Research within the anthropological paradigm has documented the impor-
tance of one of the basic premises of the volume we present here(cid:151)the premise
that children are offered unique opportunities to learn from participation in mul-
tiparty interactions, because the demands and the displays inherent in multiparty
interactions are different from, and more challenging than, those inherent in dy-
adic interactions. The anthropological approach to studying input is distinct from
the psychological approach in eschewing structured or non-natural contexts for
observation and in viewing the child(cid:146)s task of learning language more holisti-
cally, as one of achieving cultural membership rather than accomplishing par-
ticular skills. The psychological approach, on the other hand, has docu-
4 EDITORS(cid:146) INTRODUCTION
mented the importance of understanding differences in different children(cid:146)s
experiences of interaction, showing that those differences have consequences
for children(cid:146)s learning.
Why This Book?
The goal of the volume presented here is to focus on children learning lan-
guage in naturalistic contexts. We take naturalisticto imply contexts that are
often multiparty, that involve both multigenerational and peer interaction (or
at least interactions in which the child(cid:146)s relationship to more than one adult or
one child is simultaneously relevant). Most of the work presented in this vol-
ume focuses on multiparty and multigenerational contexts, but we see the
ideas suggested as equally relevant to multiparty peer interactions. We see
this work as different from most of that in Gallaway and Richards (1994)
precisely in that we focus on the value of such multiparty interaction, but also
as different from previous work in the anthropological tradition in that our
interest in describing input derives from an interest in what and how children
learn and how that relates to their opportunities to learn. In other words, we
view input from the perspective of both the adults and the children involved in
the interaction. Thus, we hope to merge the strengths of the more cognitivist,
psychological approach (its interest in the process of learning, its analysis of
the learning task, its demand for evidence about what the child has learned,
its focus on individual differences among children) with those of the more
descriptive, anthropological approach (attention to the full array of opportu-
nities to learn, recognition of the interconnectedness of being socialized into
appropriate language use and achieving membership in a culture, consider-
ation of alternate routes to any learning outcome).
THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING MORE THAN TWO
We argue, then, that there are important things about language and about cultural
membership that children would not have the chance to learn if they had access to
only dyadic interactions. Some of these things have to do with quantity of input(cid:151)
that one simply hears more language if one is hearing it from many interlocutors.
Others have to do with quality(cid:151)that certain complexities of role, of dealing with
subsets of interlocutors as addressees, of having various relationships displayed
within a particular interaction are possible only if more than two people are in-
volved. Others have to do with the code(cid:151)that the need to incorporate different
varieties, dialects, or languages is much more likely to be present with several
interlocutors. Thus, we argue, becoming a full-fledged member of society, in
which participating in groups, engaging a variety of interlocutors, and
EDITORS(cid:146) INTRODUCTION 5
taking on a wide range of roles are prerequisites, requires participating as a
child in multiparty interactions. It is the goal of the chapters in this volume to
describe, for a number of specific cases and across a variety of cultures, what
participation in multiparty interactions looks like, and what we can conclude
children learn from it. Here we briefly preview some of the issues that emerge:
Quantity of Input. Hart and Risley (1995) documented the amount of
input available to children in different families varying in social class. Though
it is difficult from their report to determine the occurrence of dyadic versus
multiparty interactions, it is clear that the sparsest input was provided to
children in single-parent, socially isolated, welfare-dependent families. The
amount of language such children heard, and the size of the vocabularies they
achieved, were strikingly smaller than in two-parent families or in families
with many visitors. Similar findings emerged from analyses of dinner table
conversations collected as part of the Home-School Study (Dickinson & Ta-
bors, 2001; Snow, 1991). Mealtimes at which at least two adults were present
were longer, contained more language per unit time, and were more likely to
include stories, explanations, and other discourse contexts that offered op-
portunities to hear challenging vocabulary and grammar, than mealtimes in
single-parent families with no visitors. Thus, on the assumption that children
who hear more talk learn to talk faster and better, there are advantages to
having more adult sources of input and to having exposure to contexts in
which more than one adult is present at any given time.
Social Relationships. The mother(cid:150)child relationship is the only one that
needs to be played out in dyadic interactions. The mother is more knowl-
edgeable, a source of nurturance and of limits, the responsible party. The
child is the learner, a seeker of nurturance and a tester of limits, with greater
resources of playfulness and irresponsibility. This simple complementarity
can be greatly complicated if a sibling enters the interaction(cid:151)then the mother
may need to differentiate her level of nurturance or style of discipline, and
the siblings have their own issues of dominance, competitiveness in access
to the mother, potential for collaboration, possibly domains in which their
shared competence is greater than the mother(cid:146)s. If at this point Dad comes
home, then Mom(cid:146)s role as supreme arbiter and ultimate source of knowl-
edge may (or may not) be threatened, and opportunities arise for exploita-
tion of parental authority precisely because it is distributed ((cid:145)but Daddy
said I could(cid:146)). Children have opportunities to learn something about the role
of mother or father from dyadic interactions, but they have opportunities to
learn about the roles of wife, husband, friends, siblings, and parent to an-
other only from multiparty interactions.