Theory to test in Investigation for Coursework

Kroll’s 4 stages of development   

February 7, 2012

Barry Kroll (1981) identified 4 phases of children’s development and further work by other researchers such as Katherine Perera added the suggested age ranges.

Preparation – up to 6 yrs – basic motor skills are acquired alongside some principles of spelling.

Consolidation – 7/8 yrs – writing is similar to spoken language including more colloquial and informal register.  Also a string of clauses joined together by the conjunction “and”.

Differentiation – 9/10 yrs – awareness of writing as separate from speech emerges.  In addition a stronger understanding of writing for different audiences and purposes is evident and becomes more automatic.

Integration – mid-teens – this stages sees the use of the “personal voice” in writing.  It is characterised by evidence of controlled writing, with appropriate linguistic choices being made consistently.

The Five Spelling Stages

Pre-phonemic: Imitate writing, mainly scribbling and using pretend writing; some letter shapes are decipherable.

Semi-phonetic: Link letter shapes and sounds, using this to write words.

Phonetic: Understand that all phonemes can be represented by graphemes; words become more complete.

Transitional: Combine phonic knowledge with visual memory; an awareness of combinations of letters and letter patterns, including the 'magic e' rule.

Conventional: Spell most words correctly

Bibliography: AQA English Language Specification B Textbook

CLA Coursework Preparation

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.

Phonics Research

Phonics Research

There are a range of phonetic techniques to teach children, however the dispute is which one to teach them. The more traditional method of teaching phonics is called 'synthetic' phonic teaching, which involves the introduction of 44 different phonemes without putting them in context. However the new, updated version of phonics teaching is 'analytic' phonic system, which involves teaching phonics in context, so the sounds from children's books are recognised and focusing heavily on rhyming groups.


According to the Independent, research shows that using the 'analytic' phonic system, children's reading age as improved by 9 months and the brightest by 14 months, as apposed to the more traditional 'synthetic' phonic method improving children's reading age by a year. Furthermore the two methods are still being disputed as to which is more beneficial for children and more research needs to be carried out to confirm this.

Child Speech Development

Child Speech Development

According to the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association, there are guidelines on what a child should be able to do with language at specific ages and if this is not happening with a child, then they are most likely going to suffer from a Speech or Language disorder. 

The most crucial age of a child acquiring their first language is from birth to three months. I am primarily focusing on speech development and so at this period of time in a child's life they will usually be making pleasure sounds i.e. cooing or gooing, will cry for its needs and will smile at a parent when recognising them. 

From four to six months, the child will start to make babbling sounds and the development of p, m and b sounds begins. At this age also, children tend to show their excitement and displeasure through different sounds and will make gurgling sounds when engaged with an activity or when concentrating but also in order to get attention when they are left alone.

The next stage is seven months to one year, and this is when the child will repeat babbling sounds in a sequence, starting to understand the structure of words, such as 'tata' and 'bibi'. Starts to actually use speech to get attention instead of making noises or crying. The child will also use gestures to communicate such as stretching out their arms if wanting to be picked up. They will begin to imitate speech sounds that they have heard before and this is the primary form of acquiring speech. Towards the age of one the child will be able to relevantly use a couple of words such as 'dada', 'hi', 'dog' and 'mama'. 

It is also important that the parent or carer looks at the child and speaks to them, tells them things and asks them questions, in order to reinforce communication and trigger the recognition of speech in the baby's mind. It is also good to repeat your son or daughters facial expressions so that they can understand how they are expressing themselves and what this means in context. A parent should also talk about what they are doing, where they are going, why they are doing it, and how they feel about it so the child can begin to understand why we communicate and how we do it.

Source: http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/01.htm

Reading Log and Summaries for A2

Reading Log and Summaries for A2

Child Language Acquisition 

Noam Chomsky - Chomsky believed that children acquiring a language was innate and they had a natural ability to create sentences which he said must have 'already been imprinted on the mind'. He called this ability the 'language acquisition device' and this encodes grammatical structures in the brain so when a child learns new vocabulary, they simply apply it to the structure they already know. He believed this because he noticed in his research that children never get their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order; they would notice if an adult purposely said an grammatically incorrect sentence; and also that they say some things which are incorrect grammatically for example 'I drawed' instead of 'I drew' but they could not have repeated this from hearing it, therefore learning is not just through imitation.

David Crystal - Crystal's theory of child language acquisition is that a child will learn in five different stages. Stage one is where children learn to say things for three different reasons: to get something they want; to get someone's attention; or to draw attention to something. Stage two is when the child learns to use interrogatives and usually start with 'what', or 'where'. Stage three involves lots of questions being asked and the development of state of actions and simple verbs such as 'listen' and 'know'. Stage four is when the child develops the ability to use more complex grammatical structures and can explain things, ask 'why' questions or making lots of requests. Stage five is when the child has fully developed language and uses it for all its purposes: to give information and explain things, ask and answer questions, requesting, expressing etc.

Jean Aitchison - Aitchison believed that a childs development of language is biologically organised and every child follows a similar pattern. She identified three stages of child language acquisition. One stage is labeling: this involves linking sounds to objects and associating a name to something. The second stage is packaging: this involved understanding the meaning of a word and the range of the meaning. The last stage is called network building: which is the understanding of the connection between words, and understanding that words have synonyms and antonyms. 

B.F. Skinner - Skinner believed that language acquisition are learned through associating events known as classical conditioning. This is said to be done by children associating objects with sounds or words. They are then rewarded by their parents by smiling or praising by their parents, which is called operant conditioning, as a positive reinforcement is likely to encourage the behaviour to be repeated. 

Neural networks - Some cognitive neuro-scientists have created neural networks that can some aspects acquire language. They are not programmed just exposed to lots of expamples of language. They are able to learn grammatical structures and make past tense forms with verbs. This supports the study that language is learned and developed as we grow up, not that we are born with the ability.

Bibliography - https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/

http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/languageandcognition/section2/page/2/

http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-language-acquisition-theories-stages-quiz.html

Investigating Language on Twitter - A2 Mini Investigation

Investigating Language on Twitter - A2 Mini Investigation

Introduction

I have chosen to focus on how gender affects language as my specialised topic area in this investigation, and in order to study this I put together a hypothesis. My hypothesis for this investigation is 'I think that men are more likely to show dominance than women in their twitter posts.' I have chosen to focus on particular feature areas such as how men and women use language features to show male dominance and female language deficiency in their tweets. I am going to focus on imperatives, multi-modal tweets, uncertainty features, empty adjectives and abbreviations and quantify them to see which sex used which features more. I would also focus on how the male and female participant used co-operative or competitive language however this would be harder to evaluate as they are not communicating to a particular speaker in a conversation thread. I also wanted to see how this would link to Robin Lakoff's deficit model and how the amount of empty adjectives and uncertainty features would show how women's language is deficient and this could link to how male speakers tend to be more dominant.

Methodology

When constructing this investigation I decided to pick two celebrities and systematically select 5 tweets from each. We did this by choosing every fifth tweet on their feed and chose celebrities so it was unbiased rather than using someone we knew personally and this could affect how we interpret the results. We also picked random celebrities so it was not biased and opinions could not affect what we analysed from the data. One benefit of using data from twitter is that we don't have to ask for consent as the celebrities who have posted these tweets are essentially allowing their information to be used as they have posted it publicly. However one limitation with our data that we collected is that it is only a very small pool of data and therefore we are unable to generalise this data to males and females in general as it is not fully representative.

Analysis

We found that Taylor (female) showed a higher amount of empty adjectives and uncertainty features than Zac (male). However Zac used a higher amount of multi-modal tweets (pictures and words), but also imperatives and abbreviations. From these results we could suggest that men are much less descriptive and more concise with their language in their tweets whereas women are much more expressive with words and describe something in more detail. This is proved as 4 out of 5 of Zacs tweets were multi-modal which incorporated pictures and words. We could also suggest that men are more dominant due to their higher amount of imperatives. However, one of Zac's tweets was an anomaly because due to my pragmatic understanding the tweet was song lyrics, however it uses the uncertainty feature 'like', but I don't know whether to consider it as his language use as he didn't put it in quote marks. We also considered the average number of features per tweet and didn't count 'retweets' as they were not written by the celebrity themselves and therefore cannot evaluate their language use. Taylor uses 'SO MUCH' in one of her tweets and this was a dilemma because both of these words are individual uncertainty features, and we can't decide to count them as one uncertainrt feature or two, as they are used in a phrase and work together.

Conclusion and Evaluation

There are massive limitations in this investigation as the data pool is very small and limiting as tghere was only 10 tweets. However, the data proves hypothesis as female uses more uncertainty features and empty adjectives however the male uses more multi-modal tweets, imperatives and abbreviations, which could prove male dominance in language. 

How is Gender shown in a conversation between Ricki and Vicki from Geordie Shore? How could we compare this with other data?

How is Gender shown in a conversation between Ricki and Vicki from Geordie Shore? How could we compare this with other data?

Key: I= Interviewer, R= Ricci, V= Vicki

R and V: [laughs]
I: will we be seeing a geordie wedding this season (.) or coming up?
V: (1) no (.) we're not um (.) I think we'll (.) in (.) oh (.)
R: you lost for words babe?
V: | [laughs]         |
R: | is she feeling | alright?
V: I'm not lost for words I'm just tryna work out how to | put it |
R:                                                                                      | yeah  | ok
V: shut up!
R: I can't believe this like
V: |we don't have a wedding |
R: | when she's on camera     | this never happens

Analysis

Due to the nature of this interview, we can tell that Vicki is trying to conceal some information about the next series, as the purpose of this interview is to encourage viewers to watch the new upcoming series of Geordie Shore, without giving too much information away. This factor could affect the significant amount of uncertainty features that Vicki uses as she is reluctant to use her speech as freely as possible, rather than just applying Robin Lakoff's 'Deficit Model' with women's language. She uses false starts; hesitations including 1 second pauses and micropauses; and fillers, such as 'um' and 'oh' as seen in the extract above. This is interesting as it supports Robin Lakoff's theory as she suggested that these features made women's language deficient as they were unnecessary in conversation. I also noticed that Ricci, the male speaker interrupts several times throughout the interview, and from the extract above, he interrupts three times consecutively while Vicki doesn't interrupt at all. This supports Zimmerman and West's theory as they suggested men interrupted much more frequently  than women and this was as a result of their dominance. I can also tell that there is a relationship between the speakers from their informal register as they laugh a lot with each other and Vicki also tells him to 'shut up' however we can tell from the context and the way he reacts to her, that it is a light-hearted joke. However after she says this, he flouts the maxim of relevance as he shifts the agenda back to what he was talking about before. You could suggest that this shows his dominance and power of him being able to shift the agenda, but she also does the same by carrying on to talk about the wedding in a competitive way. Ricci says 'I can't believe this like' and Vicki says, 'we don't have a wedding' which also flouts the maxim of relevance and juxtaposes with stereotypes of language and gender that men are usually more competitive and women are more cooperative.

In order to compare this conversation with other data collected first-hand, I could interview and record one-on-one mixed gender conversation, preferably a couple who are familiar with each other, by introducing a topic or debate. This way we could analyse how features of their language support or contradict gender theory and compare it with this interview with Vicki and Ricci to see whether the gender roles coincide in both interviews. However, to limit external variables that could affect the ability to establish cause and effect, we would have to choose two Geordie speakers, because regional dialect could really influence the language features used and this could be a factor to affect their language rather than gender being the influencing factor. I would also use a couple who are in a relationship or close friends because if the couple did not know each other this could affect how they speak to each other as they are likely to be more polite. If I were to use this as my data for an investigation I could title it 'How does gender affect the way couples speak in mixed gender conversations when presented with a particular topic of conversation?' to study different language features in relation to gender stereotypes.