The Communicative Competence Of Young Children

How children first acquire language is one of the central issues in linguistics. This book draws on a wide range of research, including work in developmental psychology, anthropology and sociology, to explore the processes behind child language acquisition to the preschool period.

No detailed description available for "The Child's Communicative Competence".

Language, Children and Society: The Effect of Social Factors on Children Learning to Communicate investigates the processes involved in the development of communicative skills in young children, in particular as these unfold during the child's participation in social interactions in a variety of everyday, educational situations. For a fuller understanding of these processes, through which the child learns the vast array of communicative skills necessary to function effectively in social contexts, the broad range of situations in which the communicative exchanges are embedded—school, home, community, etc.—are examined. Comprised of 17 chapters, this volume begins by painting a vivid picture of human discrimination and prejudice that touches every child involved in the education process in the United States, a result that can be linked to language ignorance. The discussion then turns to some of the contributions of linguistics to education and some of the problems involved in reaching greater cooperation between linguists and educators. The relevance of developments in sociolinguistics to the study of language learning and early education is emphasized. Subsequent chapters focus on the communicative competence of kindergarten children; children's situational variation and situational competence; sex differences in the language of children and parents; and dialogue, monologue, and egocentric speech by children in nursery schools. This book will be of interest to teachers and students, as well as to practitioners in the fields of educational psychology, psychobiology, psychiatry, linguistics, and childhood education.

This publication is concerned with the early stages of language acquisition and is designed for use by early childhood teachers, nursery nurses, special education teachers and others working with children experiencing difficulties in learning to talk. Procedures are described that can be used to assess a child' s current skills and plan activities to increase communicative competence. The programme described is based on a developmental sequence that moves the early skills of joint attention, turn-taking and appropriate play to the more complex skills of asking and answering questions. Other issues discussed include sound development and intelligibility, the use of augmentative and alternative communication as stepping stones to speech, working with children and with families. The second edition has an expanded focus on the place of communicative intentions in early language development.

This book provides new insight into the development of the child's ability to become a competent participant in conversation. The author combines a pragmatic analysis of the functions language can perform with an innovative and extensive empirical investigation of the development of young children's language use and sociocognitive skills. She gives a detailed description of the development of children's language between the ages of three-and-a-half and seven, broadens the scope of theorizing about language development by placing it in relation to the development of social understanding, and provides a new framework for understanding speech problems and designing ways to solve them. It is the first study to find a strong link between language, sociocognitive development, and social development. It will be welcomed by child language specialists, developmental and social psychologists, conversation and discourse analysts, and their advanced students.

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topic of the discourse, and the sex, age, familiarity and relative status of the speaker and the listener. There is available detailed evidence of the ways in which adults consistently modify their speech to foreigners, of phonological, syntactic, and lexical markings of language in professional settings, and of differences in men’s and women’s speech that are tied to their roles in society. This book examines young children’s knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules that govern appropriate language use, exploring (i) the repertoire of registers (ie speech varieties) that young children possess; (ii) the linguistic devices that they use to mark distinct registers; (iii) the way their skill in using these registers develops.