BOOK 3
L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
Chapter 12
Growing up with
English
Barbara Mayor
Introduction
Nay Hannawi
In this chapter, you’ll
explore how English-
speaking children
participate in the language
and literacy practices of
their own communities,
learning on the one hand to
make meaning and on the
other to express social and
cultural identity through
English.
Is learning English different
from learning any other
language? Figure 1 Striking up a conversation?
Early Stages
Emergent Grammar
In the examples below, in research on child language, ages are usually
given in the form 1;2 or 1:2, meaning 1 year and 2 months.
The four examples point to early attempts to pronunciation (aden for
"again in example 1), the two-word stage in example 2, language
produced in 'chunks' in example 3, and emergent grammar in
example 4; that is, the beginnings of grammar, shown here as an
attempt to form the past tense of go'.
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Linguistic Competence &
Communicative Competence
• Linguistic Competence relates to the underlying knowledge of the language
which is the focus of the cognitive approach.
• Communicative Competence, on the other hand, relates to how a normal
child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical but
also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to
speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when,
where and in what manner.
This distinction between people’s underlying knowledge and actual use of language
applies throughout life, but in childhood the relationship between the two is
evolving, and children’s utterances – such as the ones at the start of this chapter –
provide a fascinating insight into the ideas children have about how English works
(p.58).
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BOOK 3
L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
1
Learning to Talk in English
Early Utterances
Children begin to talk, moving from early utterances to putting words together to
make their meaning understood.
In this section you’ll look at how children begin to talk and read about theories of
child language learning.
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Explanation …
• Consider the previous examples of children’s early utterances. How would you
best explain what’s going on in each case?
• What do you think has prompted the child to say what they do?
• Are they likely to be imitating something they’ve heard someone else say? If not,
what else do you think may be going on?
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How do learn to talk?
Prior to the 1960’s , the focus was purely on imitation of the language modelled around
them.
Subsequent work in the tradition of theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky (e.g. 1986) claimed
the existence of an innate universal grammar and set of rules needed to form grammatically
correct sentences (a ‘generative grammar’).
-Termed generativists, followers of Chomsky argue that due to the ‘impoverished input’
children are exposed to, they must possess an innate understanding of language and
grammar which Chomsky termed the ‘language acquisition device’.
Since the 1990s, however, linguists have instead emphasized the role of a range of factors
that shape language learning including experience, input, frequency, and memory.
This is often termed the usage-based approach to language learning.
Within this approach, some theorists emphasize the role of cognition in language learning,
while others focus on the role of social interaction. In general, researchers from each
perspective recognize the importance of the other, seeing each perspective as working together
to jointly build an explanation for how children learn language.
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Usage-based approach: the cognitive
aspect
Usage-based research focusing on the cognitive aspect of learning to
talk seeks to understand the mental processes within children’s minds,
focusing on the relationship between the outward form of their
utterances (especially their grammar and vocabulary) and what these
may reveal about their developing understanding of language and the
world.
A cognitive perspective generally seeks to investigate what’s common
to all typically developing children, rather than what makes each child
different.
It’s provided a body of evidence suggesting that the linguistic
development of monolingual English-speaking children follows a
predictable path, and that the key stages in the acquisition of English
are constant, even though each child’s rate of progress and actual
linguistic output will differ.
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Grammatical Development
One of the most widely reported phenomena in children’s language
development is that English-speaking children roughly between the
ages of eighteen months and three years is telegraphic language or two-
word ‘mini sentences’ expressing simple semantic relations such as
actions or belonging. These ‘sentences’ will use content words and will
omit function words ( determiners, linking verbs) and grammatical
particles (such as inflections). Example, Daddy key instead of These
are Daddy’s keys.
p. 62
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Grammatical Development
As children start to use grammatical inflections, developing English speaking
children seem to move ‘backwards’ in their learning and make more mistakes.
They start replacing simple imitation of chunks of language (as in she held two
mice) by the application of a set of rules (as in she hold-ed two mouse-s) before
finally settling on their local variety of English (in Standard British English she
held two mice). For example, Susie who says did holding and holded instead of
held.
A child seems to know more (has a greater linguistic competence) than they can
actually produce (their linguistic performance) just as adults tend to have a
higher receptive than productive vocabulary.
They are sensitive to the distinction between their developing language and that
of a mature adult. (See example of Fredrick and his father p. 63)
Children, like adults, may be aware of the correct form (underlying knowledge =
linguistic competence), yet occasionally slip into an error in the actual production
of the grammatical rule, in pronunciation, in word choice (linguistic
performance); otherwise, we would sound robotic.
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Hypothesis testing
Acquistion of meaning
Just as children may overgeneralize the rules of
grammar, it has been observed that children tend to
overextend (or less commonly ‘under-extend’) the
meanings of words, as they make the most of the
linguistic resources they have available and develop
a sense of conceptual boundaries in English.
Psycholinguists Peter de Villiers and Jill de Villiers
classify some typical over-extensions according to
the apparent grounds for similarity.
For example:
Calling all four-legged animals a horse (over-
extension)
Not considering a fish to be an animal (under-
extension)-less common
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Usage-based approach: the social aspect
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.
According to this view, language learning is seen as part of the child’s socialization
into a community with distinctive language practices, and language itself is seen as
a resource for its users.
As the linguist Michael Halliday observed, from an early age a child ‘uses his [sic]
voice to order people about, to get them to do things for him; he uses it to demand
certain objects or services; he uses it to make contact with people, to feel close to
them’.
A focus on social interaction therefore entails how children learn to take part in
conversations with others, and how they use language to perform particular functions
and to express social identity (see Chapter 11).
So it could be said that learning to speak is initially a matter of learning the rules
of social behavior and meaning making and only later a matter of learning the
grammatical rules by which these are realized in English or any other language.
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Social Aspect
Meanings Expressed by Young Children
Pioneer researcher into child language Roger Brown
(1973) was one of the first to attempt to classify the range of
meanings he observed young children trying to express.
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 mail come or daddy hit), Action–Object (want
more or hit ball) and Agent–Object (mommy sandwich or daddy
ball) (Brown, 1973, pp. 114, 173).
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Social Aspect
Meanings Expressed by Young Children
Building on Brown’s key work, de Villiers and de Villiers (1979) established that
typically developing two-year-olds usually use a limited range of meanings in their
first sentences:
English-speaking children talk about actions, what happened to what and who does
what: Me fall. Car go vroom!
They are concerned, not to say obsessed, with the relationship of possession: My
teddy. Mommy hat. Equally prevalent is the relationship of location: Cup in box.
Car garage. Among other early meanings that find frequent expression at this
stage are recurrence, labelling and nonexistence.
Children learning many different languages, among them Samoan, German,
French, Hebrew, Luo (in Kenya), and Russian, seem to encode the same set of
meanings in their first sentences.
(Adapted from de Villiers and de Villiers, 1979, pp. 48–50)\
De Villiers and de Villiers concluded that young children’s meaning making,
regardless of the language they’re learning, is constrained by their gradually
developing understanding of the world (socialization).
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Child Directed Speech (CDS)
Features – Who uses it?
When communicating with young children, adults in many cultures tend
to use a simplified style of speech with exaggerated intonation, and
higher pitch referred to as child-directed speech (CDS).
They might also exaggerated facial expressions and gestures,
particularly for babies and very small children.
CDS is speech directed by adults at children, but the child is by no
means passive. On the contrary, child-directed speech is also directed
by the child’s attention and by what the child is doing, meaning that the
child is effectively leading the topic of conversation.
Child directed speech is not universal but appears to have three
main useful functions.
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Child Directed Speech (CDS)
Useful functions of CDS
The function of CDS:
Research by Usha Goswami (2010, p. 112) has observed that
CDS may help children attune their ear to the characteristic strong weak stress
pattern of English words (like ‘function,’ ‘children,’ and ‘pattern’ and this same
pattern can extend to common diminutives and terms such as Mommy, Daddy, baby,
and words like doggy and milkie.
Second, by 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 i.e. nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs, rather than the function words) in an utterance.
Third, by means of exaggerated intonation patterns involving rising and falling pitch,
CDS may also help to facilitate turn taking in conversation, by emphasizing question-
and-answer exchanges and other adjacency pairs ( discussed in Chapter 11) .
Researcher Catherine Snow (1977) was among the first to notice that caregivers vary
their CDS according to the individual child’s language level…As children grow their
caregivers expect ‘more sophisticated vocalizations’ (Rowe, 2008, p. 202).
CDS provides scaffolding for language learning and prompts to continue talking.
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Cooperative Conversationalists
Children learn to cooperate with their interlocutors in conversations in order to make their
meaning understood.
Both Susie, and the Singaporean girl are being
‘cooperative coversationalists,’ the term coined by
Evelyn Hatch. According to the social approach,
language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on
a conversation and not the other way round.
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Formulaic Language
Language constructed from pre-fabricated ‘chunks’ which are acquired and produced
as wholes or as chunks is generally referred to as formulaic language, e.g. time for a
cup of coffee (Ellen 1.9) , a cup of tea, on the whole, have a nice day, a great deal of.
One of the main theorists of formulaic language, Alison Wray observes that ‘although we
have tremendous capacity for grammatical processing, this is not our only, nor even our
preferred, way of coping with language […] much of our entirely regular input and
output is not processed analytically, even though it could be’ (Wray, 2002, p. 10), but
rather in socially contextualized chunks.
Children are able to deduce the meaning of whole phrases from the communicative context,
without necessarily analyzing them int their component parts.
Research in many languages has identified formulaic language, and children in second
language learning contexts have also been found to learn through this means (Schwartz and
Deeb, 2018).
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Formulaic Language and Telegraphic
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 is built up by the child
from individual lexical items in their vocabulary, showing evidence of
their rule-testing.
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Conclusion – Cognitive & Social Aspect/
Approach to understanding children’s language
learning
The cognitive aspect within the usage-based approach to language
learning gives greater prominence to analytic processes and rule
formation, along with the child’s general understanding of the world,
while the social aspect gives greater prominence to copying those around
them in learning about social behavior and meaning making, along with
developing skills of social interaction. These parallel accounts, which
reflect a relative emphasis on linguistic structures or on communicative
practices, work in a complementary way within the usage-based
approach, enabling us to view the language learning process through
different lenses.
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BOOK 3
L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
Chapter 12: Growing up with English
2
Learning to read and write
in English
Emergent Literacy
Children, from the beginning of their life, grow up in communities where literacy
plays an important part, (and they) react to the written environment around
them, making sense of its functions and forms.
For children, taking part in literacy practices doesn’t depend on being able to read
and write in the adult sense. Particular genres of text, such as product labels,
restaurant sings, street banners, and so on, may be recognized long before
individual letters are known.
Children attempt to write, before they can make intelligible signs (e.g. the child
writing her name on the list to get a turn in Soft play at school , producing
‘pretend’ shop signs, shopping lists, telephone messages, newspapers, and so
on). Children will (also) 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 by some as
emergent literacy (e.g. Neaum, 2018; Neumann, 2018), as children participate
in the literacy activities of their families and communities.
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Emergent Literacy
These first discoveries of reading and writing have been described by
some as emergent literacy (e.g. Neaum, 2018; Neumann, 2018), as
children participate in the literacy activities of their families and
communities.
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Cognitive perspectives on learning to read
and write
A walk in any local shopping area where English features in the environment will demonstrate the diversity of
visual symbols which
confront children.
street signs, posters, shop names, notices and leaflets which use the Roman alphabet (as in English)
. a similar array of signage using other scripts (e.g. Chinese characters)
. various abbreviations (e.g. Co., Pte., Ltd.)
. logographs, also known as ‘logograms’ (where a symbol stands for a whole word), as in the Arabic-based
numeral system (1, 2, 3…), various weights and measures and company logos; for example, 1K for ‘£1000’, H
for ‘hospital’, M for ‘McDonald’s’, or the heart shape sometimes used to mean ‘love’.
• pictographs, also known as ‘pictograms’ (where an image denotes an entire phrase or concept), such as many
road traffic signs and pictorial symbols for male and female toilets.
Yet a child’s world of written texts isn’t limited to ‘writing’ and ‘not writing’ in the same way as the adult world,
and part of the challenge facing children is what to identify as ‘English’ and what not: Mathematical and
musical notations, road signs, emojis, barcodes, punctuation marks, etc. need to be worked out.
Letter and number are not very different terms to a child.
Six is the same as 6 and both represent a whole word, whereas similar looking number 6 and lowercase
letter b represent two very different things,, the second being a letter that has no meaning on its own.
Children’s writing experiments with directionality, and they explore pictographs as well logographs and
letters.
(se p. 74)
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Cognitive perspectives on learning to read
and write
There are two different types of writing systems:
1) Systems where the symbol represents an object, or meaning
2) Systems where the symbol represents sound
1) Systems where the symbol represents an object, or meaning:
a) Logographs: also known as ‘logograms’ (where a symbol stands for
a whole word), as in the Arabic- based numerical system, various
weights and measures such as kg, $, £, H for hospital, or the heart
shape sometimes used to represent ‘love’.
H for Hospital
b) Pictographs: also known as ‘pictograms’ (where an image denotes an
entire phrase or concept), such as many road traffic signs [two cars to
represent no trespassing], the disabled sign, and pictorial symbols for
male and female toilets. Nay Hannawi
Cognitive perspectives on learning to read
and write
2) Systems where the symbol represents sound
a) The Alphabetic system: where the symbol/ the letter/ the
grapheme stands for a sound, more specifically the phoneme), as in
the English writing system for the most part and in languages such as
Arabic, Spanish, French…. “fan” /fᴂn/ cat /kat/ grapheme bat
‘b’ -- /b/ phoneme
b) The syllabic system: where the symbol/ the character stands for a
sound, more specifically the syllable), as in Japanese.
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Social perspectives on learning to read and write
Engaging in literacy practices
Shirley Brice Heath’s Study
Shirley Brice Heath conducted an ethnographic study (Heath, 1982) that revealed differences
in preschool literacy practices among three communities in the American Piedmont
Carolinas that she called Maintown, Roadville and Trackton.
In her study, Shirley Brice Heath showed that the same literacy activity (story book reading) in
a native speaking community, the American Piedmont Carolinas, is practiced in different
ways in the different contexts of Maintown, Roadville and Trackton.
So the same activity can have different meanings.
Both Maintown and Trackton use stories to interact with children and allow for discussion of
the themes in a wider context of real life. Roadville uses the story reading activity as a
teaching tool, focusing on skills that can be learned from the stories that are read.
Whereas Trackton depends on oral stories and general stories that the grandparents or parents
may have read in the media, Maintown and Roadville use colored story books, puzzles.
She concluded that although the literacy activity may be the same, story reading and telling,
the literacy practices differ. These differences socialize children into different understandings
of reading and expectations of reading activities at home and later at school. (VERY
IMPORTANT pp.75-6)
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Social perspectives on learning to read and write
Engaging in literacy practices
New studies following Heath pp.76-7
Since Heath’s foundational work, a great deal of research focuses on the effects of home
literacy practices on the development of emergent reading and writing skills in preparation
for school, challenging previous ‘normalized’ perceptions of children’s language
development.
For example, Suzanne Mol and colleagues (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of 16 studies
examining book-reading at home and children’s vocabulary, concluding that storybook
reading is most effective when adults actively engaged children in discussions around the
story.
Cynthia Puranik and colleagues (2018) examined the amount and types of writing-related
practices that parents engaged in at home with their preschool children and found a
correlation between these activities and children’s independent literacy practices.
Researchers have an increased awareness of the multimodality of reading, whether in print or
on digital devices. In addition, there’s been an increased focus on oral literacy skills
alongside reading and writing.
Coming full circle to Heath’s work, a group of researchers investigating multilingual and
monolingual Dutch families suggested that researchers use a broader definition of home
literacy activities, including non-print activities such as singing and rhyming activities, in
order t o describe differences in children’s home literacy experiences (Krijnen et al., 2020).
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Learning to Communicate Digitally
In addition to learning how to read and write in English, children are also
learning how to communicate digitally in one or more languages.
They learn, with friends or with their parents to navigate the world of
Whatsapp emojis and abbreviations, and sometimes the digital domain
is an opportunity and a more welcome platform for bilingual children to
use a second language (See example of mother and daughter using Czech
pp. 77-78) - Reflect on examples of Arabic or other native languages you
use.
Children, like adults, learn to accommodate to choices of language and
tools based on other interlocutors and context when communicating
digitally to achieve the ideational but most importantly the interpersonal/
social function.
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English Literacy : Is it harder to acquire?
One critical task in the early stages of learning to read is to work out
1) which unit of speech is coded by any particular language.
We mentioned earlier that two principles are usually identified as the
basis of the different writing systems: that symbols should represent
meaning, as in logographs or pictographs, or that symbols should
represent sound, as in alphabets (symbol is a letter or grapheme which
represents a phoneme) or syllabaries (a phonetic writing system where
symbols represent syllables rather than individual sounds or
phonemes).
English is an alphabetic writing system.
2) children need to work out how the temporal order of speech relates
to the spatial order of writing.
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English Literacy : Spatial order
2) children need to work out how the temporal order of speech relates
to the spatial order of writing.
For example, English words are conventionally written from left to
right, whereas in Hebrew and Arabic, which are both alphabetic, words
are written from right to left. The classical way of writing Chinese,
which is predominantly logographic, is from top to bottom and right to
left, and in Japanese, which may be written with syllabic or logographic
symbols, writing may be either vertical or horizontal.
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English Literacy : Advantage
The advantage of learning to read in an alphabetic or a syllabic system
is that, once the initial breakthrough in understanding happens, any
new word can (more or less) be worked out, while the learning of new
logographs has to continue for many years.
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English Literacy : Is it harder to acquire?
Some of the Challenges
Is the English a transparent alphabetic system?
Alphabetic systems may represent another kind of learning challenge in
terms of their orthography (or spelling system). In some languages – for
example, Finnish, Spanish or Welsh – there’s a very close relationship
between the phonemes and the letters. This means that a fluent reader
familiar with alphabetic systems would soon be able to read aloud in
Finnish, although unless they knew some Finnish, they wouldn’t
understand what they read.
English writing is more complex, as there are fewer symbols in the 26-letter
alphabet of English than there are sounds in the spoken language, and the
standard orthography does not correspond precisely to any particular
accent. Attempts to reform the spelling by grammarians and lexicographers
over the history of English were to no avail.
Children learning to read and write English have to become aware of
many inconsistencies.
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English Literacy : Is it harder to acquire?
Decoding a script- developing Literacy
• There is lack of one- to-one correspondence between
phoneme and grapheme in English, such as the letter <a>
in the words cat, play and are.
• Within English, there are also many letter combinations
which may have to be memorized as though they were
logographs (e.g. knight, through) and others as though
they were morpheme or syllable based (e.g. the ending -
tion).
The young child learning to read and writeEnglish seems to
face a more challenging task than, say, the child learning to
write Spanish or Welsh, with their more regular spelling
conventions.
Literacy in any language, however, isn’t 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.
Decoding skills may take longer to develop in English that in
these other languages
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English Literacy : Is it harder to acquire?
Challenges of the English orthography
• Grapheme → phoneme
c → /s/ circle, medicine
c → / k/ cat, medical
• (letter) a → /ᴂ/ apple, bat
• /ay/ date , late
/ᴐ/ ball
b → /b/ bring
silent doubt
k → silent knife
l → silent dolphin
phoneme →grapheme
/f/ -------- fun
------ phone
- ------ enough
/k/ ------ kite
car
queen
orchestra
kick
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Becoming Biliterate
Children do not separate the different writing systems in their
environment completely.
They avail of the resources that they have accessible to them and that
they acquire.
Selena, in figure 9 below, uses a picture(pictogram), Chinese logographs
and English alphabet.
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Becoming Biliterate
All children experience a range of forms and functions of writing. However,
children acquiring literacy in bilingual or multi-lingual communities are
additionally faced with working out the particular forms and functions of a
variety of different scripts or orthographies. Mukul Saxena (1993), for
example, describes the complex choices available for spoken & written
communication among the British Panjabi community in Southall, London.
It is clear that young children who have the opportunity to do so are able to
develop two or more literacy systems alongside each other with relative
ease.
Biliterate children widen their horizons with respect to the making and
placing of marks on the page. The have to recognize what counts as
important in each script and be able to produce their own version, whether
this involves writing [in an unfamiliar orientation] or using Arabic letters
that have different shapes depending on their position in the word.
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Becoming Biliterate
Reading 12 Young children learning different writing systems by Charmian
Kenner, there are various points made about special skills or attributes that the
bi-literate children may be acquiring.
• Biliterate children develop a wider range of ‘visual and actional capabilities.’
Gunther Kress [1997] explains that all modes of representation offer different
potentials and limitations for [capabilities] and [action]. Each writing system
uses the visual and actional modes in particular ways.
Children learn ‘to recognize what counts as important in each script’ and to
‘identify what really matters when distinguishing one letter or character from
another’; in so doing, they build up ‘a vocabulary for concepts of shape, angle
and size.’
When children produce written symbols, they have to pay attention to a
number of different facets such as:
The type of stroke to be used, directionality, shape, size, spatial orientation,
placement on the page, and these will be culturally specified in the teaching
experience by the child (p.84).
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Becoming Biliterate
Children need to acquire both the visual skills (reading/ recognition) and the actional skills or
knowledge (writing).
Each writing system has its own potentials and limitations and uses both the visual and actional
modes in particular ways.
Children are given the chance to practice both aspects in school, by being asked to read and recognize
alphabet letters, trace the letters and then write them on their own.
Children become aware and pay attention to a number of different features of the writing system they use:
thickness of stroke, directionality, shape, size, spatial orientation, placement on the page.
Check what matters in Arabic, and how writing facets of Arabic to help in visual discrimination are explored and
taught : a) writing words on the board, requesting children themselves to write on the board, asking children to
read, asking children to trace…
They learn to ‘adapt to different contexts’ and in particular, to recognize that their classmates ‘might not have the
same expertise’.
They develop an interest in ‘exploring connections’ between their writing systems through the peer teaching
activity. See example of 6 year old Selina’s drawing of both her mother and sister, with comments in English “I love
my Mum” and “I love my sister” below the images, and Chinese characters on top of each of the images, saying
“Love” for her mother, and the other “Girl Power” [an English concept adapted from one of her western pop star
icons, for her sister.
The children in the study use their different scripts to express a distinctive personal identity. Selina’s world is lived
simultaneously in both English and Chinese. (pp.84-90)
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Becoming Biliterate
Children acquire embodied knowledge
of their own literacy context(s) and
what matters in each of the writing
systems that they are competent in.
They are aware in the example In
Arabic, with Tina and Tala, where
Tala points that the letter مhas a
wiggle which is essential especially
when attached to an )( ا (ماFigure 11)
and
In Chinese, the thickness of the stroke
and the spacing might change the
letter and accordingly the meaning
of the word (Figure 10).
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