CLA Coursework Preparation
I intent to test the development of child writing and how the vocabulary and grammatical structures develop over the long period of language acquisition. I also plan to investigate how the child's ability of displaying idiolect and dialect begins to shape as they get older. The children I am going to study are two boys ages six and seven so it will be interesting to look at their books from younger years and see how their writing abilities have developed including writing for an audiences and manipulating register. I predict that as the child gets older, they are more likely to develop the ability to manipulate register, display idiolect and dialect, the complexity of vocabulary and the complexity and range of grammatical structures used will all be displayed more and I also predict they will make less grammatical and spelling mistakes.I am planning to collect several workbooks from both of the boys over the years at similar ages, and look at the factors stated above. It would be good to acknowledge Noam Chomsky's theory of children being born with the ability to acquire language and to test the presence of their Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This means I can test the way in which the grammatical structures are used i.e. if 'runned' is used instead of 'ran' during the development stage then this shows understanding of adding the 'ed' to past tense verbs and therefore proves Chomsky's theory of children already having these grammatical 'rules' imprinted on the brain. I can also look at how easy it is for the children to acquire more vocabulary and test how this is linked to Chomsky's theory.
It will be difficult to compare the development of the language of the two boys as their development will differ and this is not fair to assume that one may be more linguistically developed than the other at a certain age. However I can use their own data to compare with their own data in previous years. This means I have two children so I can perhaps analyse certain pieces of data that I might not have seen with just testing one child's writing ability and I can learn more about the difference of their development, errors and improvements. This will be a difficulty as it will be hard not to compare the two however comparing their data might help me to discover some things about their individual development. I cannot assume that one child at the same age as the other is less developed as there are other factors that could influence that which I have not controlled.
Good. I think you can compare the two as long as it is not a prescriptive judgement about what a child should be able to do. I am not sure Chomsky is the most relevant, as overgeneralisations will most often appear pre-writing, which your sample data may by now have shown you. Do some reading into writing theory to find appropriate hypothoses. Check less vs fewer. Promising work.
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