Bibliography

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/wiki/Revision:Language_change_and_language_acquisition


http://eastnorfolklanguage.blogspot.co.uk/ 

What to look out for when doing 'Child language Aquisition'

Features of child language acquisition

• Holophrases - one word (12-18mths), then two-word stage (after 18mths), then telegraphic speech (after 2yrs) - sometimes grammatically correct but omit determiners like 'a' and 'the'

• Underextension - 'car' only for family car, but not other cars

• Overextension - 'car' for tractor, van, etc

• Fis phenomenon - Berko and Brown - child pronounces fish as fis but when a parent asks if it is a fis, the child says no - when asked if it's a fish, child says yes. can understand a word without being able to pronounce it - comprehension before speech

• Simplification - deletion, substitution

• Intonation - Cruttenden - found children find it harder to recognise intonation

• Questions - inflection often used at first to show it's a question, then question words learnt during 2nd yr, firstly what and where, then why, how and who. results in 'where daddy gone?' as they've not learnt auxiliary verb, 'has'. auxiliary verbs learnt 3rd yr, and how to form qus is learnt too (reverse subject and verb order). 'joe is here' --> 'is joe here?' but wh- words not always inverted correctly - 'why joe isn't here?' (hehe plagiarised my revision book for the examples, sorry!)

• Critical period for learning - Cases about twins who were kept locked up by their family, but they were rescued young so developed normally. Feral children like Genie, who was forced not to talk, and hence only made limited lang progress as she is thought to have missed the critical period for learning lang. Two girls were found wolves in a wolves' den and had trouble learning to speak etc "After three years, Kamala had mastered a small vocabulary of about a dozen words. After several more years, her vocabulary had increased to about 40.To compare, a normal two-year-old child, at the peak of its language learning, would find it easy to pick up 40 new words in a single week. Also, Kamala's words were only partly-formed and her grammar stilted"

• Stages of negatives:
  • Aged 0-15months - Gestures are used to indicate a negative
  • 15-18months - single words "no" "not" are used
  • 2-2 1/2 yrs - "no" and "not" are used either at the beginning or end of a sentence e.g. "no eat" "going not"
  • 3yrs - negatives are used with the correct syntax i.e. intergrated into the sentence
  • 4/5/6yrs - more subtle negatives i.e hardly, are used, more "n't"'s as well, "can't" "won't" etc. Implied negatives are understood, i.e. "we'll go later"

• Look at how much is said by each person, who controls what is being said, who takes the lead, pragmatics, social context, as well as the actual things that are being said

• Check this website for developmental milestones in child lang: [2]

Written Child Language

• Need fine motor skills in order to hold the pen and write evenly
• Knowledge of letter shapes/patterns
• Rules: top-bottom/left-right/'finger space'
• Capitalisation and punctuation
• Format of specific genres eg. for a letter there should be an address, date etc
• Tense
• Phonic spelling/look and say method
• Stages in actually writing:
  1. Palmer grip - used to make marks on the page (just like up and down lines)
     • which leads to more conventional grip, where you can make more circular lines
  2. Motor control - more circular again, leave gaps as though imitation text
  3. Proto-letter formation - Begin to write name and letters, but the letter might be too big, or back-to-front

• BM Kroll - He suggested that there are a number of stages that children go through:
  • Stage 1- Preparatory Stage - Up to the age of 6
    • Child masters physical skills needed to write. Learns basic principles of spelling system.
  • Stage 2 - Consolidation - Ages 6-8
    • Child writes like they speak. Short, declarative sentences common. Grammatically incomplete sentences. Long strings of sentences joined with simple conjunctions.
  • Stage 3 - Differentiation Stage (8 - mid teens)
    • Child becomes more aware of differences between writing and speech. Increasing confidence. More complicated sentences and constructions.

Reading and Child Lang Acq

• Children's books also relate to prominent aspects of a child's life, eg. school, family etc.

• The higher up the reading scheme, the fewer pictures there are to aid pragmatics.

• Reading skills

• Reading schemes like 'Roger Red Hat'

• The teaching of reading in schools

• Phonics (analytic and synthetic)
  • Synthetic - break the sounds into syllables - there is a representation/action for each sound, too. For eg, S = weave hand in an s shape, like a snake, and say ssssss
  • Analytic - used in conjunction with other strategies, was the original method and doesn't break down words into such small units like synthetic.

• Try thinking about how you learnt to read, perhaps you read 'Roger Red Hat' too!

• Jeanne Chall's Stages of Reading: 1. Pre-Reading and Pseudo-Reading (Up to age 6), 2. Initial Reading and Decoding (6-7), 3. Confirmation and Fluency (7-8), 4. Reading for Learning (9-14)

What you look at in Lang Acquisition

• This area of study is designed to teach candidates about the nature and functions of language in the individual and social development of humans. It will focus on some of the distinctive features of speech

and literacy development in children from 0 to 11 years who are native users of English.

• These include:
  • The primacy of speech and the learning of the sound system
  • The links between the child’s desire to communicate needs and the acquisition of phonology, lexis and grammar in order to achieve purposes (pragmatics)
  • The significance of social interaction in language acquisition and the development of innate structures to achieve, continue and extend interpersonal communication (turn-taking, politeness rules, implied meanings, specific contexts, social awareness and other discourse patterns)
• The connections between developments in children’s language and their general conceptual development
• The beginnings of reading and writing.

Methodological methods

Corpus analysis
The methodological methods most relevant to my investigation would firstly my a Corpus analysis.
A corpus analysis is conclusions and findings drawn from running tests against a fairly large body of language material, often stored and assessed electronically .
In my case my corpus analysis will be in the form of home videos (that have been transferred to DVD, for easier access) I will be recording and transcribing from a large collection of these DVDs to gather as much information and evidence I need to be able to carry out my investigation and to draw a relevant hypothesis.


Ethnographic study
As well as this I think the Ethnographic study is also relevant to my investigation. I am observing the real language in a real life setting of myself and my sisters at home. Although the video camera is always on show and the people being recorded are fully aware they are on camera, due to the age of the children I am observing the I feel the obvious presence of the video camera wont be as much of an issue.
Interviews


Lastly interviews will also be an important factor in my investigation, Interviewing anyone (in particular my parents) who had very close contact with myself and my sisters to be able to extract information that will be useful to my investigation. For example the similarities or differences in language (language development) between my sisters and me etc.

Action Plan - Avoiding pitfalls of observers paradox

Observers paradox is the difficulty of gaining examples of real language data, when the presence of an observer or contrived situation might change the way people would normally use language,




Due to my investigation containing only home videos, I can not unfortunately avoid Observers paradox, as the data I need has already been obtained and cant be recreated. The participants in my own home videos I will be using know throughout that they are being filmed which may in fact lead to demand characteristics from the specific people.


However the only people I am specifically observing and transcribing in these videos is myself and my triplet sister from very early ages, due to the young age, confidence and creativeness of children I don't think observers paradox will be as much of an issue as it would be with a teen or fully grown adult. I will find this out when looking through more of the videos.




There are no Ethical issues involved in my investigation due to the data being my own home videos, however I still had informed consent from both my parents and sisters to use this data to avoid any issues. Also due to all the videos having me and my sisters in at very early ages, naturally there is no offensive or taboo language used.

My unique interests and contacts

My mind map was done on paper, which I have on me and is complete.

Brainstorming investigation Ideas

Through analysing and looking through various investigation ideas there have been a few that have stood out to me more than others.

The first i thought stood out to me the most was 'What similarities and differences are there in early language acquisition of twins and siblings' this is due to me myself being part of a triplet, so i thought it would be an interesting investigation to look into. I have many home videos from over he years of us from early babies to young children (age 8+) , so i thought looking through these videos i would be able to collect enough solid data to make a reliable comparison. This would be an unique and interesting investigation incorporating a massive part of my life.

The second which I found to look quite interesting was ''How has the language and style of news reporting changed during the last hundred years'' this particularly took my interest as i am looking into studying English/Journalism degree at university so might be a useful investigation, Which interests me and may look better on my university application.

Finally is ''how is status and Dominance shown in Domestic, social or professional discourse'' In AS my favourite topic was language and power which I again found to be interesting and thought i understood quite well.

The Mini Language Change Investigation - Reflection

My mini language change investigation was based on a 'private letter'.

We were given a letter in the form of an email from recent years sent from iraq to loved ones at home.

We then had too search for a suitable letter from an earlier time period of similar context to be able to compare the two letters and observe what language changes that can be identified. We found a letter from 1914 sent from a young boy in WW1 sent home to his loved one.

I felt our investigation was very successful and I enjoyed looking in depth at both letters as the changes of language were quite extravagant in comparison. We were able to identify many language features that were different including Lexis, Grammar and what is known as 'text talk'. We could also identify differences due to amount of impact of social view and believes changing for example 'Religion' and 'Racism'. Lastly we identified the effect of language change due to the ever growing world of technology and the now many ways we are able to communicate. Although there was a lot of language features we also found the meaning and sensitivity of both letters were very different, the 1914 letter was a lot more personal and intimate and the email being very general and sent to more than one person. We believed this to be due to the different circumstances each person was in, more so to do with more technology we have nowadays compared to WW1.

Out of all the mini investigations this investigation interested me the most, due to there being so much to analyse and knowing that there would most definitely be a lot of clear evidence to work with. It was also just interesting to see how different the way we communicate is, even though being in a very serious dangerous environment both situations both being as serious as each other.

Im both excited and apprehensive about the Language change investigation. More so at the minute due to being undecided as to what i want to investigate. I think it will be a useful experience and I hope to discover a lot about my chosen investigation, Which I will make sure is something that interests me and links in with some aspect of my life as to achieve the best and reliable results.

The websites and tools i think will be helpful is definitely the google search engine, being able to find information you need and gather quantitative evidence to support the investigation as well. For example N grams when looking the use of specific words over time.

Practice investigation

Through doing our practice investigation, it helped me get to grips with what my investigation will need to consist of and what I will need to do to achieve a good grade when it comes to the actual investigation itself.

A successful investigation needs to consist firstly of an Introduction. This is to discuss your chosen topic including reasons for choosing it. You will also present our hypothesis here and set out your overall aims in terms of what language aspects you will analyse.

You will also have to include the Methodology, which is a description of the process you went through from beginning to end in the investigation, also a reflection on issues you came across.

Next is the Analysis, which is the most important part of our investigation. This involves a systematic analysis  of your data using linguistic terminology, which consist of both qualitative and quantitative data. Also including contextual factors involved.

After the analysis is the Conclusion and Evaluation. Here you will interpret the analysis of your data and present your conclusions in relation to the original hypothesis you set out. Here you can make points about the overall success and challenges involved in your investigation and give ideas for further study.

Lastly is the Bibliography and references, which is simply a detailed list of any sources you used to help you in the investigation this can consist of anything from books, websites or articles etc. Then is the Appendices and data, This is where you will include the data you collected, as well as copies of any other material needed to fully understand your investigation (particularly pieces of existing research that you based it on).

Through the practice investigation I picked up a few tips which I found useful and will benefit me with my future investigation. One of the tips I picked up was not to go into so much detail and write so much particularly when analyzing specific language points. I need to be more brief and concise which will help to with time management and getting all of my investigation finished on time to a good standard.

The investigation I notice have worked the best for former students are based on the topics we studied in AS due too having quite a fresh gathering of knowledge and having the resources that will help at home.

The investigations I think would be best to avoid would be investigations where it will be difficult to collect the data you need, investigations where you are not able to gather the correct or enough resources to support your investigation.

My top 3 Favourite investigations so far

''What Similarities and differences are there in early language acquisition of twins/siblings?''

• This investigation would focus on child Language Acquisition
• The data i would collect would be from home video of myself and sisters (triplet sisters) noting and making observations about the language used between us
• The data may not necessarily be the right data i need for this investigation, I would need quite a lot of me and my sisters talking directly to each other or other people, there will be a lot of other people in the videos including family and friends who might overpower the recordings
• However i think this a unique and interesting investigation which is very personal to myself and could produce some interesting findings.
• The language issues i could investigate could be the actual language development of myself and my sisters, who develops quicker, who can communicate the best, are there any similarities in our language etc.
• The first stop I need to go about collecting the data is to find the videos and start watching them to see if they are suitable for my investigation.

"How was the language and style of news reporting changed during the last 100 years?''

• This investigation would focus on Language change over time
• The data i would collect would most likely be from offline, on newspaper websites etc.
• It might be hard to found a reliable legitimate source showing a real News report from the actual time period I need.
• However it will provide a lot of solid evidence for me to work on in the investigation
• I could investigate the audiences the reports are targeted at, and how they are portrayed to specific people, I could investigate specific language features that have changed and so on.
• My first steps to go about collecting this data would be to search online for a reliable source to which i can find a real article or report, find two good reports that are of the same context and are aimed at the same social class.

''How is Dominance and Status shown in domestic, social or professional discourse''

• This investigation would focus on power in language
• The data I would collect would probably be from real life observations, this investigation offers me a wide range of ideas i could use.
• Its a topic which provides me with a lot of variety and allows my to go into a lot depth as we studied it in great detail at AS 
• However it might cause problems due to having observing a group of people, with them knowing you are recording/videoing them this might introduce demand characteristics, natural conversation doesn't flow as easily and can become awkward. But if a group didn't know you were recording them this might bring up some ethical issues.
• The language issues i could investigate could be anything from who holds the power and how they keep this dominance to the power struggle between people within the group and how this is achieved
• The first steps I need to do about getting this data is too decide what group of people I want to use for example, a group of friends, work colleagues (at my job), parents when arguing/discussing. once I have decided I need to record this conversions and make observations about the language use. Gather evidence to use in my investigation