Despicable Minecraft Minions in the Nether

And another quick link to a BBC Radio 4 Today clip about the changing language of children. Here, the OUP language expert Sam Armstrong and comedian & writer Charlie Higson discuss the influence of popular culture and video gaming on young people's language.

While the presenter is keen to get them moaning about young children using terms like minion, nether, LOL and OMG, the experts are good at seeing the benefits to young people of new forms of language and their ability to code-switch. Take that, Radio 4 curmudgeons!

Nice stuff on lexis, morphology, word formation processes and the joys of technology, too.

Approaching child language essay questions

With the 2014 ENGA1 exam fast approaching, I thought I'd add a few quick posts to help with revision and exam technique. This post is about the Language Development essay in Section B of the paper.

Key things to remember here are:

• You need to answer the question! Generic, all-purpose answers only get you so far; it's vital to actually address the question that you've been set.
• Your intro doesn't need to be talk about all the stages, pre-verbal and otherwise; it's much better to unpack the question's wording in your intro. For example, in the question "Discuss how children develop their vocabulary and learn to use it appropriately", think about what the two key areas actually mean: vocabulary = lexis and semantics & "use it appropriately" = pragmatics.
• Use examples to illustrate your points. It's not enough to just say general things about what children do: quote actual examples either from your own study or from the data provided in the short question before.
• Don't just offload theory: evaluate it too. Try to find the most appropriate theoretical explanations for different aspects of children's language acquisition. If the question is on vocabulary and pragmatic understanding, social interaction and cognitive theories are probably more appropriate than nativist ones. If you've studied usage-based theories, they might be a really good explanation for how children develop their vocabularies in chunks rather than as separate lexical items.
• Try to offer a line of argument. While AO1 is only worth 5 marks on this question, it's important to guide your reader. Use signposting techniques to allow your reader to follow where your argument is going.

Language Development essay advice

You can find plenty of advice for the data question on ENGA1 in previous posts on this blog (like this and this), but if you want help on the essay, here goes...

With my examiner hat on (it's a bit like a wizard's hat, but less fashionable), I'd say that some of the things that examiners really want to see are as follows:

• People who answer the question . This may seem blindingly obvious, but lots of students seem to write very generic answers which don't really address the question that's been set. So, avoid this by actually addressing and deconstructing the question right from the start. By this, I mean try to define what you think the question is really asking about and how you are going to deal with it. So, if the question says "Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills" you need to define what's meant by "grammatical skills" (i.e. syntax and morphology). 
• Examples.  Give examples. It's all very well knowing plenty of the bigger picture, but you also need to bring in examples of what children (and sometimes adults) actually say. Have examples of your own ready. Failing that, use some from the data question.
• Evaluation. Many questions are phrased with "How far..." or "To what extent...", so you should be able to see that it's not just a question of raising a flag for Chomsky, Piaget or Skinner, but to really evaluate how different theories might explain how children acquire language. And remember, just because conditioning seems to work in a way with politeness features, doesn't mean it works for everything else. Think about different elements of language and how - for example - social interaction theories are very good at explaining children's pragmatic development, but pretty poor at explaining the overgeneralisation of grammar rules.
• A clear structure. You've got to write clearly and offer a logical and developed argument. Think through your answer, use a plan and paragraph it!

Foetal prepositions

Here's a quick link to some new research that backs up work by people like Fifer and Mehler (which we've looked at as part of Language Development for ENGA1) on children's early capacity for understanding and picking up language around them.

A gap to plug

Yesterday's post on 'The language deficit' picked up on Tina Rosenberg's article in The New York Times about programmes designed to bridge the gap between kids brought up in rich language environments (i.e. those getting a great deal of language used around and towards them) and those in a more impoverished (often economically, as well as well as linguistically) environment.

Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has written a piece on it too, which can be found in The Boston Globe, and in this he looks at similar territory to Rosenberg but also brings in a bit more of a linguistic focus, quoting Deb Roy, whose Speechome Project is something we've looked at in class (and through the links here and here).

The language deficit

If you're revising child language for ENGA1 (or ENGB3 on the AQA B spec), you might find this link a useful one to have a look at. Tina Rosenberg, writing in The New York Times, takes a detailed look at research into the amount and range of language that children hear around them, or have directed at them, and the gap between rich and poor kids that seems to exist.

Rosenberg refers to the work of Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (which we referred to here a while ago) and recent programmes designed to close this gap. But what kind of gap are we talking about?

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

The programmes to close this gap sound really impressive and are exactly the kind of thing that Sure Start was supposed to help in the UK before its funding was brutally slashed.

More recently, Dana Suskind, a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon at the University of Chicago who founded the school’s Thirty Million Words project, did a study with 17 nannies in Chicago. Each attended a workshop on the importance of talk, strategies for increasing it, and how to use the Lena recorder. Then they used it once a week for six weeks. Suskind found (pdf) that the nannies increased the number of words they used by 32 percent and the number of conversational turns by 25 percent.

We've talked in class a lot about the competing influences of nature and nurture in children's language acquisition, but here's a really interesting approach to improving the quality and range of what children hear, and subsequently it would seem, produce.

The phono-morph war

A report about research from Portsmouth University in the Southern Daily Echo suggests that a new approach to literacy teaching, which involves teaching about the structures and meanings of words (morphology) is more effective than the sound system based teaching of phonics that has been promoted over the last decade.

With a morphological approach, children are taught about the units that make up words (like we've been doing in Child Language recently with morphemes like -s, -ed, -ing , -er, -ist and -est):

Dr Victoria Devonshire, of the Department of Psychology, trialled a new method of teaching reading and writing with 120 children aged five to seven and found the average reading age increased by 14 months after just six months. She said: ''We were surprised at how compelling the results were.
''When children were taught to understand why English works the way it does, we saw a leap in their ability to learn to read and write.

''The written word is about conveying meaning, not the sound of speech. Expecting children to just figure out the rules of our language is worryingly common and it isn't helping them become as proficient and confident as young children in many other languages.'' 

Phonics has been promoted by successive governments as a  means of rapidly improving children's ability to decode the sounds of English, but it's come in for some stick because - as we can all see with words like plough, through and cough - the spelling system in English isn't regular or even very logical. The introduction of phonics testing at Key Stage 1, where nonsense words like wib or vog (or even our old favourite, wug) are given to children to read has provoked yet more concern among many literacy experts, because - they argue - it's articifial and pointless to give children made-up words out of context when readign is not just about individual sounds or words, but about making sense of words and sounds in their specific contexts.

The fact that some people who are quite close to government advisors are set to make a few quid out of phonics schemes is also a cause for scepticism among critics of the phonics-or-bust approach, but plenty of research suggests that phonics can help some children; the argument is not really about if it does but how and why and also in which contexts.

So, what about teaching morphology as this research suggests? It's not necessarily a new approach; back in 2006, Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant published Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes, which looked at work done in schools to promote the study of morphology as a means of improving spelling and reading. What Victoria Devonshire is doing sounds really interesting and it sounds like it will add another dimension to literacy teaching. Hopefully, there'll be more information about this approach to come out.

More child language

This week's The Life Scientific on Radio 4 featured an interview with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, who is an expert in children's development. There's some good content here for anyone wanting to look at interaction and language development, as she talks about how exposure to different kinds of language - speech from parents, TV, internet language - shapes children's early development.

The podcast can be found here.

Child Language resources

As we're now well under way with the Language Development topic for ENGA1, this link from Jill on the English language List is well timed.

It's the Talking Point website which has masses of material for parents and teachers about children's language development, including a handy set of ages and stages, where you can check what is normally happening in a child's language development at various ages. There's also some useful material on language impairments and the communicative development of children with learning difficulties, which can be really useful for A2 language investigations.

This week's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 had a really good segment on autism and language, which focused not just on the language development of young people with autism but the language used by carers towards people with autism.

No, Chomsky

For a long time, Noam Chomsky has been viewed as one of the big hitters in linguistics. It's probably fair to say that he's one of its most influential thinkers, widely admired for his groundbreaking ideas on language acquisition and what he came to term Universal Grammar. But in recent years there's been a growing body of research to suggest that his nativist approach to language acquisition - that all children acquire language through an inbuilt ability to relate universal rules of grammar to the language that is used around them - is on shaky ground.

The argument gets quite heated (and frankly, for me at least, almost completely unfathomable) in some places (like the comments that follow this Geoff Pullum THE review of a recent Chomsky publication) and I don't have the intelligence to follow most of it, but this is an interesting and readable account of some of the recent criticisms of Chomsky's approach by Dorothy Bishop on her blog and worth a read if you've already studied child language acquisition at AS/A level or are interested in finding out more.

There's also a really good chapter in the forthcoming EMC Language handbook, written by Paul Ibbotson of Manchester University, on new approaches to child language research.

ENGA1 Language Development: quick revision ideas

There's not really much time to go until the exam, so I'll concentrate on a few pointers to help with this section and then point you towards relevant resources and previous posts.

First things first:

• Only spend 5-10 minutes on the data question. It's worth 10 marks and what you need to do is pick out, quote and label 5 different features. That's it...no explanations, no theories, no extra waffle. Make sure your 5 points are sufficiently different to allow you to get 10 marks (e.g. don't identify two examples of substitution and then label the other three as virtuous errors).
• 5 bullet points/short sentences is enough!

Essay tips:

• Answer the question! Don't expect to be able to roll out a prepared response and get good marks. Try to grapple with what the question is actually asking you: maybe define the terms of it in your own words, early on in your opening paragraph.
• Use examples: you can even use the data from the first question if you can't think of other examples, but it's better to have a few of your own.
• Integrate and evaluate different theoretical models. Examiners are keen to see students thinking about the pros and cons of different theories for the question that's been set.

Resources that might help:

Last year's (and 2010's) revision tips can be found here. They still stand.
Some helpful links to various snippets.
And some stuff on new approaches if you're feeling brave.

If you look down the right sidebar you can also download 4 theory sheets from my Twitpics.

Click here

We've recently been covering children's acquisition of the sounds of English in AS classes, and I made a passing reference to how very young children can make any sound in any language (like the clicks of Xhosa in South Africa) but gradually tune in to their mother tongue as they grow older.

This fascinating post by Julie Sedivy in Discover magazine tells us a lot more about Xhosa and its clicks but also makes a number of interesting points about how we perceive sounds. Sedivy points out that to an outsider, the clicks of Xhosa sound "a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other". Of course, to a Xhosa speaker, the sounds are as familiar as t,s, and d are to English speakers.

In terms of children's acquisition of sounds, the article raises some good points to consider. We often treat the phonological part of a child's language development as mostly to do with the production of sounds and patterns of "errors" in those sounds (deletion, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, for example), at least I know I do when I teach it. But what about how we hear sounds as children and how we process those sounds and create a mental representation of what they mean?

Sedivy tells us that "your brain cares as much about how sounds function in a language than about their actual physical properties, so the same acoustic input can be interpreted very differently by the brain depending on its role in a language", so when toddlers are listening to speech all around them, they're not just parroting or imitating it, but making sense of how sounds are used, where they appear and what they might mean. It's as much to do with fathoming out meanings as it is to do with trying to replicate the production of the sound.

Toddler talk

Yesterday's Telegraph featured an article about recent research by Leslie Rescorla into children's acquisition of vocabulary in the early years. Rescorla may be familiar to some A level English Language students for her work on acquisition of lexis and semantics and the different categories of over-extension that some children make.

The article takes a look at some of the recent ideas about a child's language environment and how the language used around a child might influence their vocabulary and understanding. It also includes a checklist of some simple words that most children would be using by the time they're 2 years of age.

The 15-year project followed 40 children from privileged backgrounds who were diagnosed as late talkers but were otherwise developing normally.
While most of the children had caught up and developed an average range of vocabulary by four or five they remained slightly behind peers from the same background in vocabulary, grammar and reading throughout their school years, suggesting that their late development of speech had put them at a disadvantage.
The word test devised by Prof Rescorla can be completed in ten minutes and doctors can tell at a glance whether a child's speaking ability is poor for their age.

Personally, I think it discriminates against yokels from Norfolk who would not know many of these, but would probably be able to label several types of tractor.

New approaches to child language acquisition

http://www.instablogsimages.com

This probably isn't a link to follow if you're still struggling with the basics of child language on your A level course, but it's a really fascinating way of looking at how languages are acquired that offers a challenge to the Chomskyan model of a language acquisition device that's specifically designed to process the rules of grammar.

Construction grammar is a relatively new field of linguistics to me and one I can't claim to fully grasp as yet, but in this blog post, the expert grammarian and ELT specialist, Scott Thornbury takes a look at how construction grammar might be applied to language acquisition.

Instead of looking at language as words and rules (lexis and grammar) as we often do when looking at stages of acquisition and how children move from one word to two words to telegraphic talk, and the rest of it, construction grammar offers a model in which children pick up chunks of language from those they hear around them. It's not a simple parroting of input, as per Skinner's behaviourist model, but a more subtle processing of meaningful units of language that they hear around them.

As Thornbury explains here, language learners are not just picking up words from around them like leaves and sticking them back onto a pre-programmed grammar tree:

Rather than mapping individual words on to a pre-specified grammatical ‘architecture’ (as in a Chomskyan, generative grammar view), speakers construct utterances out of these routinised sequences – the operative word being construct.

It's therefore an active process, one which involves putting together chunks of meaning rather than piecing together individual units and linking them by grammar rules to other bits.  Where this differs markedly from Chomsky's model is that he sees a child's language environment as linguistically impoverished: this is the poverty of the stimulus argument in which a child can't be simply taking in language data from around them and regurgitating it because what they hear is so fragmented and often apparently ungrammatical. Construction grammar offers a different approach which seems to be arguing that a child can make much more sense of this language input and that by hearing enough language they tune in to the patterns that emerge and can start to spot the most frequent structures, using them in their own language soon after.

Thornbury points to the fact that so many of English's phrase and clause structures are repeated patterns, where if you know the first part you can have an educated guess at what the second part will consist of. He points to structures such as:

• take the [noun] for a [noun] (e.g. take the dog for a walk, take the cure for an illness, etc.)
• [prep] the [sing N] of the [sing N] (e.g. on the top of the mountain, in the middle of the night, on the tip of the tongue)

So, perhaps what young children acquiring language hear around them isn't quite the jumbled mess of  random noises and unfinished structures that the poverty of the stimulus argument posits, but a rather regular system that can be picked up more quickly than previously thought.

Child Language research updates and summaries

We've started Language Development in my AS classes and - snow permitting - will carry on with it this week and up to Easter.

Here are some useful links to clips of TV programmes, You Tube presentations and research  papers that should complement your class work on the topic.

One of the most handy links is this You Tube presentation (powerpoint plus handy voiceover) outlining the key arguments about child language.

Then you'll find the impressively-mustachioed Robert Winston presenting this short extract from his series, The Human Body a good intro to the main developmental stages of child language acquisition. 

The Horizon documentary Why Do We Talk which we watched in class a week or two back is split into five separate You Tube clips which can be found here.

Did you shed a little tear at the plight of the lickle baby Zebra Finches? I did, but I weep when I hear Black Eyed Peas lyrics, so ignore me. If you want to find out more about the impressively-consonanted OferTchernichovski and his work on the fluffy birds, have a look here. Or here.

If you're ready for some hard stuff, then go to these clips from the big daddy of language acquisition, the living man-god that is Noam Chomsky. In this clip he talks about his theories of language acqusition (Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device) while in this one (only for the hardcore ravers, it has to be said) he talks in more detail about how his ideas on UG have changed.

I've just found this Patricia Kuhl lecture about the critical period hypothesis on TED, which is a very clear explanation about what goes on in the first year of a child's language development.

If all of that is too much for you (or you are from Ipswich and struggle with anything beyond grunts) then check out this clip of cute twins talking to each other.

Edited to add Kuhl lecture link on 09.02.12

ENGA1 June 2011: language development questions

Here are the titles of the essay questions set since June 2009 on spoken language development:

Jan 2011
To what extent does acquisition of language depend on children’s experiences of the world about them?

June 2010
How important is interaction between children and adult speakers in the process of language acquisition?

Jan 2010
Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills.

June 2009
Discuss what you have learnt about language acquisition from children’s early uses of words and meanings.

If you're looking for possible essay titles for June 2011, it's probably a good idea to look through the questions set on the old A spec which are very similar to what's on the current spec. You can find a set of them here.

ENGA1 June 2011 language development

Following on from this week's first revision post on ENGA1, here's a link to the collected language development posts on this blog for the last few years. You'll find revision and exam tips, as well as snippets of new research and links to discussions about theory and case studies.

Twintastic

As the proud father of twins (although not so proud now one has started claiming he's an Arsenal supporter), I really liked the clip of babbling twins that circulated on the web last week. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's here.

There's also a nice bit of analysis of what's going on, provided by a child speech expert.

Baby Gaga

a view from one of the cameras

Deb Roy's longitudinal study of his own son's acquisition of language is the focus of this TED lecture. It's a clear explanation of how he went about gathering many hundreds of thousands of hours of data and some observations about what the data tells us about how his child's language developed over three years, particularly the social dimensions of interaction and acquisition. The idea of feedback cycles - caregiver speech and child's speech working together in an ongoing process of acquisition and influence - is a key point from the lecture.

One particular case study is his son's movement from gaga to water (from about 5 minutes in). The "wordscapes" created from the data are pretty amazing to look at and the tagging of particular words is a particularly fascinating way of mapping language to events. So, for example, Roy and his team have mapped the child's use of words to where he and other family members were in the house and who they were talking with. Here's the wordscape for water:

"water" wordscape, with peaks in the kitchen

You can also read more about the study in this pdf.

What's also interesting, as the lecture goes on, is Roy's team's application of this model to patterns of language usage beyond his own son and house and into the wider world, where mapping of language is linked very closely to national media events.

Learning the language/s

The ways in which children acquire language have been thoroughly researched for the best part of a century now, and even before people like Piaget, Vygotsky and Chomsky arrived on the scene, there were many observations about how children picked up (or didn't pick up) features of language, and the issue exercised the minds of great thinkers such as Kant and Plato.

More recently, studies have tended to become more intensive and involve masses more data than the earlier studies which often consisted of researchers tracking their own kids' development (or in my case publicly humiliating my children by showing clips of them to my classes or writing about them in the textbook) . The Deb Roy study at MIT which was featured in the BBC Horizon Programme Why Do We Talk (see here and here for links and further reading) showed how huge amounts of data could be collected by filming a child through CCTV for literally years, and then processing that data to see exactly what happened when.

This study shows how another large scale investigation is shedding light on the acquisition of Standard English and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in children. The findings, as reported in Science Daily, show that African-American children arrive at school with quite a high incidence of vernacular features in their speech. This then drops off as they go through the first four years of school before spiking again at the end of elementary school and dipping as the children enter high school.

The article suggests that there are implications in these findings for the teaching of Standard English in schools, which might well be the case, but it would also appear that the data tells us a bit more about how young people feel about themselves and their vernacular forms as they get older. Language is of course part of a wider system of social signification as well as a set of words and structures to be acquired, so it's quite likely that as children get older their relationship with their own language will change, and as the research seems to suggest this isn't a regular, smooth process but one that goes in peaks and troughs.

It's interesting to see how children start to pick up slang from their peer group at school as they get older and how this sits with the different varieties of English they hear around them - at school and at home -  so it's no surprise that a variety as well-established and widely used in the USA as AAVE will go through cycles as its users negotiate the complex territory of age, ethnicity, individual identity and mainstream, standard language forms.

One of the implications for English teaching might be that studying AAVE (or in the case of the UK, British Black English and other dialects or sociolects) alongside the Standard forms helps to develop a better understanding of both forms and their suitability for different situations. After all, what is being talked about here is quite a positive thing: being fluent in two languages/ codes rather than just one.

Other research into bilingualism in the early years of childhood would seem to suggest that having two or more languages around you is actually a very positive thing, leading to enhanced flexibility in thinking and even health benefits in later years:

Studies of children who grow up as bilingual speakers indicate they are often better at perspective-taking tasks, such as prioritizing, than monolingual children. Experiments with older bilingual speakers indicate that the enhanced mental skills may protect them from problems associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

So, as the report puts it, "juggling" two languages helps in many ways, and that doesn't just apply to recognised languages but also varieties of languages.

(If you can get hold of Graeme Trousdale's chapter Variation and Education in Analysing Variation in English (eds.Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April) you can find a clear explanation of how studying non-standard varieties is actually very good for our understanding of grammar in general, and helps with our grasp of standard forms too.)