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Children Talking : The Development of Pragmatic Competence Thompson, Linda Multilingual Matters 185359394X 9781853593949 9780585125961 English Language acquisition, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics. 1997 P118.C468 1997eb 401/.93 Language acquisition, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics.
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Children Talking The Development of Pragmatic Competence Edited by Linda Thompson MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon · Philadelphia · Toronto · Sydney · Johannesburg
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Children Talking: The Development of Pragmatic Competence Edited by Linda Thompson Revisions of papers presented at a seminar hosted by the University of Durham School of Education in March 1996 Includes bibliographical references 1. Language acquisition. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Pragmatics. I. Thompson, Linda P118.C468 1997 401'.93dc21
97-6560
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-394-X (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7SJ. USA: 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007, USA. Canada: OISE, 712 Gordon Baker Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2H 3R7. Australia: P.O. Box 586, Artamon, NSW 2064, Australia. South Africa: PO Box 1080, Northcliffe 2115, Johannesburg, South Africa. Copyright © 1997 Linda Thompson and the authors of individual articles. This book is also available as Vol. 3, No. 1 of Current Issues in Language and Society. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter.
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Contents Editorial Linda Thompson The Development of Pragmatic Competence: Past Findings and Future Directions for Research Linda Thompson Who Do You Think You Are?': Four Children's Sociolinguistic Strategies in the Negotiation of Self Alison Sealey Story Voices: The Use of Reported Speech in 10-12-year-olds' Spontaneous Narratives Janet Maybin Discourse Context and the Development of Metaphor in Children Lynne Cameron Children Constructing Dramatic Contexts Peter Millward Metaphor, Play and Drama: The Role of the Symbolic in the Development of Sociolinguistic Competence Zazie Todd The Development of Sociolinguistic Strategies: Implications for Children with Speech and Language Impairments Amanda Hampshire Debate
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Editorial Linda Thompson School of Education, University of Durham, Leazes Road, Durham DH 1 1TA In March 1996 the University of Durham, School of Education hosted a two day seminar on Child Language. Four researchers, Lynne Cameron from the University of Leeds, my colleague Peter Millward from the University of Durham, Janet Maybin from the Open University and Alison Sealey from Warwick were all invited to present papers on their current research into language development in the middle years of childhood. The unifying theme of these papers is that they all focus on the social dimension of children's talk. This is a particularly appropriate theme for a journal devoted to Current Issues in Language & Society because it develops a theme that has become an established interest amongst social scientists, namely, the links between social structures and individual action. Anthony Giddens for example, describes it as structuration. The seminar was attended by a group of some twenty individuals, who all shared an interest in the theme. Drawn from a variety of disciplines including sociology, theology, linguistics and psychology the group comprised teachers, teacher trainers as well as speech therapists and others who work with children in a professional capacity. This variety of views, interests and backgrounds made for lively discussions and exchange of ideas. We hope that some of that vitality has been captured in the papers presented in this volume. The contributions from Alison Sealey, Janet Maybin, Lynne Cameron and Peter Millward are all based on the papers presented at the seminar, although, in all cases there has been revision and refinement of the originals. The volume begins with my own paper on 'The Development of Pragmatic Competence' in children. I hope that this paper will provide an overview to previous work in the field. It is intended as a framework for understanding the subsequent papers and discussions. I hope that it will provide those who are new to the study of children's sociolinguistic competence with an introduction to the field. The aim was to provide an accessible and succinct overview to the main work already undertaken. I would like to think that it may whet the intellectual appetite of those who are new to this field of study. Alison Sealey's paper 'Who Do You Think You Are?' presents data from four children aged 8 and 9 years. She uses their casual conversations with their friends and family to explore the ways in which they negotiate social identities. She suggests three connected dimensions of identity: the individual self; the immediately situated social actor and the person who functions within a context of wider social relations. Janet Maybin develops the links between individual's utterances and social contexts in her paper, 'Story Voices'. She presents a Labovian analysis of children's spontaneous narratives to demonstrate the links that 10-12year-olds make with stories and conversations from previous contexts to make their meanings.
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Lynne Cameron's paper focuses on a specific feature of language, namely metaphor. She uses data collected from the classroom to illustrate children's developing understanding of metaphor and to suggest a theory of metaphor development which is pertinent to all who are interested in teaching children. Peter Millward has also collected data from the classroom to demonstrate the ways in which children develop narratives to construct dramatic, make-believe contexts. He describes the ways in which the children depend upon conventional rules from their everyday lives when they create these contexts. He concludes that dramatic experience connects directly with everyday experience. The last two papers in the volume expand on points from the discussions that took place over the two days of the seminar. Zazie Todd's paper, 'Metaphor, Play and Drama', makes links between the papers presented by Lynne Cameron and Peter Millward. She demonstrates that metaphor can arise from pretend or symbolic play. Her paper includes a specific discussion of the nature of autism, a condition marked by the absence of both symbolic play and metaphor. She explores the ways in which children's capacity for mental representation can affect other aspects of development. Amanda Hampshire's paper, 'The Development of Sociolinguistic Strategies', also explores the significance of children's talk for those who work with children in a professional capacity. Although she writes from her experience as a speech therapist, her suggested strategies for developing children's language are equally appropriate for all children and not just those with speech impairments. After each paper was presented there followed a substantial period of discussion. This has become established as a unique feature of the Language & Society seminars and this journal. Hence the volume concludes with a summary of the deliberations that took place. Five recurring themes emerged from the debate: children's developing identity; children's narratives; children creating contexts through language; the use of metaphor in the classroom; and methodological issues associated with collecting and analysing children's spontaneous language. This debate is presented in the final paper in this volume. Finally, I should like to say how pleased (and indeed surprised) I have been at the interest that has been expressed in this aspect of children's language development before, during and since the seminar. We hope that this volume has contributed to this interest, and we should be happy to receive news and views from other researchers working in this field.
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The Development of Pragmatic Competence: Past Findings and Future Directions for Research Linda Thompson School of Education, University of Durham, Leazes Road, Durham DH1 1TA The aim of this paper is to provide an informed background to the descriptions and discussions of child language that appear in this volume. Some of the background will be familiar to many readers, indeed so ingrained in our present understandings of the field of child language development that we take it all for granted. It has become what linguists call intuitive knowledge. The selected descriptions serve as a reminder of the complex processes involved in learning a language. The paper presents a framework for describing and understanding children's developing pragmatic competence and accompanying sociolinguistic strategies. Descriptions of children's communicative competence is not of course a new field of study, although there is a feeling in some quarters that they have maybe suffered from neglect in recent years. The starting point for the paper is previous work in the field. Presenting the findings from previous research can never be entirely comprehensive but it is an inevitable necessity when researchers from different subject backgrounds meet together for interdisciplinary debate. Those attending the seminar (and hopefully our readers) work in a wide range of academic disciplines including: anthropology, linguistics, psychology; as well as the professional fields of speech therapy, teaching and teacher education. Thus the background to the study of children's developing sociolinguistic strategies presented here draws from, and addresses, these wide ranging interests and concerns. I take as my starting point an extract from an episode of a television programme that made me start thinking about how people learn to communicate with each other. A recently repeated episode of 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century', the 1970s science fiction programme, portrayed the following communicative event. Two robots, one named Bleepy and the other Kryton (I do not know how to spell these names and the Radio Times did not help!) meet up together at the end of the programme after another successful venture. Mission accomplished, the programme ends with the following dialogue: Bleepy: Kryton: Bleepy: Kryton: Bleepy: Kryton: Bleepy: Kryton:
Well done kid give me five Give me five does not register Okay put it there Put it there is insufficient information Let's shake on it Shake on it is not a programmed command Well done Kryton Why, thank you sir
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Inherent in this exchange are all the indicators, features and elements of pragmatic competence: a knowledge of the structure and forms of language; a range of vocabulary, register, and formulaic exchanges; and knowing how to behave in specific social contexts. It is not sufficient to be able to speak the language grammatically, lexically and phonologically. Being communicatively competent requires combining social competence with linguistic competence. One needs an understanding of other people's linguistic and social behaviour(s); an awareness of the speakers' relative status, the roles and relationships they represent and an understanding of the cultural significance of these. This exchange between Bleepy and Kryton not only demonstrates a range of sociolinguistic styles of 'congratulating', but it also serves to highlight the complexity of understanding, and learning to understand, what is really meant by these (and similar) utterances. Bleepy is not only congratulating Kryton on the 'mission accomplished' he wants to do this by shaking hands, appropriate accompanying behaviour between some people in some cultural contexts. Bleepy is unsuccessful because he is not understood by Kryton, who has been programmed for a different set of stylistic interactions and role-status relationships. Being communicative competent means being able to understand the significance of even minor changes in these prosaic aspects of other people's talk, and then being able to respond appropriately. Whether or not computer scientists have yet been able to describe naturally occurring language adequately for Kryton to communicate competently in this situation in the 1990s, is not certain. What is clear is, that back in the 1970s the complexity of learning language and appropriate social behaviour was recognised, not only by researchers but also by television script writers. This exchange between Bleepy and Kryton (which is incidentally more engaging in the simulated machine voices of the programme) illustrates the central facets of pragmatic competence. These are: (1) a knowledge of the structure of the language and the permissible range of uses (the lexis, syntax, phonology etc.), (2) a knowledge of the rules that govern appropriate social behaviour in specific contexts, (3) a knowledge of a world shared with others and one's place within it, (4) an ability to understand the language and social behaviour of others. To recognise what is appropriate and what is not, and the ability to respond and participate accordingly. In this sense, pragmatic competence requires being able to speak and behave appropriately, and being able to understand what others say and do. It requires being able to understand and interpret the language and behaviour of other people. This is what children are learning when they learn their first language and this is what we mean when we talk of children learning a language. They are engaged in a complex task. Language learning has not always been understood and described in this way. Earlier descriptions of child language did not always attempt to include aspects of context and the social consequences of an individual's utterances in their descriptions. Instead, they have sometimes focused on discrete aspects of
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individual utterances, choosing to ignore the full complexity inherent in social dimension of the interactions. This approach to descriptions of child language is referred to by Giles & Coupland (1991: 1) as 'language without social context'. While these narrower descriptions of child language were under way, other interesting work was also being published in the related fields of linguistics and philosophy of language. Generally speaking, it is possible to chart these parallel but separate developments in the following chronological way. Although decade divisions should be regarded as no more than indicative, they do illustrate representative trends within the field of language study which have had some influence on the descriptions of child language. 1950s Focus on discrete aspects of language production e.g. grammatical structure, phonological features of utterance 1960s Auditory processing (input theorists) Speech Act Theory 1970s Discourse Analysis Speech Act Theory 1980s Text Analysis Generic descriptions of texts 1990s Critical Language Awareness Corpus Linguistics In summary, the progress in descriptions of child language can be characterised as a gradual shift away from descriptions of discrete features of utterance, towards descriptions of language in context. Studies of child language have drawn on the theoretical frameworks established within disciplines as diverse as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology and philosophy. This makes for a rich diversification of descriptions and methodological approaches. Table 1 outlines the main influences in the field of child language study this century. It is by no means comprehensive but includes the most influential names and demonstrates trends (particular foci and aspects of the descriptions) across the decades. Those named are by no means the only significant influences on descriptions of language use. However, their work has been included in this overview because of their enduring influence. From these fields and descriptions have emerged a wealth of information about the nature of children's developing strategies for interacting and communicating with those around them. The next section will outline some of the more established frameworks, from a range of disciplines, that have influenced descriptions of child language. We begin with what we think we know. Familiar Frameworks In outlining the theoretical influences on their work, researchers reveal not only their value systems but also their professional preferences. As researchers we are concerned with descriptions of language learning that are socially motivated and those which are driven by the speaker's desire to communicate. If people use language for realising social situations, then the context exchanges are central to linguistic descriptions. The familiar frameworks that have
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Table 1 An overview of key influences on descriptions of socially situated language use Fields Pre-1950 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990Boissevain (1974) Anthropology Malinowski Barnes (1923) (1954) Philosophy Austin (1962) Searle (1975) Psychology Clarke (1979) Bruner (1975) Donaldson (1978) Sociolinguistics Barnes Searle (1969) Bourdieu (1972) Milroy (1980) Fairclough (1954) Labov (1972) Ochs & Schieffelin (1990) Hymes (1972) (1983) Gumperz (1976) Romaine (1984) Sinclair & Coulthard Saville-Troike (1975) (1982) McTear (1985) Linguistics Firth (1953) Pike (1967) Fillmore (1979) Chomsky Halliday (1975, (1957) 1978)
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influenced descriptions of children's language that appear here are therefore those which are predominantly socially orientated descriptions. These include the school established as Systemic Linguistics with its origins in the works of the anthropologist Malinowski, and the linguistics of Firth and Halliday (amongst others). Malinowski and Firth both view language as realising social acts within the context of situations and cultures. Malinowski's (1923/66: 310) view is that language performs specific functions in the lives of a society's members in the following ways: (1) Language realises actions, (2) Language expresses social and emotional functions, (3) Language realises phatic communication whereby members of that society create 'ties of union' through the exchange of greeting. For Malinowski (1923/66:307) 'a statement spoken in real time is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered . . . the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation'. Malinowski's (1923/66: 310-11) description of how a fishing activity unfolds contextually as a social process is now established as a cornerstone of sociolinguistic description. Through his description, Malinowski reveals this patterning, firstly, by showing how a social activity unfolds as a generic structure, and secondly, by outlining how register (language) choices are made in each structural element of the social activity (or genre). Malinowski's description is now a framework for describing language and other social contexts. It demonstrates this in a number of ways: • by showing the participants' orientations to the relevant institutions and objects in the text (the Field); • by revealing the relations between participants (the Tenor); and • by demonstrating how communication channels (Mode or register choice) are selected at each structural element of the genre. At each stage in the activity the choices made by the participants are acknowledged as 'linguistic consequences'. In this way language can be seen to be social action. Since Malinowski, the conceptualisation of context of situation has been developed and elaborated by Firth (1968) who suggests that meaning is created at two complementary levels: the contextual and the linguistic. The study of the relations between these two levels is regarded by Firth (1968: 27) as the study of semantics. His view, outlined in The Tongues of Men (1937/64), is that as speakers, we go through life, developing a 'bundle of personae' and that we are continually learning new language or registers appropriate for these identities. In other words, we are learning how to mean as these personae. Entering new social settings requires learning new social roles and different relationships. Our personae or identities are continually evolving and as speakers we continue to develop our individual linguistic repertoires in order to communicate effectively within an ever widening range of social contexts. Firth (1937/64) describes language as a function of what he terms 'situation' and 'set' in the following way: language behaviour may not only be observed in the actual context of
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situation on any specific occasion, but may be regarded as manifestations of the 'sets' which the speakers bring to the situation. We carry our 'sets' about with us. By the time we reach adult life, our 'sets' have done a great deal of recording, and tune themselves automatically to the various types of situation we live in. They are very selective. (Firth, 1937/64: 93) Firth's view is related to frames, schema and script theory. Schema The term schema was originally used by Bartlett (1932) to describe organisational or contextual structures. Schema are important because they describe how people anticipate social events, situations and indeed other people and their behaviour, in terms of their previous experience(s) of similar contexts, events and situations. For example, on the basis of the experience of the first day at school, children construct expectations about subsequent experience of life at school. As individuals we construct schema for all aspects of our daily lives. Some constructs are highly individualised while others are more general semantic maps of common events and contexts. These schemata or structures of expectation (Tannen, 1979) encourage anticipation of future events and nurture an individual's expectations of likelihood, based on previous experiences of similar or dissimilar events. These developing expectations include personal beliefs and value systems; as well as assumptions and expectations about a variety of things, people, places, roles and responsibilities including what to say and how to behave appropriately in a range of social contexts. For example, after only a short time in school, children become aware of the specific behaviour expected of children at school, they quickly learn to become pupils (Willes, 1983). Schema also play an important role in guiding individual's behaviour in situations that require highly regulated and ritualised patterns of behaviour, for example, doctor-patient encounters, pupil-teacher interactions, telephone conversations, and service encounters like waiter/waitress-customer interactions. These situations, like all language situations, are bound by the norms of behaviour specific to the culture and society in which they occur. They are culture bound and context dependent. However, what is appropriate behaviour between participants in one context may not necessarily be appropriate to a different context even with the same participants. For example, the same group of children would be expected to behave differently even within the school setting, for instance, acceptable playground behaviour would not necessarily be acceptable classroom behaviour even between the same group of people. Frames Framing is an established feature of discourse. The notion of interactive frames was first explored by Bateson (1972). The term has also been used by discourse analysts (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Tannen & Wallat, 1982) to show the ways in which people signal significant developments during conversation. Some frames are highly individualised, others serve as markers of specific speech communities and become ways of signalling affinity.
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Scripts The concept of scripts emerged from attempts by computer scientists to create programs capable of understanding human language. Scripts account for the cognitive connections made by individuals to construct a semantic map, or personal understanding of particular words or events. In everyday conversations these connections are made at the intuitive level of language use, and individuals remain unaware of the processes in which they are engaged. Schank & Abelson (1977) defined scripts as 'a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation'. Frames, scripts and schema are important sets of knowledge for children to learn. They include the social dimension of language use and stress the interdependence of language use and social behaviour. Together frames, scripts and schema are rule-governed behaviours that focus on social cognition as a central aspect of language learning. These descriptions of socially situated language learning emphasise the complex nature of learning a language. When children learn to use language in social situations they are not merely learning new ways of behaving, they are actually learning new ways of being. They are actively involved in developing their own individual bundle of personae. Although the focus of the discussion throughout this volume is the development of pragmatic competence and the accompanying sociolinguistic strategies in childhood, the reality is that this can only be part of a much broader picture. The development of sociolinguistic strategies is best understood as a life long process. One possible difference between sociolinguistic development in childhood and later life, is that during childhood the learning may be a less conscious activity. The important point to be emphasised is that language, and the social contexts which exchanges create, should not be viewed as separate, or separable, from the each other. Language and social context are interdependent and mutually influential. Learning frames, scripts and schema begins in infancy with our first interpersonal encounters and experiences, and continues throughout adulthood. Viewed in this way, it is possible see the developmental aspects of pragmatic competence, and to view it as a lifelong process in which we are always engaged. As we evolve new personae, being a pupil, parent, professional; a friend, lover, spouse, shopper etc., we expand our personal linguistic repertoires to meet the social and linguistic demands of these new roles and relationships. We are learning new ways of being. Continuing to build on the Malinowskian-Firthian descriptions of language, Halliday (1973, 1975) reinforces the interdependence of language and context when he proposes the formulation of language as social semiotic. This presents language as functioning as an expression of, and a metaphor for, the social processes which it creates and the social contexts in which it occurs. Inherent in this description is the notion of language as a dynamic process which not only facilitates and supports social encounters but which actually creates those contexts. Within this description, learning a new language requires understanding how everyday social encounters are organised linguistically within a specific (speech) community. Semiotically speaking, all social contexts consist of a construct of potential meanings. Discourse (exchanges between people) allows for a negotiated exchange of meanings in interpersonal contacts in social
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contexts. Discourse creates the social context(s) and thus creates the potential for individuals to exchange meanings and create personal encounters. Through the description of language as social semiotic it is possible to regard language as the means through which people create social contexts and personal encounters. The description of language as social semiotic assumes particular significance in descriptions of child language learning. While a child is learning a language, other significant learning is taking place simultaneously. Through the medium of language the child is constructing an internal and external reality to which the coterie of significant others (those with whom interaction is taking place) are contributors (c.f. Halliday, 1975). For Halliday (1978: 1) 'the construal of reality is inseparable from the construal of the semantic system in which the reality is coded'. Halliday (1975: 120) states that learning a language and learning the culture are interdependent: 'a child constructs a reality for him/herself largely through language, but it is also in the more fundamental sense that language is part of this reality. The linguistic system is part of the social system. Neither can be learned without the other.' Therefore a child learning a language needs to learn more than merely the lexis, the phonological and syntax that govern the particular language system which is being learned. The child learning a language must also learn the rules of appropriate social behaviour. This is communicative competence, it was defined by Hymes (1972: 277) as knowing 'when to speak, when not to, what to talk about and with whom, when, and in what manner to interact.' However, communicative or pragmatic competence cannot be fully understood through the study of any one individual's language. Although the individual remains the locus of language use, the study of pragmatic competence requires understanding the social contexts of the language used and making links between the social contexts of the interactions and the actual utterances of the speakers. Prophetically, Firth (1953: 173) predicted this when he stated that: 'a normal complete act of speech, is a pattern of group behaviour in which two or more persons participate by means of common verbalisations of the common situational context, and of the experiential contexts of the participants'. Although it is difficult to decide whether there is still agreement with his view that 'group behaviour is a pattern without clearly defined boundaries' (Firth, 1953: 173), Barth (1969) for example, would argue differently, Firth's general point that 'speech made an end of the individual', that 'speech habits are established links with fellow participants,' and that 'it is impossible to draw a boundary around individuals who are participants in the same exchange', remains sound. This interdependence of speakers, mutuality, and the negotiated construal of meanings are key elements in children's developing pragmatic competence. However, it is suggested here that it is possible to study the individual speaker's contribution(s) to the on-going discourse. While not detracting from the notion that pragmatic competence is a collective activity, the individual's sociolinguistic strategies, individual's utterances, or the means whereby individual discourse participants contribute to an exchange, can and should be analysed in the quest for greater understanding of developing competence. It is through the study of these sociolinguistic strategies, as manifest in specific aspects of utterance(s), that we can come to understand more about the development of pragmatic competence. We can isolate individual speaker's utterances for the purpose of
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Page 11 analysis but we cannot fully understand these utterances without reference to the dual influences of the context and the other participant(s). This leads us to another framework that has been influential in the descriptions of language. A descriptive model presented by Hymes (1967: 8-28) in the Ethnography of Speaking, outlines the component parts of language use within a speech community as Speech Community, Speech Situation, Speech Event, Speech Act, Speech Style and Ways of Speaking. Hymes (1968) describes aspects of speech acts in a mnemonic SPEAKING which outlines what it means to be communicatively competent: S etting and scene P articipants E nds (goals and outcomes) A ct sequence (the order of the message form and its content) K ey (tone, manner for example, mocking) I nstrumentalities (channels and forms of speech, for example, writing or spoken) N orms of interaction (discourse rules of silence, interruption etc.) G enres The significance of combining Halliday's description of child language learning as social-semiotic with Hymes' notion of communicative competence is that it allows for the possibility whereby each discourse participant (including children) can play an instrumental role in the negotiated construction of the social context in which they are participating. As such, the individual speakers are potentially empowered with discourse rights in the particular social contexts in which they are participants. These discourse rights can be realised as social rights and are open to negotiation. This introduces features such as power, social status, value systems and negotiating strategies into all interactions and inter-personal exchanges. These are to be regarded as an important dimension to descriptions of children's developing pragmatic competence and language learning. The descriptive frameworks of Halliday and Hymes contrast with Chomsky's (1969) description of child language development as the emergence of a finite number of grammatical rules, innately determined as part of what he termed a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) from which a infinite number of sentences could be generated. The impact of this approach is to draw attention away from language as a social instrument of communication. However, others have sought to reconcile child language learning with social learning. In 1984 Suzanne Romaine wrote The Language of Children and Adolescents: The Acquisition of Communicative Competence, a book which set out a description of language development that contrasts sharply with the established Chomskyan description. Romaine (1984: xi) outlined children's acquisition of communicative competence, defined as focusing on 'the range of sociolinguistic skills that children need to learn in order to be able to interpret and produce utterances, which are not only grammatical but also appropriate within particular contexts'. In conclusion she notes that neither innate universals, nor social environment can alone account for the development of communicative competence. Her view is that children's developing communicative competence
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emerges as a continuing interaction between the social and the grammatical, as an ongoing and continuous process which begins before the child starts to speak, and which is never actually complete. More recently, Foster (1990) proposed a model of communicative competence that embraces psychological aspects of learning. Her model of communicative competence, presented diagrammatically (Foster, 1990: 187) suggests that communicative competence represents both innate and acquired knowledge. She suggests that communicative competence reaches the adult stage when the innate component of the grammar is no longer refined by new input, and when the strategies no longer result in new generalisations and rules. However, there are some limitations to this view. This definition suggests that there comes a point when an individual's language is no longer open to new influences and hence, no longer dynamic. It is a view that is contentious and which contradicts some key aspects of pragmatic competence. There is always the danger that the particular focus of any one study will be (by nature) so specific that it cannot be all embracing. In the introduction to her book Romaine (1984: 3) warns that 'since there are some aspects of competence which are more purely linguistic than others, it is important not to conflate a sociolinguistic theory of communicative competence and a more general socio-psychological theory of action or human behaviour'. She cites Saville-Troike (1982:6) who outlines a wide range of linguistic, interactional and cultural phenomena which need to be accounted for in an adequate model of communicative competence. This includes three elements: linguistic knowledge, interactional skills and cultural knowledge. They are defined as follows: (1) Linguistic Knowledge (a) verbal elements (b) non-verbal elements (c) patterns or elements in particular speech events (d) range of possible variants (in all elements and their organisation (e) meaning of variants in particular situations (2) Interactional Skills (a) perception of salient features in communicative situations (b) selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations, (roles and relationshipsrules for the use of speech) (c) norms of interaction and interpretation (d) strategies for achieving goals (3) Cultural Knowledge (a) social structures (b) values and attitudes (c) cognitive maps and schemas (d) enculturation processes (transmission of knowledge and skills) Saville-Troike (1982:213) further stresses the central role which language plays in the enculturation of children. She notes that language is: (1) part of the cultural body of knowledge, attitudes and skills which are transmitted from one generation to the next,
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(2) a primary (though not the only) medium through which other aspects of culture are transmitted, (3) a tool which children use to explore and manipulate the social environment and establish their status and role relationships within it. Romaine emphasises that communicative competence continues to develop well into adulthood as one learns how to do new things with language. Yet despite its importance, she concludes that little is actually known about the extremes of communicative competence, the minimal and outer limits for competence in a language, or indeed the differences that exist between individual speakers in their language ability and behaviour. Fluency is one aspect of conversational competence described by Fillmore (1979) who identifies the need to distinguish between how people speak their language(s) and how well they speak it (my emphases). He uses the term maximally gifted speaker to describe a person who can fulfil all of the following four abilities: (1) to talk at length, fill time with talk (he cites the professional example of a disc jockey but maybe there are other professionals, for example, teachers who also seem able to do this), (2) to talk in coherent, reasoned and semantically dense sentences, mastering the syntactic/semantic resources of the language, (3) to have appropriate things to say in a wide range of contexts, (4) to be creative and imaginative in language use including telling jokes, punning, varying styles and creating metaphors. Fluency is an important feature of children's developing conversational competence. However, Fillmore's criteria for assessment were intended to describe adult, not children's language. We shall return the notion of children's developing fluency in the next section which outlines future directions for research into children's developing fluency. Ochs & Schieffelin (1983) combined their research backgrounds and interests in anthropology and linguistics to write Acquiring Conversational Competence. The volume presents a number of empirical studies that focus on specific features of the acquisition of communicative competence through children's participation in conversational exchanges. The description includes specific aspects of conversational competence including repetition and non-verbal features of interactions such as eye direction and gaze. Although the volume concentrates on aspects of socialisation, in particular interactions between adult care-givers and children, the methodological frameworks presented lay significant foundations for subsequent descriptive studies of the social and pragmatic aspects of children learning language. Their findings (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1983: 183) that two children aged 2.6 and 3.6 were able to sustain interaction over twenty-five turns, paying detailed attention to each other's utterances, reinforce the notion of young children as communicatively competent, with an emerging sense of metalinguistic awareness and pragmatic phenomena even at this very early age. Their work is significant because it is based on descriptions of children's naturally occurring language. The ethnographic tradition of descriptions of child language using naturally occurring discourse data, gathered in everyday contexts is
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continued by McTear (1985) who develops our understanding of children's conversational competence with a description of two children, his daughter, Siobhan and her friend, Heather. The aim of this section was to provide an overview of existing frameworks of socially situated descriptions of children's language that can provide the theoretical foundation for future work. A Summary of Socially Situated Descriptions of Child Language. In order to save time and energy it is useful to know what research has already been undertaken in the field of children's developing pragmatic competence. This section provides a brief outline of the relevant research to date, together with a summary of the more influential findings to date. Listed below are some descriptions of children's developing pragmatic competence and the sociolinguistic strategies that have already been investigated and reported. These include: • ritual insults (Labov, 1972), • trick or treat routines (Berko-Gleason & Weintraub, 1976), • the pragmatics of particular speech acts including requests for action (Ervin-Tripp, 1977), • speech events including narrating (Kernan, 1977), • disputes (Brenneis & Lein, 1977), • ability to adopt their talk to younger listeners (Shatz & Gelman, 1973; Andersen & Johnson, 1973; Berko-Gleason, 1973; Sachs & Devin, 1976; Gelman & Shatz, 1977), • the range of children's speech acts (Dore, 1977), • peer interaction (Garvey, 1975 & Ervin-Tripp, 1979), • non-verbal behaviour (Bates et al., 1979; Ochs, 1979a), • talk of trades (Mishler, 1979), • self-repairs (Clark &Andersen, 1979; Clark, 1978; Zakharova, 1973; Leopald, 1949; McTear, 1985), • stylistic features of conversation (Crystal & Davy, 1969,1975; Ochs, 1979b), • role-taking ability including taking account of the listener's perspective, • children's use of the use of definite and indefinite articles (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), • dealing with requests for clarification from interlocutors (Corsaro, 1977; Garvey, 1977b, 1979; McTear, 1985), • comprehension of clarification requests (Gallaher, 1981; Langford, 1981), • gaps between turns (Lieberman & Garvey, 1977; Garvey & Berninger, 1981), • overlaps (Garvey & Berninger, 1981; Jamison, 1981), • sequential ordering of clarification requests (Schegloff et al., 1977: 367), • correcting lexical items (McTear, 1985), • correcting interlocutor's pronunciation (McTear, 1985), • turn-taking (Jefferson, 1973; Sacks et al., 1974; McTear, 1985), • self-repairs to pronunciation (McTear, 1985), • self-repairs to grammar (McTear, 1985).
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This volume now adds to this established body of literature on children's developing communicative strategies. Future Directions for Research To complement the work that has already been undertaken in this field of child language development, I should now like to outline a direction for future research into descriptions of socially situated descriptions of children's language. It is hoped that as a result of this CILS Seminar held in Durham (March, 1996) and this publication, other research will be added to this list. There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved and this final section will set out some ideas for future research and development. It is important to begin with what we already have, and to consider future research within three broad methodological considerations: data collection and analysis, and the formulation of a socially orientated theory of pragmatic competence. Data collection is always a time consuming activity. This is particularly true when collecting data from children in their everyday lives. It is especially so for longitudinal studies of child language development that demand data be collected over long periods of time, sometimes amounting to several years. There seems, therefore, a strong case for a more collaborative approach to child language research. Mindful of the axiom 'more data do not a paradigm create' researchers need to be more aware of existing data sets and to contrive ways of sharing these with the view of exposing them to a wider variety of methods of analysis and scrutiny. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is currently in the process of establishing a data bank of qualitative data. This should provide a rich resource for those interested in this field of research. One way forward is to establish opportunities and ways whereby researchers can share data sets, and work towards developing coding systems that can be more widely used and therefore more widely understood. Through the sharing of data, researchers will be able to apply a wider range of coding systems to common data sets, and to analysis and interpretations from different methodological perspectives, and thereby gains fresh insights. However, ways of doing this require both trust and transparency within research groups, and between researchers. It also requires transparency of research design, more detailed information about the ways in which the data are gathered, about the informants who provide the data, and the social contexts where the data are collected. Of course, there is the possibility that this may place extra demands on child language researchers and it may not be reasonable or possible for them to be open to more rigorous scrutiny than is expected of other scholars. However, given the complex and diverse range of disciplines that contribute to descriptions of children's developing pragmatic competence, it seems essential that greater collaboration and complementarity be fostered within our research community. While considering the future, it is also important to acknowledge that there are also specific aspects of pragmatic competence that need to be explored more fully. In particular I refer to those features which can give insight into the developmental features that are unique to children learning language. There is no reason to assume that pragmatic competence in children is merely a pale imitation of the adult. Fillmore's description of adult fluency could be used as a
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framework for identifying the prevailing features of the communicatively competent child and to identify those features of fluency in children's conversations that differ from those of adult interactions. It may be that the maximally gifted child meets Fillmore's four criteria for fluency but in ways which are different from the maximally gifted adult. Descriptions derived from children's naturally occurring language across a range of different social contexts, with a range of interlocutors, could contribute to a more comprehensive description of child language abilities that identified the parameters of child utterances from the maximally gifted to the minimally competent. Analysis of data gathered from these contexts could focus on discrete aspects of conversational fluency, for example framing or fluency. A descriptive framework of this kind, would be of use to professionals working with young children. Finally, the importance of context is now accepted as a dimension in influencing and even determining the range of a speaker's pragmatic competence. To date, the focus has been on identifying features of the immediate context which influences utterances. Increasingly we are becoming aware that communication between individuals is sensitive to (and even constrained) by the contexts which it creates. Furthermore, there is an increasing literature on the social consequences of utterances. We need now to understand better the ways in which personal interactions in local contexts are embedded within other contexts. We now need to understand how immediate, local, regional and wider contexts can influence the specific features of what people say, how they say it and how they behave. Figure 1 is a proposed framework of contexts that influence social and language development. It is based on Bronfenbrenner's (1977, 1979) hierarchy of contexts that influence human behaviour. Extending his idea, five levels of contextual influences that impact on social and language behaviour are described. Level 5, the highest and most official order of social organisation, is the international context. It includes social, political and economic influences, as well as legislative frameworks. International contexts can be of supra-state status, for example pan-national groupings like the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the European Community and increasingly trans-national commercial companies (like Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Microsoft and Shell). Level 4 is the national or nation state context. The national context can be seen to influence both the topic of people's conversations and the variety of language they speak. The national level of influence is to be found in the varieties of language, for example, Singaporean English, Australian English, American English are all established varieties of language that have unique identifying features. Matters of national interest regularly become topics of conversation, like for example, the National Lottery or sporting events. Level 3 is the regional context, this assumes different degrees of significance. Some varieties of English are considered inappropriate in some contexts for some language functions. Standard English is accorded prestige, and its status is reinforced by its inclusion in the National Curriculum for schools as the only variety of English to be prescribed for to all pupils. Children (and indeed adults) have to learn the social and language behaviour appropriate to a variety of formal
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Figure 1 A proposed framework of influences on social and linguistic development and informal interactions that they may need to negotiate within institutions. This will include individuals interacting in a variety of roles. The individual speaker's orientation towards the relevant institutions (for example, the school, doctor's surgery, bank, police station, work place, etc.) corresponds to what systemic linguists term, the field. Level 2 represents institutional settings or domains. These could include contexts such as the home, the classroom, the playground and other specific settings that demand particular codes of language or registers. Level 1 represents the individual, the locus of language. This level includes the personal roles that participants assume within the social networks and relationships which they form. Children within their various social and functional networks assume particular roles, for example the role of friend, sibling, or pupil. Each role requires different types of language use (sets or registers) and appropriate accompanying behaviour. The roles within the social networks and the relationships between individual participants, correspond to what systemic linguists term, the tenor. These five levels proposed and defined here are probably only a small proportion of the contexts that influence language and social development. They represent the range of potential influences on individual speakers. Future research could focus on prosaic features of utterance and demonstrate more precisely the influences of these wider social and cultural contexts on an individual's precise utterances in specific interactions. Descriptions of language use need to be rigorous and maintain linguistic respectability. Loose categorisations or spurious links between utterance and social behaviour will not be helpful. In summary the view of child language development presented here is one of
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language which creates social contexts and carries social consequences. Learning to be communicatively competent requires learning rules (of language and social behaviour, roles, responsibilities, rights and the place of others in our negotiated interactions). In order to be regarded as communicatively competent, children need to learn the sociolinguistic strategies for pragmatic competence within their own speech communities and within those other societal domains where they want or need to participate. A great deal is now understood about pragmatic competence but if we are to help children we need to know more about what they can do, in order to help them to learn more. The papers in this volume provide examples from within this framework and demonstrate some of the ways in which children have already been seen to have achieved pragmatic competence through a range of sociolinguistic strategies. While each of the studies is interesting in its own right, together they contribute to our growing understanding of how young children learn to talk, and how through sophisticated linguistic strategies, they learn to negotiate their place in social contexts through their contributions to the discourse. Bibliography and References Anderson, E.G. and Johnson, C. (1973) Modifications in the speech of an eight-year-old to younger children. Stanford Occasional Papers in Linguistics 3, 149-60, Stanford University. Austin, J. (1962) How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. M. Holquist (ed.), C. Emerson and M. Holquist (trans). Austin: University of Texas Press. Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little Brown. Bartlett, G. (1932) Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bates, E. (1976) Language and Context: The Acquisition of Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1979) The Emergence of Symbols. New York: Academic Press. Bates, E., Camaioni, L. and Volterra, V. (1979) The acquisition of performatives prior to speech. In E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Development Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Bateson, G. (1972) A theory of plan and phantasy. In G. Bateson (ed.) Steps to an Ecology of Mind (pp. 150-67). New York: Chandler. Berko-Gleason, J. (1973) Code switching in children's language. In T.E. Moore (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language. New York: Academic Press. Berko-Gleason, J. and Weintraub, S. (1976) The acquisition of routines in child language. Language in Society 5, 129-36. Brenneis, D. and Lein, L. (1977) You fruithead: A sociolinguistic approach to children's disputes. In S. Ervin-Tripp and C. Mitchell-Kernan (eds) Child Discourse. New York: Academic Press. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977) Towards an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist 32, 513-31. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1975) The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of Child Language 2 (1), 1-19. Cazden, C. (1972) Child Language and Education. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Chomsky, Noam (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. (1969) The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, E.V. (1978) Awareness of language: Some evidence from what children say and do. In A. Sinclair, R.J. Jarvella and W.J.M. Levelt (eds) The Child's Conception of Language. New York: Springer. Clark, E.V. and Andersen, E.S. (1979) Spontaneous repairs: Awareness in the process of
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acquiring language. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 16. Stanford University. Corsaro, W.A. (1977) The clarification request as a feature of adult-interactive styles with young children. Language in Society 6, 183-207. (1979) 'We're friends, right?': Children's use of access rituals in a nursery school. Language in Society 8, 315-36. Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1969) Investigating English Style. London: Longman. (1975) Advanced Conversational English. London: Longman. Dore, J. (1977) Children's illocutionary acts. In R. Freedle (ed.) Discourse Comprehension and Production. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ervin-Tripp, S. (1977) 'Wait for me, roller-skate'. In S. Ervin-Tripp and C. Mitchell-Kernan (eds) Child Discourse. New York: Academic Press. (1979) Children's verbal turn-taking. In E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Fillmore, C. (1979) On Fluency. In C. Fillmore, D. Kempler and W. Wang (eds) Individual Differences in Language Learning and Language Behaviour (pp. 85-101). New York: Academic Press. Firth, J.R. (1937/64) The Tongues of Men. London: Longman. (1957) Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. London: Oxford University Press. (1968) Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski's views. In F.R. Palmer (ed.) Selected Papers of J. R. Firth 1952-59 (pp. 136-67). London and Harlow: Longman Green & Co. Fletcher, P. and Garman, M. (eds) (1986) Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fletcher, P. and McWhinney, B. (eds) (1995) The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Foster, Susan H., (1990) The Communicative Competence of Young Children. London: Longman. Gallagher, T.M. (1981) Contingent query sequences within adult-child discourse. Journal of Child Language 8, 51-62. Garvey, C. (1975) Requests and responses in children's speech. Journal of Child Language 2, 41-63. (1977b) The contingent query: A dependent act in conversation. In M. Lewis and L. Rosenblum (eds) The Origins of BehaviourVolume V: Interaction, Conversation, and the Development of Language. New York: Wiley. (1979) Contingent theories and their relations in discouse. In E. Ochs and B. Shieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Garvey, C. and Berninger, G. (1981) Timing and turn taking in children's conversations. Discourse Processes 4, 27-57. Gelman, R. and Shatz, M. (1977) Appropriate speech adjustments: The operation of conversational constraints on talk to twoyear-olds. In M. Lewis and L. Rosenblum (eds) Interaction, Conversation, and the Development of Language. New York: Wiley. Gumperz, J.J. (1982a) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (ed.) (1982b) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, H. and Coupland, N. (1991) Language: Contexts and Consequences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. (1973) Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. (1975) Learning How To Mean: Explorations in the Development of Child Language. London: Edward Arnold. (1978) Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Hymes, D. (1967) Models of interaction of language and social setting. Journal of Social Issues 33 (2), 8-28. (1968) The ethnography of speaking. In J. Fishman (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Language (pp. 99-139). The Hague: Mouton. (1972) On communicative competence. In J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Jamison, K. (1981) An analysis of overlapping in children's speech. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 5, 122-43. Jefferson, G. (1973) A case of precision timing in ordinary conversation: Overlapped tag-positioned address terms in closing sequences. Semiotica 9 (1), 47-96. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979) A Functional Approach to Child Language: A Study of Determiners and Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kernan, K. (1977) Semantic and expressive elaboration in children's narratives. In S. Ervin-Tripp and C. Mitchell-Kernan (eds) Child Discourse. New York: Academic Press. Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Langford, D. (1981) The clarification request sequence in conversation between mothers and their children. In P. French and M. MacLure (eds) Adult-Child Conversation. London: Croom Helm. Leopold, W.F. (1949) Speech Development of a Bilingual Child (Vol.4). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lieberman, A.F. and Garvey, C. (1977) Interpersonal pauses in pre-schoolers' verbal exchanges. Paper presented at Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans. Malinowski, B. (1923/66) The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (eds) The Meaning of Meaning (pp. 296-336). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1935/66) The Language of Magic and Gardening (Coral Garden and their Magic) (Vol.2). London: George Allen & Unwin. McTear, M. (1985) Children's Conversations. Oxford: Blackwell. Mishler, E. (1979) Wou' you trade cookies with the popcorn? Talk of trades among six-year-olds. In O. Garnica and M. King (eds) Language, Children and Society. Oxford: Pergamon. Ochs, E. (1979a) Transcription as theory. In E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. (1979b) Unplanned and planned discourse. In T. Givon (ed.) Syntax and Semantics (Vol.12). New York: Academic Press. Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B. (1983) Acquiring Conversational Competence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pike, Kenneth L. (1967) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour. The Hague: Mouton. Romaine, S. (1984) The Language of Children and Adolescents: The Acquisition of Communicative Competence. Oxford: Blackwell. Sachs, J. and Devin, J. (1976) Young children's use of age-appropriate speech styles in social interaction and role-playing. Journal of Child Language 3, 81-98. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., and Jefferson, G. (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50, 696-735. Saville-Troike, M. (1982) The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Schank, R. and Abelson, R. (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals & Understanding. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977) The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361-82. Scollon, R. (1979) A real early stage: An unzippered condensation of a dissertation on child language. In E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shatz, M. and Gelman, R. (1973) The development of communication skills: Modifications in the speech of young children as a function of listener. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38 (5). Slobin, D. (1978) A case study of early language awareness. In A. Sinclair, R.J. Jarvella and W.J.M. Levelt (eds) The Child's Conception of Language. New York: Springer. Tannen, D. (1979) What's in a frame? In R. O. Freedle (ed.) New Directions in Discourse Processing (Vol.2) (pp. 137-183). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
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Tannen, D. and Wallat, C. (1982) Interactive frames and structure schemes in interaction: Examples from a pediatric examination. Paper presented at Seminar on Natural Language Comprehension, St. Paul, Les Durances, France. Willes, M. (1983) Children Into Pupils. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zakharova, A.V. (1973) Acquisition of forms of grammatical case by preschool children. In C.A. Ferguson and D. Slobin (eds) Studies of Child Language Development. New York: Rhinehart and Winston.
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'Who do You Think You Are?': Four Children's Sociolinguistic Strategies in the Negotiation of Self Alison Sealey Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL Introduction This paper explores some of the ways in which four children, aged 8 to 9 years, negotiated social identities through the language they used in spontaneous, casual conversation with others. The children were equipped with compact portable tape-recorders for short periods, during which they recorded themselves in conversation with a range of people, predominantly friends and family members. The paper explores how transcripts of these conversations exhibit different aspects of the children as social 'selves'. It proposes that the children's talk can be analysed in relation to three connected dimensions of identity: the individual self, the immediately situated social actor and the person who functions within a context of wider social relations. Emma's Win on the Lottery The following extract of dialogue is presented as an instance of the complex negotiations with which the paper is concerned. It involves Emma, aged 9, at home on a Sunday morning with Jenny, her sister (aged 7). Emma has called next door and invited her friend Gemma (aged 10) to come round to play at her house. The three girls have gone upstairs so that Emma can show Gemma her 'display' of cuddly toys, and they have been chatting about the toys laid out on Emma's bed. Emma remembers a new toy Jenny has bought, and this apparently supplies an introduction to the topic of some money won in the national lottery. The extract is analysed to illustrate how Emma, in her talk with Gemma and Jenny, is simultaneously an individual self, a situated actor relating to those within her immediate social context, and a social being affected by structures and institutions which operate on a larger scale. 1 E: Jenny bought Ohwe wonwe won the lottery yesterday 2 G:Did you? 3 E: A tenner 4 G:Oh 5 E: [laughs] 6 J: And we got five pounds 7 E: We get five pounds each 8 G:[laughs] 9 J: We've got five pounds (in a sing-song voice, crowing, but quietly)
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10 E: Because Jenny chose the numbersa+and so she gets five and it 11 wouldn't be fair if I didn't get five so we got five each 12 G:Oh. {drops something} Oop sorry 13 J:
'cos I got five 'cos Dad's spending the money 14 on getting the lottery numbers 15 E: Oh if only you had told me I'd spend the money if I knew it was 16 going to win 17 J: Yeah but erm we're not allowed to 18 E: No but they can still give us the money 19 J: Who? 20 G:Mm I suppose so 21 J: You didn't even do a thing 22 E: [laughs] 23 J: I did. I chose the numbers {emphasis on I} 24 E: Gemma the lottery started on my birthday 25 G:Did it 26 E: Yep 27 G:Oh Erm 28 E: Look at this 29 J: You're a lottery girl aren't you Emma The extract can be analysed in various ways, of course. Generically, it is a report, introduced by Emma and extended by Jenny. Gemma provides an audience, using each of her contributions to maintain that position. Thus her 'did you?' functions as feedback for the story, with the minimal utterances 'mm', 'oh' and so on also providing back-channel support for the telling of the anecdote. In these terms, it has many features in common with an adult account of an incident shared among peers. In other ways, though, it is talk which is immediately recognisable as generated by children, and it provides some illustrative data about the children's negotiation of identities and relationships. Emma the Individual One of the ways in which the children, just like other speakers, define themselves is through the use of pronouns. The sisters are literally 'positioned' in space in their own home as members of the family which won the ten pounds. Emma's first use of 'we' could be read as denoting the family as a unified group to which she and Jenny belong and Gemma does not. The 'tenner' which was won was the total prize, presented at the beginning of the story as a single sum acquired by the family. However, Jenny's first contribution (L6) uses 'we' in a new sense: now it means only the two sisters. Jenny's modification to the story, explaining that they got 'five pounds' is ambiguous, and in clarifying that they 'each' received five pounds, Emma simultaneously distinguishes herself from Jenny. She elaborates on this distinction in Lines 10-11, when 'Jenny' becomes the third party in the account of events addressed to Gemma, repeating the grounds on which she and Jenny, separately, 'each' received half of the total. In Jenny's next contribution (L13), she realigns herself in stating her role alongside her father's in the sequence of events. Emma's response (L15) sets up a revised contrastive relationship between herself and Jenny. While the import of her claim
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that she would have spent the money herself is ambiguous (she uses an ironic intonation, suggesting scorn for Jenny's supposed foresight in choosing winning numbers), this statement repositions the girls in respect of their father. Emma echoes Jenny's formulation 'Dad's spending the money', but makes herself the subject in 'I'd spend the money' (L15). So now it is Emma who is connected to their father, until Jenny reminds her that she could not have done what he did. The 'we' in Line 17 may mean children in general or it may mean just the two sisters, but its effect is to place Emma back on a par with Jenny. Within the role of children, collectively, who are involved with the lottery enterprise, Jenny once more contrasts herself with Emma, distinguishing her as the 'you' who made no contribution (L21), and emphasising 'I' in Line 23. At this point (L24), Emma addresses herself to Gemma to make a point about the topic of the lottery which moves it on from the anecdote about the win. In this contribution she is again a distinctive individual, the only one who can claim a birthday on the day the lottery started. With little further encouragement from Gemma to prolong the discussion, in which she has played little substantive part, Emma seems ready now to move the topic on to something present in the room (a broken toy), but Jenny makes a final contribution to the lottery topic before there is a pause and the discussion moves on to toys and games. In Line 29, Jenny again addresses Emma as 'you', supporting and adding to her claim by offering her the designation of 'lottery girl'. Emma does not respond. In this dialogue, then, Emma is often an 'I'. Even this designation has more than one connotation, including the 'I' who has a particular date of birth, the 'I' who received five pounds, the 'I' of a brief fantasy where it is possible to buy one's own lottery tickets. Emma the Sister Emma is also included in more than one collective 'we'. She is part of her family unit and also one of the members of her particular generation within it. In this extract, she chooses a designation as the former (L1, L3) and is assigned a designation as the latter by Jenny (L6, L17). Emma is also designated as belonging to the collective group of 'children' in general. Jenny's reminder that there are restrictions on who can buy tickets assigns Emma to the category of those excluded from the adult world. Jenny's use of the formulation 'not allowed' (L17) positions them both in the category of those who are subject to constraints on what they may do. Emma's comment about 'fairness' (Lines 10-11) also has a childish ring. Parents' and teachers' discourse about learning to share, to take turns, to apologise for hurting or inconveniencing someone else, are aspects of the socialisation which promises to admit children, eventually, to an adult world of responsible interaction with others. However, children's appeals to this discourse of 'fairness' often seem to evoke an idealised social world where natural justice prevails and all must be seen to be equitable, at the very least among the children themselves, and particularly in respect of the individual who is making the claim. Like the utterance 'we're not allowed', 'it wouldn't be fair' carries an elliptical reference to the rules which are sometimes supposed to govern the children's experience.
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Emma the Lottery Girl Finally, the talk links Emma with the wider social world symbolised by the lottery: in reporting the win itself, in speculating about buying her own ticket and in making the link with her birthday. However, she appears as simultaneously inside this cultural club and excluded from it. She herself cannot participate, because of gambling laws, and the tenuous link with her birthday is not one which an adult would need to make. Jenny's final statement (L29) can also be read as including her in the adult world of the lottery, its use of 'lottery' as a premodifier for the 'girl' Emma is. However, the phrase may also be read as exclusionary. It is true that 'girl' is related to chronological age in ambiguous ways, but even when it is applied to adult women, as it may be in a phrase such as this, its connotations are often infantilising. This analysis of a brief conversation between Emma; her sister, Jenny; and friend, Gemma has illustrated the three dimensions of identity proposed at the outset: the specific, individual 'I'; the situated self who negotiates relationships which are sometimes more and sometimes less aligned with various others in her immediate circle; and the child member of wider social institutions and networks. The next section of the paper sketches out the idea of these dimensions of identity-through-language in a little more detail, although space does not allow a thorough exploration of the many ways in which this issue has been addressed in various disciplines. It is important to note that the three 'dimensions' proposed are not mutually exclusive, and indeed this first extract has illustrated that the perspectives identified are co-present in the dialogue and even within a single utterance. Dimensions of Identity in the Negotiation of Self. Accounts of the self which are influenced by psychology have traditionally stressed the individual as an isolated unit, presenting a version of childhood 'development' in which the human organism unfolds almost like a plant which contains within itself the blue-print for its maturation. In contrast to such accounts, the discursive turn in explanations of human subjectivity emphasises the emergent possibilities, for each individual, of the interactions with others which contribute to our sense of who we are. Through all kinds of social interactions, '. . . most of us will fashion a complex subjectivity from participation in many different discourses that tend mutually to illuminate one another' (Harré & Gillett, 1994: 25). The children as 'selves' were first presented to me in the context of this particular study through language, as a list of names supplied by their respective head teachers as possible informants for the research. At various times throughout the research, each child was spoken of (by themselves and others) in terms appropriate for a distinct individual. Only this individual child has this name and this specific life experience, unique to themselves. At the initial meeting with each family, for example, my questions about possible contexts in which recordings might be made inevitably led to an outline by the child, often with supporting additions from the parent(s), about the child's lifestyle and routines, and these accounts contributed to a discursive construction of an individuated self in respect of each of them.
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Speakers claim an individual identity for themselves through dialogue from early childhood onwards. Halliday (1982: 43) remarks on this in relation to the formation of the child self through the initial development of language competence: the shaping of the self through interaction with others is very much a language-mediated process. The child is enabled to offer to someone else that which is unique to himself, to make public his own individuality: and this in turn reinforces and creates this individuality. The role of discourse in the constitution of the self is acknowledged by Harré & Gillett (1994), who characterise discursive practiceengaging in verbal interaction with other human beingsas the use of a sign-system with rules. They point to the use of pronouns as a basic example of speakers' collaborative participation in this sign-rule-system, where the use of the 'I', is the means by which I constitute myself as a self, take responsibility for my utterances, separate my self from the selves of others. Simultaneously, though, 'I' am defined in relation to 'you' and to numerous other categories to which I may or may not belong. Immediately, then, an exploration of identity through a focus on the individual demands a broadening of perspective to include those with whom he or she is interacting. The 'emergent properties' of the relationship impact on the people involved in it. Many of the factors which play an important part in our sense of ourselves are contingent and arbitrary, and emerge only through our interactions with others. The children in the study were engaged in the symbolic construction of identities for themselves through the emergent properties of their linguistic interactions. Emma the lottery girl, Emma the daughter, Emma the older sisterthese are not fixed, essential identities, but they are ways of being Emma which emerge, and indeed can only emerge, as she interacts with those around her. Furthermore, the possibilities for individualswho we are and what we can dooperate in the context of various 'macro' social structures. These structures include the economic, political, legal and cultural 'technologies' which construct our everyday existence, in ways which are more or less negotiable depending on our positions within differentiated social hierarchies (see Mouzelis, 1995). Discourse itself contributes to the construction of identity at the 'macro' levels, because: the ways in which societies categorise and build identities for their members is [sic] a fundamental aspect of how they work, how power relations are imposed and exercised, how societies are reproduced and changed. (Fairclough, 1993:168) The fact that I had sought out these particular informants for this study (three boys and three girls) arose from an implicit assumption that 'eight and nine year old children' form a social category of sufficient homogeneity to warrant their selection as members of a meaningful group. This view is hardly idiosyncratic: to choose 'children' as a category of social actors is unremarkable. However, it is itself an example of one of the ways in which 'societies categorise and build identities for their members'. Children are structurally excluded from certain
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activities and discursively constructed as different from adults: many prescriptions and proscriptions about children's behaviour and experience are taken for granted because they apply to people within the socialand linguisticcategory of 'children'. Children, then, like other social actors, are neither free to negotiate from an infinite range of possible selves, nor yet so determined by a 'given' psychological identity or by their position in constrained social contexts that there is no room for negotiation. Some of the properties of the social interactions which form the data for this study are more negotiable than others. The further the children move from the immediate relationships in which they participate, the less malleable social relations prove to be: you can accept, reject or ignore your sister's designation of you as 'Emma the lottery girl', but you cannot, except in fantasy, have the identity of a nine year old child and actually buy a ticket. Thus, within each of the proposed dimensions of identity managed by the children in their talk, there are both inclusionary and exclusionary influences. There are aspects of the discourses in which they participate which are common to anyone who finds themselves in these social, historical and cultural contexts; but there are other features of the discourses which mark these subjects as children: as individuals, as participants in relationships, and as members of society, with the specific identity of 'child'. In the next section of the paper, further examples of these discursively managed dimensions of identity will be explored, drawing on the data from informal talk generated by Emma and three of the other children in the study, Leanne, Simon and Chris. The Individual Selves The topics of the conversations recorded by the children are wide-ranging. Some of the talk relates to the activities in hand (for example, a skipping game, peeling potatoes, playing football, travelling in the car), and some of it is less context-dependent, exploring relationships, ideas, planning for events in the future and so on. There are obviously numerous occasions where each of the children selects pronouns which identify themselves as an 'I', as one of 'us', or as not 'you' or 'them'. In addition to these as indicators of individual selfhood, there are also instances where the children make explicit some of their perceptions about who they are and what they are like. These utterances fall into different categories, one of which points to the changing nature of selfhood from the child's point of view. All of the children refer at some point on the tapes to their age, often in the context of a comparison with people of other ages, or with themselves at previous or future periods in their lives. The following are some examples. Emma, as she walks to school one morning with her friend Gemma, discusses the preparations her class have been making for Easter: E: G: E:
And an Easter Hat Parade. We all had to make an Easter hat. We made them in reception and we're too old for it [laughs] [laughs] But she still made us wear make one
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Chris, at the dining table with his parents and younger sister, turns the conversation to preparations for his ninth birthday and recalls previous parties. His father reminds him about the time a 'bouncy castle' was arranged for his party as a surprise: C: Mm. That's what I think that's what I'd been asking for earlier onin thein the year hadn't I CM: when you were five wasn't it. I can't remember whether you wanted it but you didn't I'm five now V: know <***> CM: I was six C: Simon engages a member of his church congregation, 17-year-old Luke, in conversation after the service, and tells him an anecdote about when he used to attend a mothers' and toddlers' group. Then he observes: 1 S:I don't think many people remember that far. [laughs] 2 L:No. It takes a good bit of memory to do that. Mind you 3 S:Mm 4 L:you haven't got to think as far back as many people have you 5 S:Pardon? 6 L:You haven't got to think as far back as m+ some people have you 7 S:[laughs] Yeah 8 L:Only six years [laughs] 9 S:S+ It seems longer but erm mm the time seems to go really fast 10L:Sue does. I remember when you were down there not down there 11 [laughs] 12S:[laughs] 13L:You weren't that far down but 14S:Mm. I remember when I was about down to my waist 15L:Someone could have given you a fishing rod and little hat and they 16 could have put you in the garden by the er 17S:[laughs] 18L:pond you know just like a gnome [laughs] 19S:[laughs] Just give me some quick freeze. Or perhaps a coat of cement 20 [laughs] 21L:Yeah. That's it 22S:And a fishing rod like that Some of the references to the children's former selves, in extracts like these, are very like the observations one would make about a third party. Emma's 'we made them in Reception and we're too old for it' contains a suggestion that the referents for each of the two 'we's are not identical. Chris's seeking of confirmation about what he had asked for and when would not be out of place in a question about what his younger sister, or some other third person, had said and done. This phenomenon is perhaps most noticeable in Simon's good-humoured collaborative fantasy about how, when he was younger and smaller, he could have been used as a garden gnome. Note particularly the construction in
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Line 14: if each 'I' and 'my' have the same referent, the utterance cannot make literal sense. Like the children themselves, however, we accept that the individual self is a changing entity, especially in childhood. In addition to these most obvious and explicit references to the self as classified by age, the children sometimes comment, in various kinds of conversation, on other aspects of their personalities, skills and abilities. Chris, in a telephone conversation with his friend Ryan, remarks on his ability with hand-held computer games: C: had R: C: R: C:
Erm [sighs] [....] when I went to my friend's house erm Dylan he gave me this little game. You know that dinosaur game I Yeah erm well he gave me one of them except it's smaller and it's a different game Oh Mm. And erm it's good. I'm good at it now. Gave it me last Monday
This example also includes an implication of change: one learns to be good at a practical skill and expects to improve over time. At other times, however, the children's descriptions of themselves suggest a more fixed notion of identity. In the following group of extracts, Leanne is at her grandmother's house. She has negotiated with her 'Nan' that she will stay there for tea, as will her cousin Angela (aged 12), and they begin to help to prepare some potatoes. Her grandmother (LGM) is working out how many are needed. LGM: How many do you want Leanne? L: I'll er I'll eat as muchasas muchas you give me Nan. I don't really care. I just eatwhatwhat's put in front of me. I'm not fussy In Leanne's indications about the ways she sees herself, her discursive style is often markedly more adult-sounding than that of other children in the study, and one reason for this is that she sometimes appears to be quoting an adult utteranceperhaps about herself, or perhaps newly applying to herself a description she has heard adults use about other people. In this respect, Leanne's style exemplifies the phenomenon described by Maybin (1994: 148), where, 'one of the ways in which children construct personhood . . . is through the reporting and taking on of other people's voices'. One dimension of the un-childlike 'feel' of statements of Leanne's such as 'I'm not fussy' is that they suggest a continuing state of being, an ability to describe what one is like with some certainty. This effect is created in part through the use of verbs in the simple present tense. In the following extract (which begins with the clarification of a misheard remark), this is exemplified as, on a more prosaic level, Leanne discusses peeling potatoes with her cousin: L: . . . You said just you get what? A: No I said I can't peel with L: Oh. No I can't peel with knives either. I take chunks out A: So do I L: I take really big chunks out of the potatoes I do. That's why Nan brought this so I could use it when I peel the potatoes for her and so she could use it to find it easier
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The Situated Social Actors As I have said, the discursive self even at the individual level may emerge from the interactions with others in which the children are involved. There are sometimes contrasts between the children's reflections as presented above, on themselves as distinct from others, and the examples in the transcripts of their negotiations of their place in relation to others. In other cases, the 'individual' level and the 'situated' level are so interlinked as to be indistinguishable. The following exchange between Leanne and her cousin Angela is a good example. Their conversation has turned to a discussion of the research in which Leanne is involved, with me, and Angela wants to know if she could perhaps make some recordings too. Leanne says that Angela would have to ask me, and Angela asks about me: 1 A:Al+ er Is Alison nice? 2 L: Alison Sealey. She's okay 3 A:Eh? 4 L: But I don't really know her that much do I. I mean I've o- I've only 5 met her about three times. Summat like that anyway. Probably about 6 five times <maybe>. And 7 A:A few times maybe about five 8 L: [laughs] Well you don't really judge a person do you li- when you9 you need I think with me I need to get to know people before I can 10 like judge 11A:Mm 12L: on them a bit more. Like see her every day. Like now I know that 13 you're a snotty cow because I see you every day Here, again, Leanne offers a description of an aspect of what she is like. She gives Angela a partial answer to her question about me (conscious, no doubt, that I will hear the recording), but passes on to a generalisation about assessing people's characters. In doing so, she simultaneously makes a statement about what other people can be like, about her own stanceagain presented as relatively fixedand about where her way of making such judgements fits into a more general norm. In Lines 8-9, there are several false starts as her choice of pronoun changes. The first 'you' is apparently used in the sense of the generic 'one', positioning Leanne well inside the group of people-at-large who know to be cautious before forming opinions about others. Midway through the utterance she changes stance, and specifies how she, as an individual, prefers to reserve judgement. Finally, in Lines 12-13, she playfully returns the discussion to the relationship between herself and her cousin and interlocutor, and they subsequently exchange further insults. While each of these extracts depicts Leanne as a unique 'I', with identifiable characteristics, they also situate her in relation to others. In describing herself in explicit ways, she suggests that some of her characteristics confer membership of social groups, such as people who are not fussy about food, people who reserve judgement on the characters of others and so on. Such mobility across the dimensions of identity in the negotiations is characteristic of many of the exchanges which the children manage in the recordings. Grouping and regroup-
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ing of the selves involved in interactions, such as those illustrated in the account of the lottery win at the beginning of this paper, occur repeatedly in various social contexts. Another characteristic of some parts of the tapes is the kind of collaborative talk identified by Coates (1989) and Maybin (1994: 147), where 'meanings do not seem to be generated within one mind and then communicated to another through talk; rather, they are collaboratively and interactionally constructed between people'. Both these writers have commented specifically on the collaborative construction of meaning. In relation to examples of speakers particularly womencompleting each other's utterances, Coates (1989: 119-120) observes: 'this seems to be a clear example of the primacy of text rather than speaker', when 'the joint working out of a group point of view takes precedence over individual assertions'. However, in my own study, even where the function of some of the informal talk is apparently primarily phatic, rather than meaning-seeking, as it were, there are examples of 'duetting', such as repetitions and completions of an interlocutor's contributions. An inference which could be drawn from this is that the children are sometimes using their informal talk to construct themselves as components of a collective 'we'. Instead of a 'primacy of text rather than speaker', this may illustrate a (temporary) primacy of collective rather than individual identity. The following extract, which illustrates this kind of duetting, is from Chris's dinner-table talk with his younger sister. She has been promised strawberries for dessert and announces that she is looking for them in the kitchen. Their mother mishears her and asks what she means by 'strawberries on the choo choo train'. This nonsense idea is taken up and developed by both children over several utterances: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V: C: V:
You can laugh but you can't do that [laughs] But - y+ - you can do the strawberries on the choo choo train Strawberries on the choo choo train [laughs] [laughs] [laughs] It's not getting s± Eyeballs on the choo choo train. [laughs] [laughs] Eyeballs on the choo choo train [laughs] Why don't you say something like [....] Mummy on the choo choo train [laughs] [laughs] - Why don't you say - why don't you say something like Tom's on the Inter-City or something Mummy on the choo choo train [laughs] Tom's on the Inter-City Tom's on the Inter-City
Here, Chris almost seems to be speaking 'through' his sister, encouraging her to repeat what has made them both laugh, suggesting what she 'can' say, suggesting
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what she might say ('why don't you say . . .'), and they both repeat, modify and complete each other's utterances. Another example, where it is hard to say who 'owns' the utterance, is from Emma's discussion with Gemma, as they walk to school, about Emma having had to make an Easter hat, even though she is really too old now for this to be an appropriate task: G: E: G: E: G: E:
Well you've got a straw hat I get a posh straw hat with a with yellow ribbon on it. Yeah. And little posh chickens
Later in the same recording, the two girls proclaim themselves members of 'the nutters club', alluding to the 'nutter calling card' and singing a nonsense song in unison: 'We're nutters and violets are red and as long as polka-dotted rabbits have bad breath we'll be nutters to the end of a giraffe's neck'. These are only a few examples of the various ways in which the children negotiate, through their informal talk, a collective identity which situates them in relation to those present. There are also, inevitably, instances of disassociation from those around them, and of renegotiations where conflict threatens. Here, Emma and Jenny are playing in the garden where their grandmother (EG) is sitting. Jenny proposes what Emma might say, and Emma, although she responds to the prompt, claims a separate interpretation for herself: J: Emma E: What? J: Are you going to tell Grandma about [....] E: The what? What? - Ho+ [....] - hopscotch. What about it? EG: <What about it?> E: I just drew a hopscotch on the floor with chalk EG: Oh. Yeah. I don't think you should have done it [....] there and up there though do you E: Yeah. Well EG: It makes the place look very er E: Jenny did it up there. - I - I measured this one out here Leanne, playing a skipping game with two of her cousins, begins by mocking Marcie's nil score, but when a dispute escalates she assumes a peace-making role: L: M: A: L: M: A: M: A: M:
Marcie got none. [laughs] None Please <me have another go> No No Angela had another go I never had a go You had another go I never. I didn't <***> You two had chances
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A: M: A: L:
No I never. I Yes you did I couldn't get my foot right Yous two stop arguing man
In many ways, the individual self and the situated self merge and re-emerge throughout the dialogues. The final dimension of identity proposed in the paper is the person who is contextualised in the networks and institutions of wider social relations, and this is the topic of the next section. The Person in the Wider Social World In the analysis of the extract at the beginning of this paper, it was suggested that one of the identities claimed by Emma was as a national lottery winner. As a child of her times, she is affected by this national institution ('we won the lottery'), associated with it ('you're a lottery girl aren't you Emma') and excluded from it ('we're not allowed'). Distributed throughout the dialogues recorded by all the children are direct references to various pieces of apparatus which belong to the wider social world: money, football, films, television programmes and so on. Such phenomena are created and maintained primarily by adults for adults, but the children's worlds are not separate from them. Sometimes, the spoken references to these things serve to transform them into components of a distinctly childish discourse, although the reverse may happen too. One example of this is Chris's substitution of 'inter-city' for 'choo-choo train' in the extract quoted above. At other times, the children's references to them, and incorporation of them into their conversations, suggest a potential access to the adult worlds from which they originate. The most direct versions of this temporary crossing over into adult scenarios are the role playing dialogues generated by the children. Both Chris and Emma, for example, pretended to be footballers at points in their tapes. On one occasion, Chris organises his young friends, ascribing to them the identity of whole teams: 'Thomas you're Liverpool, Tom you're Man United'. As their game progresses, Chris comments on the play, chanting 'nilnil' and 'two-one' with the intonation of spectating crowds. Emma plays with a large ball in the garden and provides a running commentary in which she explicitly names herself as playing various roles: E: And Emma has the ball Oh and it's hand ball. The game's changed And the game's changed to basketball J: Mum E: Emma gets the ball she's bouncing it and she hits the barbecue. Oh. And it went into the swimming pool which is full of dirt J: <***> E: And then she kicks it from behind - and and - and she missed. And she gets it and she throws it up throws it up and [....] she missed. Never mind. And [....] [makes high-pitched engine noise] It turned into car racing. And Emma Mansell is in the car and she's going to get into second place. Yes. And she they're neck and neck. [gasps] Er what's that other one called. Never mind. And Emma's in the front. [makes Formula One noises] J: <***>
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E: J: E: J: E:
And she's coming close to the finish line and [....] [claps] she won. Yes. And Emma Mansell wins another erm gold medal No I did And now back to the match c+ Oh not the match the car commentators No. No. What<***> Brilliant match. Brilliant match. That's it from us. Bye
Here, features of the real environment (the ball, the barbecue) are incorporated into the fantasy world where the child is various adults, speaking in their style, sometimes almost literally with their 'voice'. Leanne, Chris and Emma all adopted assumed accents at various points in the talk they recorded. (Simon did not do so on tape, although this does not mean that it did not happen.) Sometimes, the model for these voices is an identifiable adultChris is sometimes the television wrestler Hulk Hogan, for example, and Emma, in rejecting the suggestion that she and her friends might play blind man's buff, mimics the way her mother would 'tell us off', saying 'it's far too dangerous', with exaggerated intonation. In other instances, the assumed voice is unspecific, an imitated accent, often American. Leanne, for example, discusses films and pop music with Angela and sings in an American style, both to accompany records and also by herself. These allusions to other (adult) people who inhabit the wider culture, through the adoption of their 'voices', is not quite the same as the sustained role play which the children sometimes enacted, but there is no clear demarcation between role play, the direct quotation of specific others' speech, the loose assumption of another's 'voice', and the use of the words of others, where: the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's concrete contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. (Bakhtin, 1981: 2934) The children in the study 'took' (in Bakhtin's sense) the words of many others, including other children, but there were also many traces and echoes in what they said of distinctly adult discourses. Many of the children's individual utterances, if taken out of context, would be indistinguishable from those of adults. This in itself illustrates the fluidity of the discourse styles and negotiation of selves which the children manage constantly as they interact with others. Conclusion This paper has explored examples of children engaging in the linguistic interactions through which they negotiate social identities. The linguistic 'tacking' by means of which they navigate their interactions (albeit not at a conscious level) is impressive in its sophistication. It provides an indication of the sociolinguistic competence which the children display as they negotiate identities for themselves as individuals, as siblings, sons and daughters, friends and as generic children. Even the meanings implied by these categories are not static, as the past and the future echo through interactions involving each child.
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The fact that they are children locates them within hierarchically structured social relations. As social actors, they are not as favourably placed as adults in relation to the social technologies which provide the contexts for everyday interactions, and this too is a dimension of who they are. Acknowledgements The research described in this paper, 'The role of spontaneous spoken language in the social relationships of six 8 and 9-year-old children' was funded by the Nuffield Foundation under the Social Science Small Grants Scheme (SOC/100/903). Transcription of the tapes was financed by COBUILD. I am very grateful to the children and their families for their participation; all names have been changed. I should like to thank Bob Carter for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of the paper which helped to clarify several of the ideas explored, and I am also grateful to Ron Carter, Fred Inglis, Hilary Minns, Sylvia Winchester and the participants at the CILS seminar held at the University of Durham (March, 1996) for their helpful comments and questions. References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. M. Holquist (ed.) C. Emerson and M. Holquist (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Coates, J. (1989) Gossip revisited. In J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds) Women in their Speech Communities. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (1993 edn) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell. Halliday, M.A.K. (1982) Relevant models of language. In B. Wade (ed.) Language Perspectives. London: Heinemann. Harré, R. and Gillett, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. London: Sage. Maybin, J. (1994) Children's voices: Talk, knowledge and identity. In D. Graddol, J. Maybin and B. Stierer (eds) Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mouzelis, N. (1995) Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies. London: Routledge. Appendix Transcription conventions guess at unclear word or utterance {text} additional information <***> wholly unrecoverable section text overlapping parts of utterances [text] non verbal contribution + word begun but not completed [....] unexpected pause
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Story Voices: The Use of Reported Speech in 10-12-year-olds' Spontaneous Narratives. Janet Maybin Centre for Language and Communications, School of Education, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA Five spontaneous narratives from 10-12-year-olds' conversations are analysed to show how they contribute to the children's ongoing construction of knowledge and identity. A Labovian analysis of the evaluative function of narrative is supplemented with ethnographic research and Bakhtin and Volosinov's work, to demonstrate more dynamic and complex processes in children's talk. It is argued that the children's use of reported speech drives both the referential and the evaluative functions of their narratives. The children's reproduction and framing of other people's and their own voices enables them to explore the different perspectives of characters within the story, and also to comment on and evaluate these perspectives. The stories are orientated towards listeners and previous conversational turns, and they also set up intertextual connections with other stories and other conversations, to create additional connotations and layers of meaning. Children's narratives revisit particular themes and preoccupations, for example toughness and gentleness, their emerging new gendered identities and relationships, and their changing relations with parents and other authority figures. In this sense, a narrrative may be seen as a turn in a more meta-level 'long conversation', carried on among children across different interactions and settings. Introduction Children's talk, like adults', is full of stories. There is now a substantial literature on the role of conversational story-telling in accounting for actions and experience, relating to others and exploring cultural values (e.g. Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972; Polanyi, 1985; Bruner, 1986; Bauman, 1986; Riesmann, 1993). Research with children and adolescents suggests that conversational stories and anecdotes are important in learning culturally appropriate ways to experience and express emotion (Miller et al., 1990, 1992). They are also used to pursue and negotiate relationships with others, and to establish positions within social groups (Goodwin, 1990; Shuman, 1986). Why are informal, spontaneous stories so widely used by both children and adults for such a variety of purposes? Research would suggest that narrative structures are particularly rich in their potential for simultaneously and economically fulfilling a number of social and cognitive functions. Labov's seminal analysis (1972) of the referential and evaluative functions of conversational narratives shows that stories refer to or recapitulate experience through temporally sequenced narrative clauses, but that at the same time they are shaped, not just by the past events they recount, but also by the narrator's reasons for choosing to tell a story, in other words the point (or evaluation) they want to make. The evaluative functions of stories are particularly interesting to researchers trying to under-
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stand how children use talk to represent and question their experience, and in this article I shall focus on the processes of evaluation in five spontaneous narratives from 10-12-year-olds, and on the ways in which these children are using stories to negotiate social knowledge and identity, as they move from childhood into adolescence. I shall argue that while Labov's framework offers an important starting point for analysis, we need a greater theorising of the relationship between the story text and the context in which it is produced, in order to capture the more complex and dynamic processes of evaluation in children's stories. In my discussion of the narratives, below, I shall draw additionally on ideas from the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1977; Heath, 1983) and Russian socio-historical theory (Volosinov, 1973; Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) to focus on a centrally important, but under-researched, evaluative feature in children's stories: their animation of other people's voices through reported speech. Because Labov's research was carried out on stories elicited in interviews specifically designed for that purpose, he has a fairly limited concept of conversational context. He asked his informants (male adolescent and adult Afro-Americans) about dangerous situations or fights they had experienced, and suggests that the evaluative function of the stories they told him was to portray the danger as impressively as possible, and to highlight their own courage. He analyses the expression of this evaluation through looking inside the story text. Thus the narrator may add an explanation or additional description to highlight a particular point (external evaluation), put evaluative comments into the mouths of characters within the narrative (embedded evaluation), or use a variety of syntactic structures within the story, e.g. intensifiers, comparisons, explanations (internal evaluation). Most naturally occurring conversational narratives, however, are not self-contained in this way; they are usually told between people who have longer and more complex conversational histories than Labov and his informants. Spontaneous narratives are interpreted in the light of what has been said in the conversation leading up to the story, links they make with stories and conversations from other contexts, and the relationship between the conversationalists. These links and relationships are also an important part of the narrative's evaluative function. The way people make meaning together over time is recursive and iterative, as they revisit topics and experiences on different occasions, in a series of what might be called 'long conversations', which return again and again to particular themes and concerns. So a story makes its point not just through the kind of textual evaluative strategies which Labov describes, but also through the web of interconnections which the narrative invokes. Because of the narrator's sensitivity to what has gone before in the conversation, and to their listeners, understanding the meaning of a story is socially negotiated and to some extent provisional. The use of reported speech in the stories of 10-12-year-olds in my research has particularly interesting evaluative functions which go well beyond Labov's recognition that narrators can put evaluative comments into their characters' mouths. Almost all the children's stories used reconstructed dialogue and as well as bringing the stories alive, these dialogues enable the narrator to play on ambiguity and explore a variety of evaluative perspectives simultaneously. In
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reproducing the voices of different characters, children can briefly take on and try out that character's viewpoint, and in many stories this is important as children are often trying to understand the differences between opposing perspectives. These characters' voices, however, are framed by the narrator in specific ways, as I shall describe in more detail below, and on a different level this also conveys an evaluative attitude towards what they are saying. The potential relationships between the voices invoked in a story, and between these voices and the narrator's, provides a particularly rich site for children's exploration of meaning. In my discussion of the spontaneous narratives, I shall start by examining how their referential and evaluative functions are expressed in the story texts (as Labov suggests), but go on to look in more detail at reported speech, and at the intricate links between these stories and their conversational and more general social contexts. The narratives come from data on children's language practices collected by continuous tape recordings of informal talk across the school day, in two different schools over a four week period, and from 40-60 minute informal interview conversations with 34 children in friendship pairs. The catchment areas of both schools were white, working class council estates, some miles north of London. The research was not planned to focus on narrative, and the stories were not elicited. They emerged spontaneously in the conversations between children, and in the conversations between pairs of children and myself during the interviews. Fifty of these stories have been analysed using Labov's schema (1972), and further examined in relation to their use of reported speech, and their intertextual conversational links. The five stories below illustrate points about structure, context and reported speech which occur across the sample. Karen: Giving Voice to Family Discord Labov (1972) found that the conversational stories he collected from adults and adolescents tended to have a recurring five section structure. They started with a summary of what they were about (the abstract); followed by a comment about the setting (orientation); then an account of the main action (complication); how it all finally worked out (resolution); and sometimes a comment linking from the story back into the ongoing conversation (coda). The first story, from my interview with Karen (11 years) and her friend Helen (10), demonstrates the structural pattern identified by Labov and how it becomes adapted within a specific conversational context. It also shows the way in which the evaluative functions of stories are explored through the characters' voices, and through links with the surrounding conversation. Karen had been telling me about all the animals she used to have at home, 'three different houses ago', as she put it. At various times the family had thirty-six dogs, parrots, cockateels, budgies, ferrets, rabbits, cats, hamsters, and guinea-pigs. Karen explained that they moved house because her parents split up and divorced, but then got back together again (although they had not legally remarried). The conversation moved back to the family pets, and I asked Karen if both her parents liked animals, (see Appendix for transcription conventions).
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Story 1: Selling Tiny Janet: Are they both keen on animals? Karen: Well my dad isn't that keen, my mum is. [A] We used to have this little dog like this called Tiny and my dad sold her. [O] Well we were going to try and get rid of some of our dogs, one day a man come and he said, he (dad) was showing him all the other dogs and he didn't show him Tiny [C] and he goes, 'Who lives in that kennel there?' and he (dad) goes, 'Oh, that's my wife's dog, Tiny' and he took one look at her and he said, 'I'll have her, yes', he goes, 'I want her' and my dad goes, 'Er, alright'. So he sold it. Just before the man went I went into my house and I goes, 'Mum, Dad's sold Tiny!' and she just burst into tears and so I come running up going, 'Dad, if you sell Tiny Mum will never talk to you ever again!'. [R]He goes, 'Sorry, you can't sell (buy) that' and I took off, rushed into the house with Tiny and my mum just, her face, she was crying her eyes out, as soon as she saw her, she goes, 'Give me her here now' [r] and when he come in she goes, 'You horrible thing, I never, told you I'd never sell Tiny as long as I live!' And then Helen: / As long as it's lived as well Karen: [c] And then my dad let one of the dogs out, well he let Tiny out and he thought this other dog would be playful with her, and she killed it. The use of 'this', signalling a deictic switch away from the time and place of the current conversation into the story is common in the opening of children's stories (see also the next three below), and Karen's phrase 'like this' accompanied holding up her hands to show just how small Tiny actually was. Labov points out that, in contrast with the grammatically simple abstract, the orientation section (framed here by 'well', signalling the start of the main story) is often the most grammatically complicated, because the teller wants to sketch out what was happening before, or alongside the main narrative events. However, as Karen had previously explained to me about her family's large number of dogs, she can pass fairly quickly over this section. The 'complication' section starts where the man wants to buy Tiny, and Karen's dad finally agrees. The 'complication' includes the significant actions in a story, often accompanied by reported speech and switches in and out of the present tense ('he goes', 'I come running up'). This use of what has been termed the 'conversational historic present' tense in stories (Wolfson, 1982) is generally believed to make events seem more real and immediate, drawing the listener in to become closely involved in the story. Wolfson suggests that the switch itself, from past to present tense, catches the audience's attention, to ensure that they listen carefully to the most important part of the action. So far I have been keeping close to Labov's description of the various narrative sections. I would suggest however that, because of where it occurs in the conversation, this story can be read at a number of different levels. In answer to my immediate question, it demonstrates that Karen's Dad is less keen on animals than her mother. He almost sells a favourite pet but the situation is resolved by
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Karen's intervention and her father's retraction of the sale 'Sorry, you can't buy that' [R]. But the story is also about the relationship between Karen's parents and Karen's role in the family, explored through the 'Tiny' incident. The story thus develops comments she made earlier in the interview about her parents' divorce and subsequent reconciliation, and the 'resolution' of the story on this level, where 'Selling Tiny' is really about the misunderstandings and dynamics of her parents' relationship, seems to occur later, when Karen returns Tiny to her mother [r]. In addition to shaping the structure of the story (reducing the need for an orientation section, suggesting a different point of narrative resolution), the preceding conversation has semantic links with the contents; we hear the account in the light of Karen's earlier comments about her parents, and this also affects the overall evaluative functions of the story, which are to do both with answering my question and with reflecting on her parents' relationship. Evaluation, as Labov suggests, is achieved in a number of different ways within the narration. Karen uses intensifiers such as repetition and quantifiers: 'never', 'ever' (repeated) and 'as long as I live' to describe the strength of Karen's mother's attachment to Tiny. The whole first half of the story, concerning her father's interaction with the dog-buyer, is told rapidly in a fairly flat voice and contrasts strongly with the drama and anguish of the second half, where Karen builds up the tension through her choice of verbs (burst into tears, running, took off, rushed, crying), and through the accumulation of clauses (underlined below) delaying the point where her mother finally realises that Tiny has not been sold after all (I took off, rushed into the house with Tiny and my mum just, her face, she was crying her eyes out, as soon as she saw her, she goes 'Give me her here now'). From the point where Karen rushes into the house to tell her mother what is happening, the characters' voices become more and more dramatic and agitated on the tape. Karen gives her dad a gruff, matter of fact voice, which contrasts with the exaggeratedly hysterical, tearful voice she creates for her mother. Her construction of their voices is central to Karen's portrayal of the characters of her father and mother, her mother's devastation at the sale of Tiny, and her father's thoughtlessness. I would suggest that the way in which Karen creates her mother's voice, with its exaggerated agitation, conveys a slight distancing of her own evaluation of events, from her mother's; as Volosinov (1973:115) points out, 'Reported speech is speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time speech about speech, utterance about utterance'. The listener hears, behind Karen's mother's hysteria, Karen the narrator sympathising, but slightly detached. After all, in the story Karen's father does not initially show Tiny to the dog-buyer, and it is only when he is put on the spot that he agrees to sell the dog. Immediately Karen explains her mother's feelings, her father revokes the sale. Even though her father is responsible for Tiny's subsequent death, this is through ignorance rather than intention: 'he thought this other dog would be playful with her'. We can understand Karen's mother's point of view, but Karen seems to be suggesting that her father is not entirely blameworthy. The voices which Karen creates for her parents, and the words she puts into their mouths are therefore not just a device for increasing dramatic involvement, but are also vital to the evaluative functions of the story. Taking on
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her father's voice and then her mother's provides a way for Karen to explore, albeit briefly, her father's perspective, and her mother's feelings, as well as commenting on them through the way in which she presents the voices. Although Karen's account of events in her story (the referential function) is clear, the evaluative significance of these is more ambiguous. Is her father stupid, uncaring, or malicious? Is her mother badly treated by Karen's father, or unreasonably hysterical? There even appears to be a contradiction between the initial abstract 'We used to have this little dog like this called Tiny and my dad sold her', and the contents of the story. Children often made evaluative references back to a previous story in the subsequent conversation, and following the account about Tiny, Karen told a another story about a dog aged 15 that had survived three strokes, but was badly injured falling from an upstairs window, and had to be put down. She commented 'even my dad was crying that day', thus somewhat softening the impression of him in 'Selling Tiny'. Rather than providing a definitive evaluative comment on an event, I would suggest that Karen's story is just one of many conversational narratives through which she visits and revisits the puzzle of her parents' relationship; of their different evaluative perspectives; and of how she can relate to what is going on. The story's function and meaning for Karen, and probably also for Helen, are related not just to its immediate context in the interview conversation with me, but also to other conversations and other contexts where Karen has told stories with a similar theme. Geoffrey and Lee: Telling Kindness I have shown that Karen tells her story in response to a question from me about whether both her parents like animals, but that the story also comments on an earlier related theme in the conversation: her parents' relationship. Subsequent comments that Karen makes later in the interview also refer back to the themes of the story, and its evaluative content. In addition to referring backwards and forwards to themes in their own talk, children's stories also make structural and thematic links with the stories of others. In the interview from which Story 2 is taken, Lee (11 years) and Geoffrey (10) talked extensively to me about their interest in animals and birds. Lee had just told a lengthy and complicated account about a local stray black cat adopted by his family, when Geoffrey offered the following story of his own: Story 2: The stray cat Geoff: [A] There was this black stray cat who started coming into our garden for two nights Lee: Is it really scruffy? Geoff: [O] Yea, and it didn't have no collar. It had no collar, and it had white bits at the paws, right on the paws and it had little white under there, [C] and every night when it came into our garden we thought 'Oh, we got no food for it, all we got is dog food', cause we've only got a dog, and I said to my mum 'Mum, do you want me to go to the shops or will it be closed?' [R] and she said 'I think it'll be closed, it's nine o'clock!' (laughter)
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Janet: So what did you do? Geoff: I thought 'Em, do cats like bread?' cause I had a few sandwiches, and my mum said 'That one might, you never know', [r] so I gave it a bit of bread and it eat a bit, it eat a bit, only a little bit (yea) Lee: And my Uncle Edward and my Auntie Jennie and the others give my mum a cockateel ... Geoffrey's use of deixis in 'this black stray cat' signals that he has a story to tell and Lee's question 'Is it really scruffy?' both invites Geoffrey to tell the story, and also helps to shape the content of his orientation section, which concentrates wholly on the appearance of the cat (including the lack of collar which suggests it is a stray), so that the boys can determine whether Geoffrey's cat is the same as Lee's stray. The complicating action is as usual conveyed mainly through dialogue, either spoken or as a way of expressing thought (Geoffrey uses the past tense throughoutperhaps because this is not an action-packed-crisis type of story). The story initially finishes at [R] (Resolution) with Lee's and my laughter, which confirms the humour of Geoffrey's mum's comment. This would suggest that the cat goes hungry. However, in response to my question 'So what did you do?' Geoffrey provides a continuation of the complicating action, and a new resolution, with a particularly striking rhythmic repetition: I gave it a bit of bread, and it eat a bit, it eat a bit, only a little bit In the story Geoffrey tentatively 'tells' himself as a gentle person, initially deflecting the evaluative point onto the humour of his own lack of sense of time, but then focusing on the dilemma of how to find food for the cat. Twelve minutes later in the interview, this theme of responding to animals in distress is taken up again by Lee. I have included the remarks which occurred just before and after Lee's story, to show the immediate conversational context. Story 3: The bird's nest Geoff: Since I started drawing birds, like in Miss Clark's class I had to draw that parrot, right the big parrot about that big Lee: / I drew the man, didn't I? Geoff: Since I drew that, whenever I started getting bored, I went upstairs, got my paper, and drew a couple of birds, (yes), tiny ones (yes). I used, whenever I went over me uncle's house, I used to take a couple of pieces of paper and some felts like and draw all these birds parrot Lee: /[O] Yesterday I was on, I was walking with my mum, we walked past this bush, and there was this nest [C] and it was fallen down on the floor, and I goes 'Mum look, there's a nest on the floor', and I goes 'Mum can I go and have a look at it?' and I went over there and there was four baby chicks in it, little chicks, I think they were willow warbler and my mum said 'Climb up and put them back in the tree', so and I had some bread, eaten some bread, so I fed it bits of bread,
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cause she had to go to the phone, and em she waited [R] and I put it back up in the tree and its mum's with it now. [c]Yea, cause someone, someone had pulled the nest down, out of the tree Geoff: I know this kid called Richie Binns who knocked a nest down on purpose Lee: They'd probably be dead by now: Geoff: Three little birds in there, one of them got thrown in my court and got squashed, one of them got dumped in a bush and that got squashed, and one got run over. Janet: Aah, that's a shame Geoff: And I spent all that time putting worms and that in the nest, put it up in the tree, Richie Binns knocked it back down again. That's, then, that's when they got squashed. In contrasting his own behaviour with that of whoever pulled the nest out of the tree, Lee presents his own actions as both a practical response (putting the nest back) and a moral response, (redressing thoughtless cruelty). However his story is also a response to Geoffrey's earlier story about the stray cat. In fact, the striking way in which the structure of Lee's story mirrors that of Geoffrey's, told 12 minutes earlier, is itself an evaluative comment both on Geoffrey's perspective (how to respond to creatures in distress, how to tell gentleness) and on the boys' friendship. Coates (1996) found in her research on stories told among women friends that this kind of mirroring of theme and structure played a key role in the expression and development of their friendship, and a similar process seems to be occurring here. In the boys' stories, the complicating action sections in both cases start with a problem described in dialogue, followed by a polite request to mum. Mum then offers helpful advice, and Lee/Geoffrey give the animal or bird some bread. Lee's moral alignment with his friend is thus expressed through the structural alignment of his story, right through to the three part list at the end, as demonstrated by comparing the following extracts: The stray cat The bird's nest we thought 'Oh, we got I goes 'Mum look, problem no food for it, all we there's a nest on the got floor' is dog food' 'Mum, do you want me 'Mum, can I go and request to go to the shops or have will a look at it?' it be closed?' I thought 'Em, do cats my mum said 'Climb advice like bread?' cause I up had and put them back in a few sandwiches, and the my mum said 'That tree' one might, you never know' so I gave it a bit of and I had some bread, giving bread (3 part bread eaten some bread, so I list) and it eat a bit, it eat a fed it bits of bread bit, only a little bit
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In order to convey their own evaluative perspective, Lee and Geoffrey construct particular kinds of voices for themselves in the storygently spoken, polite, caring voices which seem consistent with the kinds of attitudes they are portraying. The management of these voices, as in Karen's story about Tiny, is an important part of the evaluative function of the story, and of their own exploration of a particular aspect of themselves. Again, the overall evaluation is not entirely settled; it shifts in the first story when Geoffrey extends the complicating action, and the accounts of other children's thoughtlessness and cruelty continue to be explored at some length by the two boys after the extracts given above: Lee: The ones I found yesterday are probably dead by now cause this girl I know called Ellie goes to (name of school) she'll probably nick them, cause she loves birds Geoff: I know someone called Alan Horton, whenever he sees a bird's nest he climbs up the tree and goes 'There's eggs in it' and takes the whole bird's nest into his shed, gets the eggs and smashes them with a hammer The boys' repeated contrasts of their own actions with those of others suggests a need for further confirmation and reassurance that their own evaluative position is justified. It may be that Lee and Geoffrey are talking about aspects of themselves which do not fit easily into powerful cultural conceptions of masculinity (Connell, 1995). Children often gain a sense of their own identities through differentiating themselves from others (Miller et al., 1992), and while Geoffrey's animation of Alan Horton enables him to briefly explore this different, more violent version of masculinity, Geoffrey is positioning himself as different from Alan, and similar to Lee. The gendering of identity through story is explored further in the examples below. Julie and Martie: Gendered Voices Children's stories to each other during the school day are often told within the context of fast moving exchanges and a competitive jostling for conversational space (especially among the boys), so narratives have to immediately grab and hold the audience's attention. The content matter is often more immediately striking than in the longer interview accounts, and strategies involving the listener are more intense. On the other hand, when talking among themselves, children can assume a considerable amount of shared understanding and history with their audience. Therefore stories can be more eliptical, and intertextual references more complex. Whereas in the interviews I could track cohesive ties within the forty-five minutes when I was talking to a particular pair of children, the stories children told to each other could make implicit references to all kinds of previous stories and conversations which they had shared. Again, while the stories in the interviews grew out of the on-going conversation between two children and myself, anecdotes told among the children themselves would sometimes emerge from a conversation, but at other times might be sparked off by a chance remark heard across the room, or by some activity in which children were engaged. However within almost all the stories, whether from the
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interviews or from the continuous recordings of children's talk, children used reconstructed dialogue to create the complicating action, and the evaluative functions of the narrative are in some way unsettled. In the first example below Julie (10 years) creates a high pitched baby's voice for her sister in this anecdote told to Kirsty (10) while they were working on a piece of class work together. Another child had just asked to borrow Julie's eraser. Story 4: Rubbing out Julie: Right, [O] this morning, right, my sister- my mum got my sister this little dressing table, right [C] and my sister didn't like it and she says (baby voice) 'Julie, you got a rubber?' and I go 'yea' and I go 'yea' and she goes 'Can I bowwow it?' and I goes 'What for?' She goes 'I just want to bowwow it' and I go 'Alright, here you are' and she goes errrrr like that (makes rubbing out movement). I found my rubber, it was about that big- I ain't got it any more, it's absolutely disappeared. I go 'Where's my rubber?' [R] She goes 'Don know, but I can't wub my desk out!' Kirsty: Ah, isn't that sweet! In order to elaborate the metalinguistic joke which plays on the meaning of 'rub out', Julie creates a high-pitched, phonologically immature baby voice. In the same way as Bakhtin (1981) describes the novelist's creation of dialogue for their characters, Julie's representation of her sister's speech combines her sister's voice with her own intentions as author of the story. Her sister's words, like the voices of Karen's parents' and Lee and Geoffrey's in the stories discussed above, are 'double voiced' (Bakhtin, 1981); we can simultaneously perceive what the character is saying, and also the author's voice behind it, constructing and animating their dialogue in particular ways. Within Julie's joke, there could be various different evaluations of her sister's behaviouras stupid, annoying, or cute and naive. The fact that it is the last interpretation which is picked up by Kirsty ('Ah, isn't that sweet!') does not mean that the others are not also potentially there and acknowledged by the girls. In addition, Julie's exaggerated caricature of a baby voice adds another potential level of irony to the account. But Kirsty's response settles on an evaluative function which links in with a recurring theme in the girls' talk. A couple of days previously when Julie produced a small model dog to swap at playtime she announced 'Me got this little dog to swap'. This use of baby talk seemed intended to convey the cuteness and vulnerability of the dog (hence increasing its swapping value) and her audience responded by exclaiming about the dog's 'sweetness' and offering to 'look after it'. In the data, the girls' use of expressions and voices which invite listeners to take on a nurturing role are invariably successful in obtaining an enthusiastic response. Particular gendered language practices appear to be a powerful marker of in-group solidarity in this area. Julie's anecdote is successful not just because of its joke value, but also because it can be interpreted as plugging into this powerful discourse of 'mothering' that is found within girls' talk. The last example explores gender from another perspective. It comes from talk
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among a group of boys in the school coach on the way to the swimming pool. Talk during the journey had ranged around motor bike rides and trips abroad; now Darren (12) and Martie (11) are swapping their experiences of being on an aeroplane, with the other children sitting nearby. In this anecdote Martie constructs the complicating action through a kind of non-verbal dialogue between the air hostess's high-pitched imitation of a car horn, and his own deep-throated engine noise. Story 5: The air hostess. Martie: Do you like getting off the seat? Darren: No Martie: [A] I love getting off the seat. [O]I was sitting in the middle of the floor and reading a book and the hostess come Darren: /I did that once Martie: / [C] And the hostess come, and she said, she was, she was really nice if you know what I mean, and as she came past she had this trolley with all the dinners on it and she went (high pitched 'neep neep' horn sound, laughter) and all I done is, I went [c] (low pitched sound of car engine) [R] and I moved to the side as she went past. (groan) her legs, man (groan, short pause). I was going to eat the dinners, man. Boy: Chicken Darren: /And you can leave what you want Martie's external evaluative comment 'she was, she was really nice if you know what I mean' underlines one point of the storythe attractions of the air hostess and, more significantly, Martie's positioning of himself in relation to these, not just literally on the floor where he can get a good view of her legs, but also as a male who responds to this view with enthusiasm. Martie's story is successful here partly because, like Julie's story about the eraser, it plugs into a powerful gendered discourse, this time a male discourse about fancying attractive females. But the shifting nature of the evaluation also nicely illustrates these boys' transitional identity, between childhood and adolescence. This is a stage where they can play on the floor like a child but look up air hostesses' skirts, and where physical attractions can be discussed in the same breath as the meals on the plane, and a child's delight that you do not have to eat all the food on your plate. Even the dialogue between the horn and the engine noise can be interpreted in two alternative ways, either as a child's game, or as a flirtatious joke. The comment 'I was going to eat the dinners, man', which could be both a coda and the start of a new story, again shifts the interest, away from the hostess's legs and onto what she has on her trolley. Conclusion While Labovian narrative theory illuminates many aspects of the structural coherence of conversational narratives and their evaluative functions, it does not address the important evaluative links between stories and their conversational and social contexts, nor does it explore in any depth, the central role of reported speech in narrative evaluation. In this article, I have drawn on ideas from
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Bakhtin/Volosinov, and from the ethnography of communication, to develop an analytic and research frame which can handle these more complex and dynamic processes in children's use of conversational narrative. Like all utterances, stories are filled with dialogic overtones (Bakhtin, 1986). That is, they provide a response, in various ways, not just to the preceding conversational turn but to themes from earlier in the conversation, and to echoes from other conversations and other contexts. This responsive aspect of stories shapes their structure and their functions. Listeners may play a particularly active role in some narrative sections; for instance Helen prompts Karen's coda in 'Selling Tiny' and I ask Geoffrey for another resolution in 'The stray cat'. Particular sections in the narrative structure may be reduced or developed to take account of previous speakers' orientations and interests, and the shared knowledge between narrator and audience, for example, Karen's reduction of her orientation section, and Geoffrey's development of his. Specific uses of language may convey an attitude towards another speaker, for instance, Lee's echoing of both the theme and structure of Geoffrey's story, or invoke a gendered discourse which carries values important to the point of the story, for example Julie's use of a baby voice for her sister in 'Rubbing out'. Stories are connected with social practices in particular contexts (Hymes, 1977). The private interview context with a close friend and an attentive woman researcher was very different from the jostling public repartee on the school coach, and this is reflected in the way children tell themselves through the narratives. Stories have to be recognised as 'tellable', and in addition to being appropriate to a particular context they reflect the issues which are important to a particular social group. In the examples I have discussed, we can see children grappling with accounts of human relationships, moral issues about care and cruelty, and their own gendered identity. In particular the children's reproduction and framing of voices within the stories plays a central part in testing out their attitudes and strategies in relation to social problems, and in trying out their own power as a particular kind of person. The reconstructed voices in the stories invoke evaluative perspectives, which can be compared with each other, and with the narrator's perspective, within the momentum of the story. I have suggested that the evaluative processes in children's narratives are dialogic and often ambiguous; issues are explored and negotiated rather than resolved. These stories represent a turn in what might be called the 'long conversations' between children, about the business of moving from childhood into adolescence in a particular cultural setting, and about their own emerging identities and agency. These 'long conversations' are carried on in different contexts across days and weeks as children return again and again to the themes which are important to them, revisiting the issues in different stories and exchanges and from different perspectives. Thus the recursive and iterative process of collaborative meaning-making between children is carried on at three different but interrelated dialogic levels: through the dialogues they reconstruct within the stories, through the conversational exchanges from which the stories emerge, and through the 'long conversations' across space and time.
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Acknowledgement I am grateful to Jenifer Coates, Brian Street, Linda Thomas and Rupert Wegerif for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. References Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Texas: University of Texas Press. Bauman, R. (1986) Story, Performance and Event. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coates, J. (1996) Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell. Connell, W. (1995) Masculinity. London: Polity. Goodwin, M.H. (1990) He-said-she-said: Talk as Social Organisation Among Black Children. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heath, S.B. (1983) Ways With Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D. (1977) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach: London: Tavistock. Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miller, P.J., Potts, R., Fung, H., Hoogstra, L. and Mintz, J. (1990) Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood. American Ethnologist 17, 292-311. Miller, P.J., Mintz, J., Hoogstra, L., Fung, H. and Potts, R. (1992) The narrated self: Young children's construction of self in relation to others in conversational stories of personal experience. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 38, 45-67. Polyani, L. (1985) Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Conversational Storytelling. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Reissman, C.K. (1993) Narrative Analysis. London: Sage. Shuman, A. (1986) Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts Among Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Volosinov, V.N. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press. Wolfson, N. (1982) CHP: The Conversational Historical Present in American English Narrative. Dordrecht, Holland and Cinnaminson, USA: Foris. Appendix Transcript conventions Comments in italics and parentheses clarify unclear references, or paralinguistic features e.g. (laughter). (...) / [
indicates words on the tape which I can't make out, indicates where another speaker interrupts or cuts in, indicates simultaneous talk.
(yes) or (em) in children's stories indicate minimal responses from myself. Initials in brackets refer to Labov's structural elements: [A] = abstract [O] = orientation [C] = complication [R] = resolution [r] = alternative resolution [c] = coda
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Discourse Context and the Development of Metaphor in Children Lynne Cameron School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metaphor capacity take place in situations in which language is used for personal and interpersonal goals. This paper explores how the discourse context of metaphorical language supports children's understanding, and examination of classroom data shows how language, situation and interaction all offer assistance to the interpretation of metaphorically-used language. I further argue for a discourse approach to the study of children's developing metaphor capacity, and identify some of the dimensions of metaphor capacity: knowing when metaphor use or metaphorical interpretation is appropriate, negotiating appropriately rich meanings of metaphor, accessing stored contextualised metaphorical language and meanings, and using metaphor to achieve cognition or affective goals. The implications of a discourse approach for researching metaphor, and for teaching and learning are discussed. Introduction Metaphor in adult language use is currently seen as being pervasive and influential. The study of metaphor has shifted in the last 15 or so years out of its traditional terrain of poetry, literary prose and rhetoric, and into the prosaic world of ordinary discourse. 1 Since Lakoff & Johnson suggested (1980) that our thinking, and perhaps even our action, is constrained by the metaphors of everyday language, research effort has been expended on extracting and analysing the cognitive content of metaphor as the carrier of socio-culturally constructed representations. (See, for example, articles by Reddy on language and Schön on social policy in Ortony (ed.) (1979); Novek (1992) on literacy; Musloff et al. (1996) on the politics of European development.) Some of this textual analysis has been accompanied by empirical research into the psycholinguistic or experiential basis of metaphorical language (e.g. Gibbs, 1994; Steen, 1994). This work has revealed that much metaphorical language is systematic, i.e. there are systems of metaphors that occur within and across speech events, and that the metaphor used is often not highly figurative and creative, but rather it is idiomatic and conventional. Such prosaic use of metaphor can be seen as lying on a cognitive continuum with the use of metaphor to generate theoretical models of abstract and complex ideas in science (Boyd, 1979; Kuhn, 1962), and on an expressive, aesthetic, continuum with poetic uses of metaphor. Analysis of the use of metaphor in talk, from rhetoric to ordinary conversation, illustrates how it can have an interpersonal and affective function as well as a conceptual one. Conversation analysis techniques applied to complaint se-
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quences (Drew & Holt, 1988) suggest that idioms, many of which are metaphorical, function to summarise previous turns, and to mitigate between participants through distancing. The metaphorical nature of some of these idioms appears to contribute to their distancing and summarising potential, and it may well be that similar interpersonal and interactional functions for other types of metaphor will be found through further detailed study of talk. The research effort into adult use of metaphor has been accompanied by a parallel, although perhaps more muted, interest in children and metaphor. Where once children were thought to develop skills with metaphor only at a fairly late stage (e.g. Piaget, 1974) more recent changes in theoretical frameworks and research methodologies have provided evidence that pre-school children can produce and understand metaphorical language that is congruent with their level of conceptual development (Vosniadou, 1987). Others go further and suggest that the thought processes underlying metaphor are basic to human development from infancy. For example, Marschark & Nall (1985: 54) state that: metaphor provides one of the basic ways of learning about the world. Its mapping of different, previously unrelated domains onto each other is seen to extend children's knowledge to that which is unfamiliar, thus making it a tool as well as a skill. Metaphor, for both adult and child, can be seen as functioning as a Vygotskyan 'psychological tool', and requires analysis in terms of what it 'does', as well as analysis of the linguistic form. Children's capacity with metaphor 2 develops simultaneously with their developing knowledge base, and with their developing linguistic and socio-linguistic capacities. Children move from seeing all metaphorical language as 'strange' language to differentiating between conventional idiom and creative use of metaphor (Pollio & Pickens, 1980). Children acquire skills in knowing when metaphorical interpretations are appropriate (Gibbs, 1987) and how to generate appropriate metaphors or metaphorical interpretations. Within educational contexts, metaphor is used to carry new conceptual meanings and representations through talk and text, and to complexify existing concepts. Developing metaphor capacity enables children to use metaphor for reaching shared understandings and for learning, both through the metaphors of others and through metaphors they construct for themselves. In this paper, I focus on the discourse context of metaphor as the site of use and the development of children's metaphor capacity. By discourse, I intend to indicate a process of communication through interaction, and to contrast this with text as linguistic product, whether written or spoken (Widdowson, 1984: 100). I suggest that, in order to understand the processing demands such language places on children and the nature of possible outcomes of processing in terms of conceptual, sociocultural and interpersonal effects, it is important to research the discourse contexts in which metaphorical language occurs. I shall first examine what is involved in the processing of metaphorical language, taking a psycholinguistic and functional view of processing demands, and dealing with several theoretical issues in the definition and identification of metaphor. I shall then draw on data from my own study into metaphorical language in educational discourse to suggest dimensions of discourse context that may be important in
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measuring and promoting the development of metaphor capacity. Finally, I will reflect on the implications of a discourse approach to metaphor for the theory of metaphor development, for empirical research into aspects of developing metaphor capacity, and for teaching and learning. Children's Processing of Metaphorical Language An Initial View of Metaphor. Defining metaphor is problematic, and, as we shall see, it requires multiply-faceted solutions. A useful starting point is a rough account of metaphorical language, which will then be refined to develop identification criteria and procedures. An initial view is that metaphor uses language to refer to something in terms of something else; it describes something from the perspective of some other thing. The following example is taken from a children's science text The Ozone Layer: The atmosphere is a blanket of gases (that surrounds the Earth). Here, the 'Topic' terms atmosphere and gases are referred to in terms of the 'Vehicle' term, a blanket, which is clearly something from a quite distinct conceptual domain. As readers processing the metaphorical language, we are able to make sense of this metaphor by constructing links across the incongruent domains of blankets and gases, arriving at an interpretation that is congruent with our knowledge of the world (Figure 1). This process of thought that draws on stored and contextual information to produce an emergent meaning can be seen as the central feature of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon. What Counts as Metaphorical? Establishing Identification Criteria
Figure 1 Processing metaphorical language Tempting as it is when writing about metaphor to stick to examples that are clearly and unarguably metaphorical, a prosaic approach to metaphor requires that the boundaries of the category of metaphors are clarified, in a way that is not necessary when only central examples are used. Research requires a categorisation and identification procedure to define and operationalise what
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counts as metaphor. The details of such procedures can drastically affect the way results, their interpretation, and inferences are then made. For example, some studies (e.g. Levorato & Cacciari, 1992; Evans & Gamble, 1988) select the metaphors to use with children through pilot studies with adults. As a consequence their findings relate to children's comprehension of adult metaphors. The theoretical problem must therefore be tackled rather than avoided, and the key lies in the cognitive feature of domain incongruence, already set as a necessary condition for metaphor (Kittay, 1987). When an analyst states that certain domains are sufficiently 'distant' for an incongruity to exist, that judgement is made by implicit or explicit reference to the norms and conventions of a particular discourse community, or to etymology (e.g. Black, 1979). I should like to suggest that, for replicability of research, these norms should be stated as explicitly as possible. In particular, when working with children's language, there is a need to be clear about whether adult norms for the particular Topic and Vehicle domains are being used to establish metaphor, or whether the incongruity is relative to a particular child's current mental representations. This is a necessary distinction since the two may produce different results in categorising possible metaphors. For example, although a representative adult would probably disagree, the children I worked with were convinced that traffic jam could be labelled a metaphor, and produced their evidence to fulfil the necessary conditions. A further distinction must then be made in terms of levels of analysis, between what might be identified as metaphor by an analyst working with text, and what can be empirically shown to be processed metaphorically through resolution of an observed incongruity. Distinguishing these as 'theoretical' and 'processing' levels (Marr, 1982) leads to a key distinction between 'linguistic metaphors' defined as stretches of language that can be identified by an analyst as metaphor according to stated criteria, and that are seen to have the potential to be actively processed as metaphor. This contrasts with 'process metaphors', defined as stretches of language for which there is actual evidence of a second order interpretation being accessed to resolve an incongruity. When linguistic metaphors occur in text and talk, they may be processed metaphorically by activation of the domain knowledge and resolution of incongruity i.e. as process metaphors, or they may be processed more automatically, through retrieval of previously stored meanings for that metaphor. Alternatively, there may be stretches of language which children attempt to process metaphorically, even if the producer of the language did not intend this to happen. By making the distinction between linguistic and process metaphors, we thus avoid assuming that processing by a receiver always follows a producer's intentions. Fuller details of the identification procedures I have set up for the analysis of a corpus of classroom discourse have been described elsewhere (Cameron, 1996). In brief, the problem is dealt with by having a set of necessary conditions for metaphor, augmented with preference conditions (Jackendoff, 1983), producing descriptions of metaphor in terms of graded and typical features. These necessary conditions cover the need for metaphor to involve an incongruity between two conceptual domains in reference to one idea, manifested linguistically in a
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'Vehicle' term being applied to a 'Topic' domain, and resolvable through second-order interpretation. Graded conditions deal with the types of lexical items that are used as Topic and Vehicle. For example, their familiarity to the users, their conceptual complexity, their conventionality of use within the speech community (idiomaticity), and their systematicity within and across discourse events. Metaphors that appear in the literature, and often in empirical studies, as typical are usually very clearly metaphorical, often nominal in form, e.g. the river is a snake (Wales & Coffey, 1986). By contrast, the initial analysis of metaphors in my corpus of classroom discourse suggests that such highly metaphorical metaphors are rare, and that many have lower degrees of metaphoricity and involve verbs as Vehicles as demonstrated by these two examples: the printer is playing up; do you see where you have to go from here? (when used to talk about writing a diary). Domain Knowledge and Metaphor Processing The major processing demands of metaphor lie in the need to access and select relevant and affective conceptual information about Topic and Vehicle domains, and to construct links that enable resolution of the incongruity between Topic and Vehicle. With development will come an increase in domain knowledge, and in the detail and conventionality of the organisation of domain-specific knowledge. Children's understanding of linguistic metaphors is constrained by their knowledge of the domains involved. It has been suggested that lack of Vehicle knowledge appears more important for comprehension than knowledge of Topic domain (Vosniadou, 1987). By contrast with investigations of children's success in interpreting adult-normed linguistic metaphor, Keil has taken a childcentred approach to investigate the development of metaphor comprehension from the basis of children's current domain knowledge. He shows that once domain knowledge is removed as a variable, comprehension increases, and that the development of metaphor comprehension can be predicted from the acquisition of domain distinctions, i.e. the establishing of domain boundaries (Keil, 1979 and 1989). In his investigation, 5-9-year-olds were asked to explain the meaning of decontextualised sentence metaphors and they were successful where domains were already differentiated. Keil suggests that metaphor comprehension develops on a field-by-field basis. He suggests that animate/inanimate metaphors develop before animal/human metaphors. Given extensive knowledge of both Topic and Vehicle domains of a metaphor, the process of interpretation is open-ended, and it is possible to distinguish between a minimal interpretation that can count as successful comprehension and richer, deeper, more elaborated interpretations. Siltanen (1990) reports research that shows children demonstrate more elaborate metaphor comprehension, i.e. a greater number of links between Topic and Vehicle domains, as they get older. There is some evidence to suggest that the nature of links constructed between Topic and Vehicle changes with development, with perceptual or
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sensory links coming into action first, followed by relational or functional links, and then physical-psychological links (Winner, 1988). However, once again, when the domain knowledge of children is controlled, even quite young children are able to make relational links (Gentner, 1983; Nippold et al., 1984) and can deal with abstract metaphors as well as concrete (Broderick, 1991). Given the evidence of theoretical organisation within children's mental representations from an early age (Carey, 1985), we would expect that, relative to their own levels of domain knowledge, all types of link might be possible. Children's increasing competence with relational metaphors will also reflect their increasingly sophisticated understanding of the relations between and within conceptual domains, and increasing familiarity with a widening range of domains. The theoretical path-clearing of this section has produced a distinction between 'linguistic metaphors' and 'process metaphors', and demonstrated the need for the norms of domain knowledge assumed in the identification of linguistic metaphors to be made as explicit as possible, to take account of children's or partial domain knowledge. Domain knowledge plays a crucial role in selecting and interpreting metaphor. We now move to examine how the discourse context in which a linguistic metaphor occurs may contribute to perception and resolution of domain incongruity. Discourse Context and the Demands of Metaphor Processing This section explores the effect of discourse context on the demands of metaphor processing. First, we look at how the discourse context can provide information about the Topic and Vehicle that, by helping identify links between them, supports the resolution of incongruity. In oral interaction, the possibility of negotiation of meaning also exists. As well as being the site of use of metaphor, discourse context is also the site of potential development of metaphor capacity, and in a later section we examine how this might happen. In the third section we go beyond particular discourse contexts to see the implications of their socio-cultural construction. This suggests a focus on the importance of the goals of metaphor processing, constructed by discourse participants as members of social groupings. Finally, I consider the enculturation aspect of metaphor. Discourse Context and Domain Knowledge In this section we see how aspects of the discourse context can work to support participants in the process of accessing and selecting appropriate domain knowledge. Metaphorical language is usually encountered, not in isolated sentences, but in contexts of use that can influence discourse goals and support the demands of processing. 'Discourse context' can be seen as including: • situational contextparticipants, situation, and goals; • the immediate linguistic context of the metaphor; • the textual / interactional context of the metaphor. Each of these aspects of context can contribute towards accessing and selecting domain knowledge. To return to the metaphor the atmosphere is a blanket of gases in the science book, we can consider how this can be understood by the child. The situational context may provide information in a number of ways:
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through discussion with others before reading, through pictures alongside the text, through the goals the child has constructed for reading the text. Linguistically, the Vehicle word blanket appears as first noun in a nominal group (blanket of gases) which is itself the Complement of the copula verb, and which is post-modified by a relative clause that surrounds the Earth. There are thus three elements of the sentence that carry information about the Topic term. The linguistic context places informationcarrying terms in certain formal relations to each other that increase or decrease the information-processing demand on the reader. The textual context positions the sentence containing the metaphor early in the book, just after an introductory concrete example of fridges releasing harmful gases into the atmosphere, and before several pages of further detail about the atmosphere and the ozone layer. The metaphorical language therefore potentially acts as a 'root metaphor' (MacCormac, 1985) to structure the processing of up-coming information in the text. If we want to examine the processing task that interpreting such metaphorical language presents to a child reader then we need to take into account these aspects of discourse context. Joint participation of a child with another child or an adult in the discourse context of metaphor can produce interaction that may function as a further source of support for comprehension, both immediately and in the longer term. To illustrate this, I take an episode from my data which involves the use of (potentially) metaphorical language in a Geology lesson with Year 6 primary pupils, and show how the spoken discourse context of a linguistic metaphor appears to assist the children's interpretation (for transcription symbols see Appendix): 1 Ellen: volcano 2 Teacher:yes (.) it's a volcano (1.0) and (2.0) the rocks (.) that are formed 3 by fire (.) the rocks that are (.) are m(.) molten (.) molten rocks 4 (1.0) just imagine ROCK (1.0) getting so HOT (2.0) that it 5 ACTually MELTS (1.0) so that it becomes like (1.0) sticky treacle 6 Pupils: ugh 7 Louise: (whisper)treacle 8 Teacher:or even (.) like (.) runny butter 9 Pupils: ugh 10Teacher:have you ever put (.) a little dish (.) with butter in (.) into the 11 microwave? 12Pupils: yes 13Teacher:and left it for too long? 14Pupils: yes 15Teacher:do you know what happens? (1.0) I did it at the weekend (.) so 16 I know what happens 17Pupil: is molten lava like (1.0) er wax? 18Teacher:yes (1.0) it can be a bit like wax (1.0) but do you know what 19 happens to butter? (.) it does (.) there are two things it does (.) 20 which are like (1.0) volcanic (.) rocks (.) when they're being ??? ? 21Pupil: it bubbles
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22Teacher:it bubbles (.) well done (.) yes (.) and it (.) it sort of (.) keeps doing 23 this ???? so (.) that's where (.) these rocks come from (1.0) and 24 (2.0) what is interesting about Cumbria (1.0) . . . The stretches of language that satisfy the necessary conditions for potential linguistic metaphor are: Line 5 Line 8 Line 17 Line 18
it (rock) becomes like sticky treacle or even like runny butter is molten lava like wax? it can be a bit like wax
The Situational Context The extract is taken from a geology lesson taught to the whole class through a combination of exposition and completion of a worksheet. At this point in the lesson, the pupils are hearing about igneous rocks and the teacher has elicited 'volcano' (L1) to exemplify the forming of rocks through fire/heat. The potential metaphorical language appears to be aimed at helping the children understand, through the familiar example of the volcano, how heat can affect the nature of the rocks. Immediate Linguistic Context I follow Kittay (1987) in holding that comparisons marked with the word 'like', i.e. similes, may be based on both metaphorical or non-metaphorical analogies. In this example, the metaphoricity of the comparisons seems to differ in degree; while all three of sticky treacle/runny butter/wax belong in categories distinct from that of volcanic lava, the first two are more clearly incongruous than the pupil's offered Vehicle term wax, which like lava, is runny when it is hot and molten. Metaphor seems to slip towards non-metaphorical comparison as the discourse proceeds. The pre-modification of two of the Vehicle nouns acts to constrain possible interpretations of the nominal term. This is discussed in more detail later. Interactional Context Each of the three Vehicle terms occurs in clause-final, and, initially, in turn-final position, ensuring emphasis. Each is also preceded by a pause, in two cases, by pauses of about a minute, which may be significantly long in oral interaction. The interactional and immediate linguistic contexts also work to provide information to assist in interpretation of the comparisons. Before the first metaphorical comparison is introduced, sticky treacle (L5), the Topic attributes of molten/melted by heat have already been mentioned with stress. The pre-modification of the Vehicle noun by another attribute sticky means that, in processing this first metaphor, the children do not have to search through every possible attribute of treacle (made from molasses, comes in tins, has a strong smell . . .) in order to find an interpretation, the immediately framing discourse has narrowed down the possibilities for them. The second metaphorical Vehicle, which is introduced in Line 7, runny butter, in being applied to the same Topic, constrains the search for relevant attributes still further. The next stretch of discourse
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provides yet more help, as the teacher contextualises the key features of butter/treacle that are to be related to volcanic lava. The systematic use of related but different metaphor Vehicles within a discourse event produces information about Topic-Vehicle links from the overlapping attributes of the different Vehicles, and thus presents a different information processing task from a single sentence metaphor with just one Vehicle term. In Line 17 when the pupil produces a third term wax and offers it to the teacher as possible Vehicle, a chance is provided to negotiate the meaning of the metaphor. In the event, it receives only cursory positive feedback before the teacher takes the talk back to attributes of butter. The teacher then (L22) explicitly states the properties of butter that are relevant to lava, emphasising the changes that occur when the butter is heated for comparison with the effect of heat on volcanic rocks. The use of metaphorical, or metaphor-related, language in this teaching sequence offers images and concrete details to the children as they meet with the abstract concept of the formation of rocks through heat. The particular oral interactional context in which the metaphor occurs is not a separable feature of the discourse but, as we have seen, constrains and constructs the processing task the children face. Analysis of this and other episodes from the classroom data suggests a number of important features of metaphorical language in its discourse context: (1) The Topic is usually strongly featured in the immediate discourse context, and the introduction of the Vehicle comes as a contrast, thus priming the need for a non-literal interpretation (Gibbs, 1987). (2) The introduction of the incongruous Vehicle term is highlighted through clause/ turn position, stress, pausing etc. (3) The range of possible interpretations of the Vehicle term is constrained by explicit inclusion of relevant features of the Topic domain that are to be linked with the Vehicle domain. (4) Repetition and relexicalisation of a single Vehicle, or the inclusion of more than one Vehicle, constrains the range of possible features drawn on in interpretation. (5) The meaning of the metaphor can be negotiated between participants. (6) (4) and (5) may result in the same metaphor being reformulated in different grammatical forms, and in difficult syntax being made more accessible. Such support for metaphor comprehension from the discourse context is not unusual; rather, the unusual context would seem to be where a child is presented with an isolated metaphor to interpret, as is found in many experimental studies. An interactive context can provide the opportunity for the adult to adjust the gap between incongruous domains of the metaphor until it becomes small enough for the child to make the cognitive leap, and resolve the metaphor. The teacher can achieve this through sensitive choice of Vehicle(s), and by adding information about the attributes of the Vehicle and how they might relate to the Topic. Through 'fine-tuning' of this sort, the child becomes able to grasp the metaphorical meaning, at the same time receiving a model of mediation that can be internalised for future processing tasks.
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The Development of Context-related Schemata through Discourse Children differ from adults in the extent to which they are capable of dealing with wholly or partially decontextualised language by the creation of internal mental contexts or schemata that facilitate comprehension. Through incremental experience with external concrete contexts, a child moves towards internally mediated and contextualised thinking (Campbell & Olson, 1990). Each episode in which metaphorical language is encountered is an opportunity for adding to stored contexts and contextualised information in generalised forms, but also in exemplar-based forms (Medin & Ross, 1989). Metaphorical language uses may be stored along with the memory of the context, and thus be available when a similar or related context occurs again. When the children in this study discuss the metaphors they have collected, there are many references to the original contexts in which the metaphors were encountered: principally television cartoons and adverts, but also play situations, books and teacher talk. The visual images they describe in explicating the metaphors suggest that not only do they remember the context, but they have also stored images and words as they were encountered in those contexts. In terms of developing metaphor capacity, we would predict therefore that older children will have available more automatically accessible contextualised meanings for metaphors, added to which, experience as a participant in discourse should also make them more likely to recognise when metaphorical interpretations are required. Wales & Coffey (1986) report that children in their studies (aged between 6:0 and 9:7) accessed appropriate domain knowledge but still often not did proceed to interpret a sentence metaphorically. Evans & Gamble's study (1988) provides an example of the result of lack of relevant previous schematic knowledge. In their study, the most frequent 'errors' of interpretation made by children, defined relative to prior interpretations given by adults, were found to be of a type in which children picked on attributes of the Vehicle term to link with the Topic term that were salient to themselves, but not to adults. So bright red was produced as an attribute of balloons and was used in interpreting the metaphor her skirt was a balloon as she walked, producing an 'incorrect' interpretation. Even without the inclusion of a discourse context for this sentence, an adult would be less likely to make such an interpretation because of previous encounters with the term balloon used when something is blown about by the wind; balloon and windy days might have co-occurred in enough previous discourse contexts for that sense to be activated when the isolated sentence was encountered. A child without such previous experience is forced, when interpreting the isolated sentence, to generate a resolution of the incongruity. Winner (1988: 44) defends the use of decontextualised comprehension tasks to the extent that they 'reveal the kinds of similarity that children generate on their own' as opposed to 'the kinds of similarities that children recognise' when metaphors are presented in context. It can be argued that interpreting metaphor in context is much more than merely recognising them; it too involves generating possible similarities and differences between domains, in a combined cognitive and imaginative processes of generation and selection. Thus the discourse context not only supports understanding by supplementing a child's partial schematic knowledge of the domains, but it provides a context
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in which conceptual knowledge and language, including metaphorical language, may be stored for future use. Goals in Metaphor Processing. In addition to being the site of information-processing, discourse can also function as the level that links the socio-cultural context with particular situational uses of metaphorical language, providing a further dimension for the theoretical framework. To this end, constructs from post-Vygotskyan Activity Theory (Lantolf & Appel, 1994; Donato, 1994; Meadows, 1993) can be incorporated alongside constructs of an information-processing model, in which task performance is dependent on task demands. Activity Theory analyses task demands in terms of the goals that particular individuals construct for themselves. Goals interact with motives at the higher level of socio-culturally determined 'activity' and, at a lower level with 'operations', which in our case would be the use of metaphorical language. Thus a child reading the text about the Ozone Layer in the school context may have school-type motives of finding answers to a set of comprehension questions and this will affect how the text is read and how the metaphors are processed. A child who reads the text motivated by curiosity to understand the phenomenon may appropriate the metaphor of blanket of gases to structure a new understanding. In a third possible situation, which is that of part of my empirical study, two children are asked to read the text sentence-by-sentence and think aloud for a researcher, with the suggested goal of evaluating whether the text would be comprehensible by an eight-year-old. In this activity, the attention received by the metaphors may shed light on the possible processing problems they raise. The goals set for or by the child will thus influence the demands of processing for production or understanding. Acquiring the Metaphors of a Socio-cultural Group Through Discourse Any encounter with metaphorical language can involve combinations of cognitive and affective goals of metaphor, and they would seem likely to occur in children's experience with metaphorical language from very early infancy; Marjanovic-Shane (1989) comments on the interpersonal use of metaphors in language addressed to babies, and Elbers (1988) presents examples of metaphors used with humorous intent by three-year-olds. The range of specific types of sub-goal linked to general goals will alter with development, so that while young children are likely to make use of language that adults might judge as metaphorical to express concepts that they have not acquired labels for, the need to do this will decrease with age (Marschark & Nall, 1985) and older children may use metaphor to make sense to themselves of more complex or abstract concepts. This is demonstrated by the following example when one of the children in the study says of the ozone layer: I sometimes think of it as a marble cos some marbles have like ( . ) the glass um and they have like ( . ) that um picture inside and I always think it looks like a boat inside ( . ) and then I think of the ozone layer as being the glass on the outside. (Ellen, aged 9:11)
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Alongside such conceptual goals, it is likely that metaphor continues to be used throughout the school years for affective goals. For example, Maybin (1991) includes a piece of transcribed talk between 10-year-olds which contains idiomatic metaphorical language used for affective, interpersonal goals: J: P3: J:
. . . I say I've been involved when I've not. I stick up for my other friends I know, you're trying to get your nose in and things I'm not, I'm sticking up for my friends and I say that I was doing it as well. (Maybin, 1991: 44)
Incidentally, we can also see in this extract how the metaphors function interactionally to summarise and evaluate in the ongoing talk, in ways similar to adults' use in complaint sequences as described by Drew & Holt (1988). Such affective uses of metaphorical language are very closely tied in to their context of use, and such contexts become increasingly less important in research studies carried out with older children, as naturalistic studies give way to experimental laboratory-based research. One result of this shift may be to attribute older children with the production of fewer metaphors than younger childrenthe notorious decline in novel metaphor production between the ages of about 9 and 12 years evidenced in earlier studies. This now appears more likely to be a result of a combination of the research methodology and other factors, such as the consolidation of knowledge of the idioms of a discourse community, and thus more appropriate and accurate use (Gibbs, 1987), and the decreasing need to be inventive with language when dealing with lexical gaps, with perhaps the additional impact created by the demands of school-based writing and talk for accuracy and precision. Participation in discourse events can lead to children using the metaphors of others, without necessarily fully understanding them, in a process of appropriation that leads to adult capacity for using the conventional metaphor of a culture. Elbers (1988) demonstrates how children's production of idioms can be seen not merely as imitation but rather re-creation: after an adult called his baby brother a little treasure, one child (8:3) responded by extending the metaphor your mouth is full of pearls, your ears are full of gems, your nose is golden (Elbers, 1988: 612). In my data, a child of 8:9 years, having discussed the metaphors the desert is a sea of sand and camels are the ships of the desert, produced a few days later the re-created variation camels are the ferries of the desert. While there is always an uncertainty about making these connections, links between the two utterances can be made. When children learn the metaphors of adverts by heart, when they sing hymns containing religious metaphors, and when they use the idioms of others to express their feelings, they are not merely repeating and reciting, they may be appropriating sociocultural norms along with the metaphorical language. Effects of Discourse Context: Summary It has been demonstrated that the demands of processing metaphor are constrained by dimensions of the discourse context in which the metaphor is used. Discourse context can provide specific and schematic knowledge to assist interpretation or selection of metaphor for immediate processing and, in the
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longer term, for the development of both conceptual knowledge and metaphor capacity. Discourse contexts, and their goals, are socio-culturally constructed, and participation in them by children leads to the development of capacity with conventional metaphors through appropriation and re-creation. Having seen the various ways in which discourse context and metaphor capacity interact, we can in conclusion draw out some implications for research and for teaching and learning. Discourse Context and Capacity with Metaphor: Implications and Conclusions A Discourse Perspective on Metaphor Capacity Capacity with metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon depends on existing domain knowledge and on ability to make use of the support offered by the discourse context. Since encounters with metaphor can assist with the acquisition of new knowledge or the restructuring of previous knowledge, we can conclude that the development of metaphor capacity and the development of conceptual knowledge are interdependent. To understand metaphor capacity and its development we need to understand more about the nature of the task of producing or interpreting metaphor in discourse. We have seen in this paper that metaphor capacity includes the following skills: • negotiating the appropriately rich meaning of metaphorical language by finding a resolution of incongruity, through the mediation of others or through internal mediation; • automatically accessing stored contextualised metaphorical language and metaphorical meanings; • knowing when it is appropriate to use metaphor or to interpret metaphorically; • achieving conceptual and affective goals for oneself, or interpersonally, through metaphor. Research Implications: Context, Tasks and Goals in Research Design Analysis of the information potentially provided by the discourse context of a metaphor shows clearly that measuring metaphor skills through decontextualised tasks with single metaphors may lack construct validity, measuring something other than metaphor capacity. It has become increasingly common to present metaphors through more elaborated contexts, usually a brief story (e.g. Levorato & Cacciari, 1992 on idioms; Vosniadou et al., 1984). However, these still lack the information that assists comprehension via the interactive aspect of a discourse context, in which metaphors may be reformulated, explicated and repeated in the course of the interaction, rather than uttered in isolation (for an interesting exception see Todd & Clarke, 1996). If we want to research the developing production of metaphorical language by children then we need to investigate this in discourse contexts, using tasks with goals that are likely to produce metaphor, alongside experimental studies
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which use techniques such as multiple choice tasks for sentence completion. Where this has been done, there has been evidence of increasing complexity and appropriacy in the children's choice of metaphor, together with increasing use of conventional metaphor. For example, Mendelsohn et al. (1980) devised a study to investigate the types of analogies produced by 7-11-yearolds, with the task of explaining certain phenomena, such as how a radio works, to a puppet from another planet. Their findings suggest that the production of extended and elaborated analogies increase with age, and also became more conventional. Other techniques such as the use of toys to enact stories (Vosniadou et al., 1984), elicited repetition (Pearson, 1990) have revealed something of the metaphor capacities of pre-school children. Attention to Linguistic Form in Research Design The effect of linguistic form on metaphor processing and development remains in need of further investigation. Broderick (1992) investigated the forms of metaphor in popular children's books and found that the noun phrase form most often used in empirical studies was not frequent in the books. Similarly, cartoons and adverts which were an important source of metaphor for the children in my study produce Verbal rather than Nominal metaphors e.g. cool your heels; money doesn't grow on trees. If empirical studies are using grammatical forms that are less familiar or frequent, they may be underestimating or misrepresenting children's capacity. We can also note that the use of visual information, the relexicalisation of metaphor in interactive discourse, and the opportunities for negotiation, may well in practice provide children with alternative formulations of a metaphor, so that a complex form may be accompanied by the same information encoded in more accessible syntax, thus once again changing the nature of the interpretation task. Implications for Teaching and Learning Through Metaphor Scaffolding Metaphor Comprehension The effect of aspects of the discourse context on comprehension is of importance to those concerned with the role of metaphor in constructing shared understandings or for learning. We need to know more about the fine-tuning of metaphor interpretations when they are mediated by adults in conversation with children, and about the difficulties that children face in interpreting metaphors when left to their own resources, for example, when they extract information from books or computer text. This would add to our understanding of how children can learn, through metaphor, from texts and from others. Metaphor in Learning. Metaphor has the potential to be a powerful tool in learning and in reorganising knowledge, for societies, groups and for individuals. Discourse is the site in which that potential can be achieved or lost. The argument of this paper is that, in order for its potential to be positively exploited, metaphor and the development of metaphor capacity need to be investigated and explained within its discourse context.
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Notes 1. The expression 'a prosaics of metaphor' takes the term 'prosaics' from work on Bakhtin (Morson & Emerson, 1990), and is used to contrast with 'poetics' and emphasise concern with the everyday and the ordinary. 2. The term 'capacity' is used in preference to 'competence'. Capacity was used by Widdowson (1984: 234) to refer to the ability to engage particular kinds of language knowledge for achieving communicative goals, and would seem appropriate for extension to refer to the ability of engaging both language and conceptual knowledge related to metaphor for achieving what we might call discourse goals. Appendix Transcription symbols (.) (1.0) ????? CAPital ?
a micro pause a pause of one second approximately indecipherable section of recording shows stressed syllable indicates rising question intonation
References Black, M. (1979) More about metaphor. In A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Boyd, R. (1979) Metaphor and theory change. In A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Broderick, V. (1991) Young children's comprehension of the similarities underlying metaphor. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 20, 65-81. (1992) Incidence of verbal comparisons in beginners: Books and in metaphor comprehension researchA search for ecological validity. Journal of Child Language 19, 183-93. Cameron, L.J. (1996) Describing, knowing and defining metaphor. Paper presented at BAAL/CUP seminar: Researching and Applying Metaphor, University of York. Campbell, R. and Olson, D. (1990) Children's thinking. In R. Grieve and A. Hughes (eds) Understanding Children. Oxford: Blackwell. Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Donato, R. (1994) Collective scaffolding in second language learning. In J. Lantolf and G. Appel (eds) Vygotskyan Approaches to Second Language Research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Drew, P. and E. Holt (1988) Complainable matters: The use of idiomatic expressions in making complaints. Social Problems 35 (4), 398-417. Elbers, L. (1988) New names from old words: Related aspects of children's metaphors and word compounds. Journal of Child Language 15, 591-617. Evans, M.A. and Gamble, D. (1988) Attribute saliency and metaphor interpretation in school-age children. Journal of Child Language 15, 435-49. Gentner, D. (1983) Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7, 155-70. Gibbs, R. (1987) Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms. Journal of Child Language 14, 569-86. (1994) The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackendorf, R. (1983) Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Keil, F. (1979) Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1989) Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kittay, E. (1987) Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lantolf, J. and Appel. G. (eds) (1994) Vygotskyan Approaches to Second Language Research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Levorato, M. and Cacciari, C. (1992) Children's comprehension and production of idioms: The role of context and familiarity. Journal of Child Language 19, 415-33. MacCormac, E.R. (1985) A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marjanovic-Shane, A. (1989) Metaphor beyond play: Development of metaphor in children. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Marr, D. (1982) Vision. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co. Marschark, M. and Nall, L. (1985) Metaphoric competence in cognitive and language development. In H. Reese (ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behaviour. Orlando: Academic Press Inc. Maybin, J. (1991) Children's informal talk and the construction of meaning. English in Education 25 (2), 34-49. Meadows, S. (1993) The Child as Thinker. London: Routledge. Medin, D. and Ross, B. (1989) The specific character of abstract thought: Categorization, problem solving and induction. In R.J. Sternberg (ed.) Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence 5. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mendelsohn, E., Winner, E. and Gardner, H. (1980) The spontaneous production of analogies by grade school children. Technical Report No. 13, Project Zero. Harvard University. Morson, G.S. and Emerson, C. (1990) Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaic. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Musloff, A., Schaeffner, C. and Townson, M. (1996) Conceiving of EuropeDiversity in Unity. Dartmouth: Aldershot. Nippold, M., Leonard, L. and Kail, R. (1984) Syntactic and conceptual factors in children's understanding of metaphors. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 27, 197-205. Novek, E. (1992) Read it and weep: How metaphor limits views of literacy. Discourse and Society 3 (2), 219-33. Ortony, A. (ed.) (1979) Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, B. (1990) The comprehension of metaphor by pre-school children. Journal of Child Language 17, 185-203. Piaget, J. (1974) The Language and Thought of the Child. New York: New American Library. Pollio, M. and Pickens, J. (1980) The developmental structure of figurative competence. In R. Honeck and R. Hoffman (eds) Cognition and Figurative Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Siltanen, S. (1990) Effects of explicitness on children's metaphor comprehension. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 5 (1), 1-20. Steen, G. (1994) Understanding Metaphor in Literature. London: Longman. Todd, Z. and Clarke. D. (1996) When is a dead rainbow not like a dead rainbow? Paper presented at BAAL/CUP seminar: Researching and Applying Metaphor, University of York. Vosniadou, S. (1987) Children and metaphors. Child Development 58, 870-85. Vosniadou, S., Ortony, A., Reynolds, R. and Williamson, P. (1984) Sources of difficulty in children's comprehension of metaphorical language. Child Development 55, 1588-606. Wales, R. and Coffey, G. (1986) On children's comprehension of metaphor. In C. Pratt, A. Garton, W. Tunmer, and A. Nesdale (eds) Research Issues in Child Development. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Widdowson, H. (1984) Explorations in Applied Linguistics 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winner, E. (1988) The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press.
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Children Constructing Dramatic Contexts Peter Millward School of Education, University of Durham, Leazes Road, Durham DH 1 1TA This paper will explore the ways in which a group of children and their teacher use their knowledge of language to create a make-believe context. It will show how the participants collaborate to construct dramatic experience and how through their use of language they describe their relationships, roles and situations. The participants' contributions to the discourse will be seen to present the everyday context of teachers and children doing drama whilst also serving to make visible the dramatic context of the strangers, guides and priests. The data are from a piece of drama in which the participants wait for an event to occur. This piece has been selected to indicate the ways in which all dramatic situations are managed. If the managed quality of experience can be seen in the participants' presentation of a 'waiting time' (a gap in a narrative and a pause in the production of events), then it seems reasonable to expect this quality to be a feature of all make-believe and dramatic contexts. Even a period of desultory waiting has to be carefully managed and presented. It does not just happen as the participants wait to get going again. Children Constructing Dramatic Contexts It is part of the wisdom of our time to claim that the social life is negotiated and presented through language and action. That talk is 'constitutive of those settings in which it takes place' (Benson & Hughes, 1983: 19) and that conversations are 'vehicles of reality maintenance' (Berger & Luckman, 1960: 172) are statements which slip easily off the tongue but which need to be examined in specific situations. It is commonly accepted that language is more than a means of representation, and that it plays an important part in the construction of the social world which appears to be represented in that language (Thompson, 1996). The act of using language engages our sense of reality and this is clearly what people do when they use language to present dramatic experience. The general claim for the significance of language has been explored more deeply by looking at narrative forms, and Betty Rosen, for example, describes narrative as a 'supreme means of rendering otherwise chaotic, shapeless events into a coherent whole, saturated with meaning' (Rosen, 1988: 164). It is clear, though, that narrative is more than this, and in Barbara Hardy's familiar phrase it is treated as 'a primary act of mind transferred from life to art' (1977: 12). Hardy described, in vivid terms, the centrality of narrative to human experience when she wrote, 'we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative' (Hardy, 1977: 13). Narrative is also a key feature of dramatic experience, and children draw on this 'primary act of mind' when they develop narratives in their dramas. It is through language that our lives are made meaningful and familiar, and through language that we are able to make sense of our experience of living. In our language is contained the 'cultural grammar for the interpretative proc-
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ess' (Bruner, 1987:18) which we draw upon to present a social world that we seem to share in common. The meaningful quality in our lives is located in the work we have to do to produce a familiar social world in which people can be treated, in Gipps' (1992: 5) words, as 'social beings who construct their understandings from social interactions within the dynamics and constraints of the contexts in which their learning takes place'. This is what children do when they present dramatic experience in school and when they engage with one another in ways which are attentive to the make-believe context they develop in their work. However, this make-believe context through which the participants' dramatic language is made meaningful, has to be presented and sustained from moment to moment and its presence is marked in the way people act and in the ways in which language is used to create dramas. Whilst this is apparent in the 'living through' type drama (Bolton, 1992), in which the participants engage in dramatic playing and work spontaneously to develop make-believe situations, it is also true of everyday contexts. There is a reflexive quality to meaning making activities, and 'communicative action is doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and context-renewing' (Heritage, 1984: 242). In everyday life, as well as in drama, we routinely use language to present the context within which our language is made meaningful. It can easily become quite complicated and it is very hard to pin down, but looking at children constructing dramatic contexts may help us to see it a little more clearly. Drama is about the construction of make-believe rather than everyday reality. It is obvious that the make-believe world of dramatic experience is managed and sustained by the active engagement of the participants. Dramatic experience is presented in language and in actions. The ways in which children and their teachers contribute to dramatic engagements should enable us to appreciate how they work together to produce everyday engagements. It is easy to accept that drama is about life, but it may not be so easy to see how it is about life. We can easily be beguiled into thinking that drama is about life because it imitates or represents life. The link may be more direct than this though, and drama may be 'life like' in that it is produced by the same methods and practices which are used to present everyday life. Rather than being treated as a copy or a representation of everyday life, we may find that drama is much more like the real thing, and we may be able to use examples from drama to shed some light on the ways in which we make the everyday social life visible and meaningful. We can see more clearly what is happening when we consider a piece of drama. It becomes more transparent because the participants in these dramatic activities are concerned to show that what they are doing is make-believe. They have to present experience on two levels simultaneously. They present the make-believe world of the dramatic context whilst, at the same time, presenting the everyday world of teachers and pupils doing drama lessons. On both levels the participants take account of the rules which govern the use of language in context. Through close analysis, we should be able to see that both levels are produced and sustained in similar ways. The rules which enable the participants (and outside observers) to make sense of the dramatic action are the same rules which are routinely recoverable in the activities of people in everyday life and which are described in Bruner's (1987) 'cultural grammar', or the ethnomethodologists'
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'stock of knowledge at hand' (Garfinkel, 1967). We depend upon these conventional rules to present everyday and make-believe contexts. Situations developed in drama are not therefore just reflections or artful copies of everyday occurrences. In a story, meaning is developed through the words and structures of the story (Ashworth, 1988: 23) and not by reference to some real or imaginary world represented in the story but existing beyond the story. Bruner showed that, 'the story's indifference to extra-linguistic reality underlies the fact that it has a structure that is internal to discourse' (Bruner, 1990: 44). The same may be said of drama, where the participants draw on their knowledge and experience of everyday life to present a dramatic situation which is characteristic of everyday life rather than a representation of it. Children engaging in spontaneous drama, in the classroom or the playground, are not following scripts like actors in a play, but they are creating new lives and new landscapes in which the future is uncertain and can be described only by predictions and expectations. This 'living through' quality (Bolton, 1992) provides the generative force in drama and it provides the link between drama and everyday life. It may be lost altogether when drama is treated as an opportunity to reproduce or reconstruct or recreate 'real' life in fanciful and pretend ways. All social experience is managed and sustained through the work done by those involved to present it as real or as if it were real. The managed, make-believe quality of the social life is made explicit in dramatic and playful activities but it is not marked in our presentation of everyday life. The distinction, therefore, between everyday and make-believe experiences is not described by the simple assumption that one is real whilst the other is unreal, but in our agreement to treat everyday experiences as real and dramatic experiences as if they were real. We have to live our lives, of course, by attending to the simple assumption and being quite clear where real life ends and make-believe begins. However, when we start to look at the ways in which people talk and act in their lives we may come to appreciate that the two realities are different in that we routinely present everyday life as 'given' and dramatic experience as 'make-believe'. Seeing how dramatic contexts are constructed should help us to see how everyday life is constructed. A direct link between making everyday and make-believe experience meaningful has profound implications for drama in education. In this paper I want to consider a piece of drama developed by a group of eight year old children and a teacher (Millward, 1988; Millward, 1990). The work from which their drama was taken began with a small group discussion about living by volcanoes. The discussion was conducted by one teacher and six children, and it was observed by a second teacher. After a while, the second teacher interrupted the discussion and moved it into drama by asking the children to imagine they were the people who lived in a small village at the base of a volcano. The teacher said that he would be in role in the drama as a stranger seeking information about their living conditions. Three months later, the second teacher returned to develop the work with the children. The extract is taken from this later work. The piece of drama (see the transcript, which follows) has all the characteristics of an everyday social engagement and, in many ways, it looks very like 'real life'. In this drama, a stranger (the teacher in role) is seeking to join a group of people who live below a great volcano. In earlier stages of the drama, the stranger had
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discovered that in order to be allowed to join the group he must first get the permission of the priests in the community (some of the children in role) to climb the great volcano. If he managed to get permission, and if he succeeded in climbing the mountain and was able to return safely to the village, then he would be allowed to join the group. By the beginning of this extract from the drama, the teacher in role has successfully sought the help of two members of the village (the children in role) who have agreed to act as 'guides' on his journey to the top of the mountain. He is about to learn from his guides (the children in role) that the climb is fraught with difficulties, that guardians of the mountains will try to prevent him succeeding and that most of those who have gone before him have failed. He will realise that he is likely to fail, and that if he does fail, he is unlikely to leave the mountain alive! Just before the stranger and his guides are due to meet the priests and seek their permission for the climb, the teacher (through his role in the drama) introduces a time of waiting. This 'waiting time' should function in the everyday context, where a group of children and their teacher are doing some drama, to provide the participants with the opportunity to reflect upon what has happened and to consider how their drama might develop. At the same time, it should be a feature of the dramatic experience and part of the characters' lives on the volcano. I want to consider some of the ways in which the teacher and the children present the 'waiting time' so that both the dramatic and everyday contexts are indicated. This 'waiting time' is not just a gap in the drama, a time when the participants wait for things to get going again, when they have nothing to do. As with any other part of the drama, it has to be managed and sustained through the language and the actions of the children and their teacher. The characters in the drama (the guides and the stranger) also have to present themselves as waiting. In this way there are two 'waiting occasions' to be presented and they have to be presented at the same time. There is the 'waiting' experience of the children and their teacher as they review the drama and make preparations for the next piece, and the 'waiting' experience within the drama as the guides and the stranger wait to be called by the priests. Each of the contributions made by the participants serves to present the two levels of experience and is recoverable on each level. Each contribution serves to describe the make-believe context of by 'volcano dwelling people' and the everyday context of teachers and children doing some drama. It seems important to see how a group of children and their teacher engage in conversation to produce a dramatic situation which is ordered, structured and patterned. It is possible, for example, to see how the turn taking is managed and to appreciate how each contribution is made appropriate and serves to provide a context for further contributions. We should be able to appreciate that the words which follow are not just the words people use whilst they are waiting, but the words through which they give character to the waiting. They are the means whereby they make waiting a recognisable activity, and by which we might reasonably conclude that these people are waiting. Whether they are waiting in the everyday or dramatic contexts may not be immediately relevant.
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Here is the transcript of the piece of drama which is characterised by the 'waiting time'. 1 Teacher: How long do you think we're going to have 2 to wait? 3 Mark: Wh/ 4 Teacher: We seem to have been here for ages 5 already 6 Ian: Nearly two hours 7 Shirley: They've got to get the boat all (ready 8 Teacher: (Yeah 9 Shirley: Make sure that it's . . . all right 10 because/ 11 Teacher: Yeah 12 Shirley: of the river 13 Julia: You might not be warm, but if . . . if you're 14 not, you're not to touch the river . . . 15 (at all 16 Teacher: (All right 17 Julia: Otherwise you'll burn 18 Teacher: Will I? Yes, yes . . . I heard about that 19 I didn't sleep very well you know. It 20 seems ages . . . I seem to have been awake 21 for ages, and I've got myself all ready 22 and . . . I'm all eager to go, you know, 23 and now .. we.. we're not getting anywhere 24 Look/ 25 Julia: They'll call for you soon 26 Teacher: Will they? I don't suppose they rush 27 for anybody do they? 28 Several: No 29 Teacher: No 30 Julia: They have to . . . be careful with it . . . so 31 that they know whether you're good 32 enough or not to go 33 Teacher: Well, I can understand that. It's a bit 34 cold isn't it, though, down here? 35 Shirley: Mmm 36 Teacher: Looks misty up (there on the mountain 37 too 38 Mark: (It's really hot up here 39 Shirley: Yes well, it really is very hot up there 40 Teacher: Is it? How many times have you been up? 41 Shirley: Mmm/ 42 Julia: We've all been up once when we had to 43 (go up 44 Teacher: (Have you? 45 Shirley: Yeah
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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92
Teacher:
Shirley: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Ian: Teacher: Bev: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher:
Bev: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Teacher: Julia: Teacher:
Julia: Mark:
But you've been up with other people haven't you . . . or not . . . or is this the first time you've ever gone up (with someone like me? (It's the first time I've been up with someone like (you (Is it? Yeah Have any of you done that before, taken someone up for . . . for this (trial? (I've been up once Mmm Did they/ I've been three times Have you? She's been up a lot. (She's the oldest (You've been up a lot then, yeah And, and did the people who you go up with, did they all get there . . . or did any of them get there . . . or none of them? One got swallowed up Did he? Oh God It's terrible if you (lost one like that (It's the waiting, you know In fact/ I think if I could be on my way (I wouldn't mind (Yeah It's just standing here waiting or sitting waiting Well . . . a long time ago we only had two priests Mmm And er . . . I think . . . em . . . Sapphire and I went up with one of the priests when we were . . . when they came here Did you? Does every . . . does anyone ever get tired of just waiting? I mean do you think this is part of the test, really . . . just keeping us waiting? do you think/ Yeah Yes, once someone came and just went off ***********
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93 Shirley: Yeah. They start getting impatient/ 94 Teacher: I can 95 understand it, yeah 96 Shirley: . . . or . . . er . . . they're not going to be 97 good enough 98 Teacher: Yeah 99 Julia: I don't think you'll be (able to take 100 your. . . er. . . 101Mark: (Your ******* 102Julia: . . . tape.. recorder . . . 103Teacher: Won't I? 104Julia: up with you because they'll . . . they'll 105 take everything off you apart from/ 106Teacher: Will they? 107Julia: You know what you've gone/ 108Shirley: And then we'll 109 maybe (can hide it/ 110Teacher: (Well . . . yeah 111Shirley: when you/ 112Teacher: I'd like it you know, because it 113 reminds me of things that we saw and 114 talked about, you know, on the (way up 115Shirley: (I'll 116 hide it 117Julia: Could you put it under your belt? 118Shirley: Yeah 119Bev: Emerald came up with me once but she 120 was very worried and she went 121 (straight back down 122Teacher: (Did she? 123Bev: Mmm 124Teacher: Yeah 125Mark: A man who went up came back the next day 126 and . . . the priests . . . the priests wouldn't 127 let him alone because of . . . he wouldn't . . . he wouldn't . . . 128Teacher: Really? I wouldn't come back. So if . . . 129 if. . . I . . . if. . . if you go, you really got to 130 keep going because the priests or . . . 131 They'll make you stay won't they . . . if they . . . 132 once you've started? 133Julia: You might meet . . . you might meet some 134 people up there 135Teacher: Yeah 136Julia: They'll try and put you off but don't 137 take any notice of them 138Shirley: Push through them 139Teacher: Really?
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140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 156 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186
Shirley: Julia: Teacher: Bev: Julia: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Teacher: Julia: Teacher All Teacher: Bev: Julia: Teacher: Julia: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Shirley: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Shirley:
Teacher:
We'll tell you what to do They'll . . . they'll show you bones and tombstones and all sorts of things Well that's (not very nice, is it? (It's tricks It's all tricks . . . they're all rubber. They feel like real things but they're all made of rubber It makes me (a bit nervous. I'm not at sure at all . . . sure . . . (It's to make you ******* put (off (I'm happy about that If you rub two bones together you'll hear like . . . a metal scraping Really? If you rub those together you won't hear anything Well, perhaps we won't meet them. Do you always meet them? Yeah. Do you? (Oh golly (They're always there (They're always there They never told me about that before, did they? There's some nice people further up though Yes, very (nice people. (Are there? Oh, this takes so long. I wish I could get going now Gosh, they should be calling for you any minute now Any minute (yes. (***** they? They're not, they'll be/ [the bells rings] What's that? There's (the bell (Yeah, come now/ What do I do? I'll hide it [there is a lot of bustle as they get to their feet, hide the tape recorder and go towards the boat] Well, what do I do?
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187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200
Julia: Teacher:
Teacher: Ian: Teacher: Bev: Teacher: Mark:
Tell **** us again Do I? Just the same as before? Well I'll follow you. You tell me where . . . show me where to go [they move to the side of the boat] What a marvellous boat . . . isn't it wonderful? Is this only ever got out for people who are doing this journey? Mmm Th-then they've gone to all this trouble just for me? Yes Marvellous You may now enter the boat
Extract from the transcript (Millward, 1988 (Vol.2) 46-52). The best way forward is to examine the piece of drama as a sequence of contributions so that we can appreciate how a coherent experience is developed over time. Clearly, if this 'waiting time', this 'gap' in the affairs of the characters, can be shown to be carefully managed then it is likely that other parts of the drama will provide much richer examples of meaning making activities. There is a sense in which life is just idling here as the characters wait for permission to step into the boat. The drama has bought them to this point and, when the waiting is over, it will carry them on again. In the meantime, it seems, the participants do not have to do very much except sit around, and wait. If this 'waiting time', on both the dramatic and everyday levels, can be shown to be carefully managed and sustained, it should encourage us to search for the managed quality in all aspects of social experience. It is not likely that we will be disappointed if we decline to take either our everyday or make-believe lives for granted. We just have to remember that the socially described experience of waiting is presented through the participants' language and is not part of a 'real' event which lurks beyond, and is described through, what people say and do as they wait. People choose to wait, even when they are told to wait, and it is not enough simply to wait. They have to demonstrate that they are waiting. Through analysis of this extract, I will try to show how the participants demonstrate, both explicitly and implicitly, to themselves and outside observers (who, for example, may be reading the transcript) that they are waiting, and that, as a result of this presentation, they can share the familiar experience of waiting. I will try to do so by identifying some of the typical ways in which 'waiting' is managed. The teacher, in role as the stranger, begins this section of the drama by drawing attention to the waiting and by giving it a history; he says, 'we seem to have been here for ages already', (L1-5) and Ian tells him how long that 'ages' really is or, perhaps, how long he will have to wait, 'nearly two hours' (L6). We cannot be sure what Ian is up to, but we know he is quantifying the waiting time and helping to make it seem real. Ian and the teacher appear to be building a past and a future for the 'waiting' and, in doing so, show it to be a kind of gap in life's progress which is also a part of life's progress. They are building stability and
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coherence into the dramatic experience and they are also creating a shared history or view of their world. They are building a basis for future negotiation. Meanwhile, Shirley accounts for the waiting, and gives it meaning within the drama, when she says 'They've got to get the boat ready' (L7). The participants are shown to be waiting purposefully within the dramatic context. They are not just allowing time to slip by in the drama or showing that, as children and teachers in the everyday world of the classroom, they do not know what to do next in the drama. They are setting about the business of presenting the experience of waiting and Julia draws attention to the situation, and to the dangers of the volcano (L13-17). The teacher in role as the stranger builds upon their contributions in order to characterise the nature of waiting, 'I seem to have been awake for ages, and I've got myself all ready to go . . . and I'm all eager to go . . . and we're not getting anywhere' (L20-23). This is typical of waiting in everyday and dramatic situations. Already, in their waiting, we can see the children presenting themselves as guides who know about the conditions which surround the waiting time, and the teacher as a stranger who knows little about what is going on. Julia, as one of the guides, tries to reassure the stranger and put him at his ease, 'They'll call for you soon' (L25), she says. How often have these words been used for those who wait and worry? They serve to put the stranger in place as the one who waits authentically and does not know the answers; the guide in place as one who can explain what is happening to a stranger, who does not know what is happening; and the priests in place as the people who must be waited upon and who will not 'rush for anybody' (L26). These contributions describe the waiting, the nature of waiting and the roles and relationships of those who wait. They are situated, in that this is a unique account of waiting, but they are drawn from countless experiences in everyday and make-believe contexts. This is the reflexive force of all meaning making activities. The waiting demonstrates the participants' knowledge and understanding of 'waiting' in the real world and, in turn, affects and refines that knowledge. At the same time, many of the utterances work as 'stage directions' which guide the participants through the drama. There is information about how long they will be expected to present the waiting, 'nearly two hours' (L6) (surely in dramatic rather than real time!), and about when they will be required to bring it to an end, 'they'll call for you soon' (L25). These directions tell the children and their teacher how to progress with the drama and sometimes they are presented as direct instructions to the children to engage in the drama, 'How long do you think we're going to have to wait?' (L1). They work inside the drama to illuminate the dramatic context, and outside the drama to provide the children with instructions for managing the dramatic context. The teacher has professional concerns and wants to use his contributions to slow down the action and to shift the emphasis away from plot and towards a reflection upon experience. This can be done by helping the children to present a 'waiting time'. It does not just happen accidentally, on either level. It is deliberately constructed and negotiated by the participants. Julia then supplies an edge of tension which accompanies all dramatic engagements as well as our experience of waiting for something to happen which
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is giving us cause for concern, 'They have to be careful . . . so that they know whether you are good enough or not' (L30-32). Julia is pointing directly to the different 'rights' enjoyed by each of the participant groups in the drama, and the extra status which some of them enjoy over the others. She is attending to the hierarchical structure which affords added status to the priests and which puts the stranger below the guides. She is drawing upon the extra rights given to those who sit in judgement over others. These rights are not simply invested in judges but described in situations where people (priests, for example) judge others and where their judgements affect the lives of others (strangers, for example). Julia is pointing to the different levels of authority which characterise our social experience but which are socially presented when people like Julia try to explain what is happening. The edge of tension is presented as Julia uncovers the powerful relationships which inform all institutions. The stranger is not just waiting. He is waiting to be tested. And, of course, there are familiar and conventional strategies for presenting, and coping with, nerve-wracking waits. The participants look about themselves and, typically, they talk about the weather, but they focus, in a negative way, on the mountain which becomes the symbol of the challenge presented to the stranger, 'It's a bit cold, isn't it?' (L33-34) 'It's misty up on the mountain' (L36) 'It's really very hot up there' (L39) They shift away from talking about the waiting time, to looking at the context of their waiting. Then, as in the way of all people who wait, they talk about their experiences, 'How many times have you been up?' (L40). The guides develop their limited experience of the mountain (L42-57) but they also point to the oldest who has 'been up a lot' (L62). Whilst presenting the dramatic experience of waiting, contributions and exchanges, such as these, also serve to elaborate the relationship between the stranger, who can only guess at the nature of conditions on the mountain, 'Looks misty up there on the mountain' (L36) and the guides, who have personal experience of what it is like and who can talk out of their knowledge. In asking for information (wondering about life on the mountain) and in providing information, the participants make their positions and relationships clear. They help to define the status enjoyed by each group and they point, again, to the powerful relationships which exist between the groups and which serve to characterise the groups. We can see the stranger and the guides in the way they speak and act in relation to one another and to the developing context, and this is one of the ways in which the participants present their roles in the drama. Another way is through the management of exchanges at a structural level. It is interesting to see, for example, that as the children build up their roles as experts, the teacher's role as the stranger, of 'inferior status' within the dramatic situation, is clearly demonstrated. It can be seen in the way in which the exchanges are managed and, particularly, in the manner of the stranger's responses to the children. This is shown in the following exchanges:
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42 43 44 50 51 52 56 59 60 61
Julia: Teacher: Shirley: Teacher: Julia: Teacher: Bev: Teacher:
We've all been up once when we had to (go up (Have you? It's the first time I've been up with someone like (you (Is it? (I've been up once Did they/ I've been three times Have you?
These short responses give the children's contributions the apparent status of initiations, for they are 'heard' as the first part statements of 'adjacency pairs' (Sacks, et al., 1974: 696-735) to which the teacher has responded. The children, as the guides in the drama, are given extra rights in the dramatic context as they seem to control the development of the conversation through their use of initiations. The stranger only responds and his responses are constrained or even determined by the children's initiating utterances or first part exchange. However, though the children's statements are heard and experienced as initiations, they can also be analysed as responses to the stranger's questions, 'Is this the first time you've ever gone up' (L47) and 'Have any of you done that before, taken someone up for . . . this trial?' (L54-55). In this sense they are not first part initiations at all. The structure of the exchange has been presented to support the status of the participants (Millward, 1988: 273). By giving the children's contributions the appearance and extra status in the exchange of first part adjacency pairs, the teacher can indicate their roles as experts who can choose to make statements about volcanoes. Features such as these, demonstrate the nature of the rules which govern everyday conversations and the presentation of the social life. They show, as well, how conversations can be manipulated in ways which affect the status of the participants. It is fortunate that we do not have to recreate artfully experience of this kind when we engage in dramatic presentations of the social life, and good that we can draw upon our everyday experience (perhaps as teachers) to guide the exchanges in ways which empower particular groups. The children and their teacher have worked together to establish the waiting time and they have used it to put themselves in place as guides (with different levels of experience) and a stranger. Now they are ready to reflect upon the stranger's worries about the way things might work out once the waiting is over. They shift the level of the experience by moving from comments on the weather and their suitability as guides, to consideration of a possible outcome to the stranger's venture, 'One got swallowed up' (L68). The news is not good! It certainly sharpens up the stranger's thoughts about the waiting, and the extra level of tension is reflected in his response, 'Oh God' (L69). Two things happen at this point, Shirley says 'It's terrible if you lost one like that', (L70) and in one line and, at a stroke, describes her role as a professional guide and puts the stranger in role as one of many who has sought to reach the great god. It is an
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impressive contribution, and we are immediately in touch with the professional person who is appropriately distanced from emotional involvement, and who can speak in a dispassionate and objective way but who is affected when the expected results are not achieved. We might be listening to a surgeon talking of a failed operation. Shirley can achieve this level of understanding, with its strange mixture of sympathy and detachment and find the means to speak of what she felt, because she is attentive to a developing context and is prepared to speak and act appropriately. Her words were drawn from the context even as they showed the participants how to interpret the context. It is not surprising that the teacher is prompted to turn their attention to the essence of waiting for something fearful to happen, 'It's the waiting, you know. I think if I could be on my way, I wouldn't mind' (L74-75). The others are happy to develop the waiting context and, in a way which is typical of all who wait, they start to tell stories, 'Well, a long time ago we only had two priests and Sapphire and I went up. . .' (L79-83). The stranger, however, is inattentive and cannot take his mind off the waiting, 'Does anyone ever get tired of just waiting? I mean, do you think this is part of the test?' (L85-87). The guides build up the tension and draw attention to the waiting by talking of those who 'just went off' (L9192) and of those waiters who 'start getting impatient' (L93), and they link the waiting to the struggle ahead as they describe the ones who think 'they're not going to be good enough' (L96-97). It is quite easy to see how the dramatic situation is developed through the presentation of their waiting. They wait in the words they use to wait, and they use their waiting to describe their world. They talk and act in ways which are typical and characteristic of people who wait. No one has told them what to do and say, but they know how to present waiting effectively. They are familiar with the 'cultural grammar' and the linguistic conventions of waiting. They know they must do more than just hang about. They have to create waiting time. When people wait, they look to the end of their waiting and they start to think what must be done once the waiting is over. The stranger and the guides also make good use of their waiting and they have fun with their waiting. Julia turns their attention to the demands made of those who intend to climb, 'They'll take everything off you' (L104-105) and she focuses on the teacher's tape recorder, 'I don't think you'll be able to take your tape recorder' (L99-102). In doing this, she is challenging the teacher through the different roles they have in the drama. She is putting him on the spot. As Julia, she knows that the tape recorder is essential to the teacher (who, of course, is also presenting himself as a researcher). However, as a guide in the dramatic context, she can ask him to leave it behind. If the teacher wants to preserve the drama, and if the researcher wants to safeguard his data, he has to look after the tape recorder within the dramatic context. Julia is playing a dangerous game here. She is drawing attention to the teacher and to the researcher behind the role by drawing the tape recorder (with its insistently spinning wheels and its purpose rooted in the everyday world) into the dramatic context. Julia is bringing something from the everyday world into the drama and if it is not to threaten the drama, its purpose must be transformed by the drama. Without this transformation, the tape recorder could easily shatter
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the make-believe world for there is no drama left when the characters get a glimpse of a real world beyond their fictional lives. The teacher is being challenged through the drama. The teacher, who is also the researcher, has to think quickly in order to keep the drama going, and he has to think very smartly if he is not to lose his data. Hence his reply (L112-114). Fortunately, Shirley and Julia are on their toes as well. Shirley says, 'I'll hide it' (L115) and Julia makes a useful suggestion, 'Could you put it under your belt?' (L117). These statements can be read on both levels of experience. They can be seen as a response in the everyday world where children make arrangements to record their drama without the tape recorder featuring in the dramatic context ('hide it under the table', for example, or 'tie it on your belt and we'll just ignore it'). Alternatively, they can be treated as a response in the dramatic context where the stranger wants a secret recording of his meeting with the priests. It is soon clear that the children want to fold the tape recorder into the drama and make it a feature of the dramatic context. This seems sensible for they all have an interest in keeping the drama going. Even though the children might like to play games with the teacher, they are just as concerned as the teacher is to preserve the drama and their roles within it. It may be clever, but it is not surprising that Shirley is happy to take the tape recorder and keep it under her belt (L117). This act ensures her continuing presence in the drama and reinforces the teacher's status within the social hierarchy of the classroom. Whilst the researcher is seeking to safeguard his data and the teacher wants to provide a dramatic context within which the children can learn, the children like doing drama and are not very keen to go back to the classroom and join the other children in their regular work. All are interested in preserving the life of their characters in the drama, and no one likes to be 'written out'. From the children's point of view, it must have been fun to use the drama to make the teacher sweat a bit, but it is good to draw back from the abyss for it is in nobody's interest to destroy the drama. Yet it remains remarkable, for the tape recorder, which could have so easily threatened the drama, is used to elaborate the dramatic context and to give it an extra touch of stability. The dramatic situation is treated by the stranger as an event which should be recorded and remembered, an event which could be re-lived in the future. In conspiring to make the taperecorder a feature of the dramatic context, the participants collaborate to uphold the 'living through' quality of the drama even as it is most threatened. The dramatic context is strengthened by this playful threat. The guides carry on telling stories, 'Emerald came up with me once . . .' (L119-121) and 'A man went up came back the next day . . .' (L125-127). The stories are typical of waiting times. However, it also important to appreciate that these little contributions are not developed stories, but merely sufficient to suggest story telling. They stand for storytelling activities to indicate stories which, within the conventions of drama, do not have to be finished. They also serve to keep the stranger on edge. He has to think about the waiting and what he must do when the waiting is over. He is forced to consider the power of the priests and he is helped to appreciate more keenly his difficult position. Everyone, is learning more about the situation, for the stories contain aspects of their relationships with one another: the guides with the people they lead, the
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experts and the stranger, the priests. It is well done, and there is not a wasted line nor a contribution which does not help to present the dramatic context by making visible, and meaningful, the waiting time. They also use the waiting time to prepare for the next stage of the drama. They talk about what will happen in the drama before it happens. In their waiting, they develop a shared in common context which they can later explore dramatically. It is important to appreciate that the children have now taken much of the responsibility for developing the drama, 'You might meet some people up there [who'll] try and put you off but don't take any notice of them' (L133-137). In presenting themselves as knowledgeable guides and the teacher as a naive stranger, they describe how the drama will unfold and determine how the stranger must react. As Julia prepares him for what he will see, 'They'll show you bones and tombstones and all sorts of things' (L141-142), Shirley gives him guidance 'We'll tell you what to do' (L140) and shows him what he has to do, 'Push through them' (L138). Beverley, meanwhile, insists that he sees beyond the illusion, 'It's tricks' (L144) and Julia elaborates her contribution, 'It's all tricks . . . they're all rubber' (L145). She goes on to make clear the distinction between make-believe and reality, 'They feel like real things but they're all made of rubber' (L146-147). The levels of reality represented here are fascinating. There is a teacher playing a stranger and there are pupils (some of whom will later be playing guardians) playing guides, and they are presenting make-believe bones and tombstones which are shown to be illusions, 'If you rub two bones together you'll hear like a metal scraping. If you rub those together you won't hear anything' (L153-157). The stranger's comment, 'Really?' (L155) is apt on many levels. From these extracts it can be seen that the participants are staking out their roles and relationships within the drama that will follow. The children are giving themselves a dramatic future and they are using this time to try out their roles as guides and guardians before having to be guides and guardians. They are developing a storyline and a narrative, before they have to develop it dramatically. The guides keep up the pressure and though the stranger seeks some crumbs of comfort to help him through the waiting, 'Perhaps we won't meet them' (L158), they make him confront the consequences of his decision to climb, 'They're always there' (L162), says Beverley. 'They're always there' (L163) repeats Julia. But in case he gets too downhearted, Julia offers him some encouragement, 'There's some nice people further up though' (L166-167). 'Yes, very nice people' (L168), says Shirley. By now, though, the teacher and the children are ready to bring the waiting to an end, 'Oh this takes so long. I wish I could get going now' (L170-171). This contribution works directly in the dramatic context where the stranger is eager to be on his way, and directly in the everyday context where the teacher is concerned to move the children to the next stage of the drama. Julia uses her language to illuminate both contexts (the dramatic and the everyday), 'Gosh, they should be calling for you any minute now' (L172-173) and Shirley does the same, 'Any minute, yes' (L174). The priests and the children playing the priests understand what is happening on both levels and work collaboratively
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to advance the drama. They ring the bell (L177) and the waiting time is ended. Of course, it does not just stop; it is brought to an end by the participants working through their characters, and now another phase of the dramatic experience can be presented. From the teacher wondering how long they will have to wait (L1-2) to the ringing of the bell to mark the end of the waiting (L177), the waiting period has been managed and made visible through the talk and actions of the participants. When we look at a piece of dramatic or everyday experience in this way, everything appears to come together. We can uncover a structure and we can see how it was constructed. Every word and phrase, every action, seems to be purposeful and is directed towards creating the waiting time. We can account for every contribution. It is as if each piece were part of a carefully crafted play (Millward, 1990). We could imagine a playwright behind the text and appreciate why he or she had penned each line. We can understand what the playwright was trying to do and the desired effect. Yet this is not the text of a play, but the transcript of a piece of 'living through drama'. It was produced, spontaneously, by a group of children and their teacher. Nothing was planned and no word has been blotted, but it is not remarkable. It 'works' because the participants are attentive to each other and to the situation they are creating; because they understand what is happening and can act and speak in an appropriate manner; because they are concerned to make it meaningful and to treat life on the volcano and each contribution towards the presentation of that life, as being meaningful; and because the participants to the drama (and outside observers) are concerned to find it sensible and coherent by describing the ordered, patterned structure of the drama. Each person contributes out of his or her own interests and concerns whilst yet being mindful of what the others are doing. They want the dramatic context and their roles within it to thrive. That is all that every one of us wants as we go about the business of making everyday and make-believe experience visible and meaningful. The children in this drama are drawing upon their developing communicative competence and their experience of waiting in everyday life. Through their contributions to the drama, they are able to demonstrate and refine their sociolinguistic strategies. The children use these strategies to present the dramatic context and their experience in the drama enables them to make more effective use of the strategies. In this sense, dramatic experience connects directly with everyday experience and drama can illuminate and enrich our experience of living. References Ashworth, E. (1988) Language Policy in the Primary School. London: Croom Helm. Benson, D. and Hughes, J.A. (1983) The Perspective of Ethnomethodology. London: Longman. Berger, P. and Luckman, T. (1960) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Bolton, G. (1992) New Perspectives on Classroom Drama. London: Simon & Schuster. Bruner, J. (1987) The transactional self. In J. Bruner and H. Haste (eds) Making Sense: The Child's Construction of the World. London: Routledge. (1990) In J. Bruner and H. Haste (eds) Making Sense: The Child's Construction of the World. London: Routledge. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
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Gipps, C. (1992) What We Know About Effective Primary Teaching. London: Tufnell Press. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Hardy, B. (1977) Narrative as a primary act of mind. In M. Meek, A. Warlow and G. Barton (eds) The Cool Web. London: The Bodley Head. Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Millward, P. (1988) The language of drama. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, England. Rosen, B. (1988) And None of It was Nonsense: The Power of Storytelling in School. London: Mary Glasgow Publications. (1990) Drama as a well-made play. Language Arts 67 (2). Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A. and Jefferson, G. (1974) A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50, 696-735. Thompson, L. (1996) The development of pragmatic competence. Current Issues in Language and Society 3 (1).
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Metaphor, Play and Drama: The Role of the Symbolic in the Development of Sociolinguistic Competence Zazie Todd Department of Psychology, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH In this paper I explore the inter-relationships between metaphor, play and drama, and the roles they play in the development of sociolinguistic competence. I concentrate particularly on the role of symbolic play in the development of metaphor, and the importance of metaphor in discourse. Symbolic play has long been seen as important in child development and I show how metaphor is another of the abilities that arises from pretend play. I then look at the question of what happens to the skills used in pretend play as children grow older, and how they can continue to be developed through drama. Finally, I examine the nature of autism, a condition marked by an absence of both symbolic play and metaphor, to see what light this can shed on the links between the two. Introduction. According to the dictionary, metaphor is using a term or phrase used to describe something to which it imaginatively but not literally applies; in other words, it is 'calling a thing by another name' (Aristotle). An early example is from a child of four who said he had a 'tower bruise' (Todd & Clarke, 1996). Although it is recognised that metaphor can occur visually and pictorially (Kennedy, 1982) and in action (Dent-Read & Szokolszky, 1993), in this paper I will be concentrating on the linguistic manifestation of metaphor. Many of my comments however could apply in general to metaphor in these other forms (a link which is perhaps underlined if we consider Rom Harré's method of substituting suitable verbal forms in order to study nonverbal communication; Harré & Gillett, 1994). Children use metaphor from around two years old (Billow, 1981; Winner, 1988). However, there appears to be a lag between production and comprehension of metaphor (Vosniadou, 1987) which means children are able to produce metaphorical utterances before they can comprehend those of others. In fact many young children's overextensions (for example using the word 'ball' to refer to all things round) could be said to be constructed along metaphorical principles; this is what Nerlich & Todd (1996) call 'compelled metaphorical (or metonymical) overextensions'. Although overextensions are clearly wrong (mistakes because the child does not know the precise word) and not intended as metaphor, they nevertheless use metaphoric relations as a process to provide new terms. Hence, it is necessary to take a child-centred view of metaphor, as children's conceptions of what is and is not metaphorical have been shown to be different to adults' (Cameron, 1996a, 1996b). Metaphor is generally seen as having important cognitive functions, structuring our mental representations as well as the ways we talk about the world. This
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is seen as a central aspect of metaphor in both cognitivist and experiential-realist approaches. For example, Kittay (1987) talks about metaphor as 're-arranging the furniture of the mind'. In a similar vein, Gibbs (1994: 8) argues that: our basic metaphorical conceptualizations of experience constrain how we think creatively and express our ideas in both everyday and literary discourse . . . In this way, metaphor does not just help us see things in new ways. Metaphor constitutes much of our experience and helps constrain the way we think and speak of our ordinary lives. However, I would like to argue that this emphasis on the cognitive properties of metaphor has a tendency to remove it from its context, and that it is only when studied in its 'naturally-occurring' setting that we can get a real picture of the importance of metaphor. In other words, it is necessary to take a more discursive approach. While the structuring of metaphors according to the underlying principle (such as ARGUMENT IS WAR) is undoubtably useful, it is important to remember that metaphor functions not just at a cognitive level, but also has sociolinguistic functions (Edwards, 1997). To illustrate this, I will use an example from the ARGUMENT IS WAR frame. Lakoff & Johnson have cited as examples of this sayings such as He attacked the weak point of my argument; To defend a position; and Her criticisms were right on target (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) . This metaphor can also be seen to structure children's discussions about arguments. Hale et al. (1995) report on the metaphors which children used in focus group discussions about conflicts between themselves and other children. The idea of conflict as explosion/aggression was found in many of the discussions. Another metaphor was that of conflict as a place. For younger children in the study (elementary school), it was seen as something you 'get into' or 'out of', as in 'I have another way of gettin' into a fight'. For older (middle school) children in the study, it was a place that was more transient and could move. For example, one child when asked how you could tell a conflict was over said 'You're not thinking about what's behind you'. We can see from this one way in which a metaphor can change or develop over time, and something that begins as a very basic metaphor (in or out of the place) becomes more structured when used by older children. But apart from conceptual differences in the use of the metaphor by children of different ages, the similarities at a sociolinguistic level are quite striking. In both cases, they signify that conflict or fights are not things that the child seeks out. If it is 'behind you' then it might perhaps creep up on you, but you are not walking into (or causing) it; if you 'get into' a fight, again you are getting involved passively. In both cases, the child is learning how to distance themselves from the source of protagonism. Of course the experiential-realist approach is quite capable of recognising the rhetorical nature of metaphor, but because of the emphasis it places on mental representations and the tendency to consider metaphors as systems, in isolation from the direct discursive context, it has a tendency to neglect the sociolinguistic aspects. Metaphor and Play Symbolic play has long been seen as important in the development of language and cognitive function (e.g. Tamis-LeMonda & Bernstein, 1994; Bornstein &
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O'Reilly, 1993; Bretherton & Bates, 1984). It has also been seen as the root of metaphor. Many early studies of children's use of metaphor had a tendency to include 'symbolic play metaphors', or renamings which are produced by children during pretend play sessions. For example, Winner (1988) in her study of a child, Adam's, use of metaphor, found that the type of metaphor produced changed with age from 62% 'symbolic play metaphors' at age two to 76% sensory metaphors at age four. An example of a metaphorical renaming in play would be the way in which a broom can be used as a hobby horse. However as MarjanovicShane (1989) argues, while metaphor is some kind of statement about reality (even though not literally true), play is just pretend: 'Children's utterances that link real objects to the fictive plane (the so-called renamings) are not metaphors about these objects but simple introductions of segments of the fictive plane' (p. 229). She argues that while there is a link between symbolic play and metaphor, it is more complex than is currently understood. I wish to explore this link between metaphor and symbolic play further, before going on to consider the role of drama in furthering some of the skills learnt through pretend play. The importance of play for language development has been studied by many authors. Mead (1934) considered symbolic interaction to be of vital importance in social communication. Through taking the roles of individual others, and the group as a whole (the 'generalised other') people learn cultural values and beliefs. While this was a social psychological, not developmental, theory it nevertheless illustrates that pretend play has the potential not just for affecting our cognitive and representational abilities but also those at a more social level. The relationship between play and the development of symbolic understanding was also studied by Vygotsky (1986), who argued that play was the main source of development in the preschool years, and is a zone of proximal development. Play affords the child the opportunity to acquire both social and imaginative abilities, and to consider what might be possible rather than what is. Rather than dwell on the ideas of Mead and Vygotsky, and the lines of research which developed from their ideas, I wish instead to concentrate on the links between play and metaphor. The parallel between symbolic play and metaphor is that in both, the child becomes aware of another standpoint or approach to their own. In metaphor, they exploit the potential of language to express a meaning different from the one which it normally has; and in symbolic play, they use objects and themselves in the same way (for example when pretending to be a doctor). I would argue that in both the skills which are being developed are cognitive (learning about similarities between things/roles) and social (learning about discourse and empathy with other viewpoints). Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein (1994) found a link between symbolic play at 13 months and linguistic diversity at 20 months (but not vocabulary size). There are several implications for metaphor here. Perhaps as children use metaphorically-based renamings in play, they are more likely to get promptings (from other children, parents etc.) about the real (literal) names for the objects they are playing with. The opportunity to play would also allow children to explore perceptual or action features of objects or roles, which could then be exploited in the form of metaphor. This could represent both the beginnings of the use of metaphor to extend the lexicon, and lead to an increase in metaphor production itself.
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McCune (1995) carried out a cross-sectional and longitudinal study of the links between play and language. Children whose play behaviour showed that they had made particular representational transitions also showed language developments that McCune had hypothesised would be underlined by the same mental representations. For example, children in the cross-sectional sample who had reached a Level 4 stage of independent play, in which they showed the onset of combinations in play, were also able to use combinations of words in language. The longitudinal sample provided some information about time lags between occurrence of both types of combinations. Similar results were found in two other areas (the onset of the lexicon and of pretending, and the beginning of rule-governed language with onset of play Level 5, or 'hierarchical pretend'). McCune is not suggesting a causal link between play and language; rather her hypothesis is that parallel developments in both play and language occur as a result of underlying changes in a child's cognitive abilities. Another area in which we could look for links between the child's symbolic play development and language is to investigate whether there are specific correlations between play and metaphor development. The ways in which children play with objects (and the apparent bases for symbolic renamings) change as the child develops. Ungerer et al. (1981) found that children display patterns in their representations of objects in symbolic play between 18 and 34 months. Younger children's representations were usually based on physical similarity or convention, whereas for older children function and physical similarity were not always the basis of representations. They conclude that 'The importance of perceptual features for determining the symbolic representation of objects in play is consistent with studies of early language development . . . and with developmental studies of metaphor, which indicate an increase with age in the use of metaphor primarily on perceptual grounds' (Ungerer et al.: 194). There is considerable scope for research looking at links between specific play actions and substitutions and the development of particular types of metaphor. It is interesting to note that games and play structure several metaphors in adult discourse. Ching (1993) argues that to Americans, TO LIVE IS TO PLAY and illustrates this with many examples from contemporary discourse (for example, the Gulf War being referred to as 'like the Super Bowl'; see also Lakoff (1991) for a study of metaphors used in talk about the Gulf War). The games/play metaphor is used when talking about a wide variety of things for a number of reasons, including the way in which they are 'elastic' in representing different meanings, and because of the wide variety of games and play from which people can make metaphors. In addition, they fit a prototypical person and have a time frame which can be used as a way of interpreting real life experiences. Ching argues that there is a very real danger in the use of this metaphor, in that it blurs the distinction between the real and the fictive (the danger of which is particularly apparent in view of the example given aboveregarding war as a game is to downplay or ignore the significance of the casualties of war). Nevertheless the games/play metaphor is a useful framework for understanding. Metaphor and Drama Drama in schools can take one of two forms. Putting on a play involves
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choosing or writing a script to follow, rehearsing the play, and preparing to perform it in front of an audience. Alternatively, drama can be improvised along a particular theme provided by the teacher, in which no set script is created beforehand and children collaborate to try to create a realistic piece of drama. This is known as 'living through' drama (Millward, 1996). Both types are symbolic, and involve two social contexts: the real one, in which the drama is taking place (the classroom or school hall, in which the actors, teacher and perhaps an audience share the experience of drama taking place); and the dramatic context (the fictive scene between the characters in the play) (Bolton, 1992). There is a dramatic tension between the real and fictitious worlds, and children have to work in order to make the drama credible and believable (Millward, 1990). This mirrors the way events in real life can have different meanings at different levels. However, whereas in real life we are often not aware of the effort involved in particular patterns of action, in drama children are always aware of the need to sustain the drama (Bolton, 1992). As a result it may be possible for children to learn not just about drama, but also about real social situations from dramatic activity. This is because drama is important not just for an appreciation of the aesthetic, but also in the development of social roles. Bolton (1992) argues that drama is primarily about social events, and that therefore the starting point in dramatic activities should be about building social context, rather than building character. The similarity between drama and play is the ability to switch into different roles and see different viewpoints (Wolf, 1994). There are a number of links between drama and metaphor. Firstly, because the poetic nature of metaphor means it plays an important role in many plays, the exploration of the metaphors contained therein can help in both their comprehension on the various levels at which they operate, and an assessment of their dramatic function. This is akin to the way metaphors in real-life discourse can operate at different levels and perform various rhetorical functions. In addition, from taking on the roles in a drama (whether of the play or 'living through' variety), there is further development of the ability to set aside one viewpoint and take on another, crucial in order to be able to make meaning with metaphor. Further insights into the nature of these skills can also be gained from the study of a pathological condition, called autism. Insights from Autism Autism is a striking childhood condition first recognised by Kanner. It is characterised by extreme isolation and an obsessive desire for things to remain the same. Autistic children have profound communication problems. They often repeat what other people have said to them (echolalia) and misuse personal pronouns. They also tend not to engage in symbolic play or to understand and use metaphor (Frith, 1989). Happé (1995: 275) provides an example of autistic childrens extremely literal interpretations of language: A request to 'Stick your coat down over there' is met by a serious request for glue. Ask if she will 'give you a hand' and she will answer that she needs
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to keep both hands and cannot cut one off to give to you . . . These overliteral interpretations are made in all earnestness. Even so-called able autistic children, those with Asperger's syndrome, often have real problems with metaphor, and even socalled 'frozen' metaphors found in idioms (see Gibbs, 1994, for evidence that they are not so 'frozen' after all). The fact that both symbolic play and metaphor are absent or severely limited in autism suggests that there could be a link between the two. One theory is that autism arises from a deficit in 'theory of mind' (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Frith, 1989). Baron-Cohen (1989) and Holroyd & Baron-Cohen (1993) have shown that autistic children regularly fail a so-called 'false belief' task, designed to see if children can understand that the beliefs people hold may be different from their own (and reality). Normal children, and those with Downs Syndrome (who have been matched to the autistic children for mental age) can usually pass these tests. The results are even more startling with 'second-order' false belief tasks which assess the child's ability to understand what someone else thinks another person thinksfor example 'Sally thinks that John believes the marble is in the box', as opposed to 'John thinks the marble is in the box'. Happé (1995) uses Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to look at the links between autistic children's theory of mind ability and their comprehension of figurative language. She argues that use of metaphor is just another example of people trying to be relevant when they communicate. Just as we try to understand the speaker's intentions when interpreting literal language, we must do the same when interpreting metaphor. For autistic children, a literal interpretation of a literal utterance is often good enough (even if it does not make the speaker's intention clear); however: . . . metaphors cannot be fully understood or properly used without a first-order theory of mind . . . Just as in the falsebelief situation the actor's belief is crucial and reality alone is no guide to action, so in metaphor the speaker's intention is vital, and working with 'reality' in the form of the literal meaning of the utterance is not sufficient for comprehension. (Happé, 1995: 283) Happé (1993) presents evidence that autistic children's performance on a figurative language task can indeed be predicted from the child's performance on a theory of mind task, with those children who completely fail all theory of mind tasks also doing very poorly on metaphor and irony tasks (but not on simile or synonym conditions, for which a literal interpretation would suffice). However there are a number of problems with this account. For one thing the presence of a link between theory of mind performance and comprehension of metaphor/irony does not establish that one deficit is a cause of the other. There are broad similarities between the mechanisms involved in both understanding what someone else is thinking and what is meant by a metaphor, which makes it possible that some other deficit is behind both of these problems. In addition, because we know that children start to produce metaphorical utterances from around two years (Billow, 1981), the argument that problems with theory of mind causes problems with metaphor is not feasible: at two years most normal children would fail a standard theory of mind test. It is not until around four that children
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begin to pass these tests, by which point their metaphorical capacity is already well-developed (although not yet adultlike). In addition, theory of mind assumes knowledge of a mental-real distinction, and while there is some evidence that this is found in other cultures, a recent study raises doubts over its universality (Wahi & Johri, 1994). There are of course other criticisms of the theory of mind approach which I shall not discuss further here as they are not pertinent to our consideration of metaphor and play (but see Hobson, 1991, and Bradley, 1993). An alternative viewpoint is put forward by Hobson (1993). Whilst appreciating the extreme cognitive deficits found in autism, he believes that problems in theory of mind are not the cause. He argues that the development of social understanding arises from a biologically determined capacity to feel emotion and to co-ordinate our emotions with others ('affective relatedness'). Their abilities to respond to other people's emotions (which may be different from their own) lead to the development of the ability to know what someone else is thinking. He traces this development through infancy, from experiencing their own emotions (e.g. seeing something as alarming) to being able to differentiate between themselves, other people, and things, and the recognition that other people might hold different views (feel different emotions). The triangulation among self, other person and focus-of-attitude provides a setting within which an infant may discern the contrast between 'thoughts' (or better, person-based attitudes) and 'things'. Correspondingly, items in the world may have different 'descriptions' for different people. The child's capacity to apply its own person-dependent meanings to things in symbolic play appears to be an early manifestation of such awareness. (Hobson, 1993: 237) In autism, then, he argues that it is a biological failure in terms of the production and perception of emotions that is the root cause of other problems, including the lack of symbolic play and failure to understand metaphor. The inability to comprehend other's mental states, is then just another of the abilities affected in autism, rather than the cause itself; and the basis for this is an innate problem in the emotional sphere, which prevents the development of any abilities which require the child to understand or appreciate that there are other points of view. His sketch of the way in which these abilities might develop is a convincing one and raises the question of how it might be shown that the biological deficit in autism is indeed of this nature. There is already some evidence that children who are later diagnosed with autism can be identified at an early stage as having deficits in the areas of symbolic play and two other areas: gaze-monitoring and proto-declarative pointing. Baron-Cohen et al. (1996) found that deficits in all three areas at 18 months carried an 83% risk of a diagnosis of autism later in childhood. As earlier indications of autism come to be recognised, it should be possible for researchers to further investigate both the direct causes of autism and the links between different areas of the deficits. What is certain is that autism can give us important insights into the interaction between symbolic play (and drama) and metaphor, and our abilities for understanding others.
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Conclusions In this paper I have traced the relationship between metaphor, symbolic play and drama. I have sketched out some aspects of children's metaphorical competence which show that it begins to develop at a very early age. I have considered the possible links between play and metaphor, both at a symbolic level of using one thing to stand for another, and at a more concrete level of specific examples of some possible direct links between play and metaphor. Drama also uses symbolic relationships and can be used to continue to develop both cognitive and social skills. Finally, I have considered the special case of autism, which can throw further light on the links between play, metaphor, and our understanding of mental representations. There is no doubt that our capacity for mental representation affects other aspects of development, such as in play and metaphor. However, I hope I have shown here that the relationship is not one way. Changes in metaphorical abilities and in symbolic play can equally have an effect on our representational capacities, and in addition our capacities for social behaviour. While it is clear that there is a link between them, we should not automatically conclude that the mentalising comes first. While metaphoric abilities probably have their origins in symbolic play, participation in drama can continue to develop children's appreciation of the aesthetic, cognitive and sociolinguistic properties of metaphor. References Baron-Cohen, S. (1989) The autistic child's theory of mind: A case of specific developmental delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 30, 285-97. Baron-Cohen, S., Cox, A., Baird, G., Swettenham, J., Nightingale, N., Morgan, K., Drew, A. and Charman, T. (1996) Psychological markers in the detection of autism in infancy in a large population. British Journal of Psychiatry 168 (2), 158-63. Billow, R.M. (1981) Observing spontaneous metaphor in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 31, 430-35. Bolton, G. (1992) New Perspectives on Classroom Drama. Hemel Hempstead: Simon and Schuster. Bornstein, M.H. and O'Reilly, A. (eds) (1993) New Directions for Child Development: The Role of Play in the Development of Thought. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Bradley, B.S. (1993) A serpents guide to children's theories of mind. Theory and Psychology 3 (4), 497-521. Bretherton, I. and Bates, E. (1984) The development of representation from 10 to 28 months: Differential stability of language and symbolic play. In R.N. Emde and R.J. Harmon (eds) Continuities and Discontinuities in Development (pp. 229-61). New York: Plenum Press. Cameron, L. (1996a) Describing, knowing and defining metaphor. Paper presented at the BAAL/CUP seminar: Research and Applying Metaphor, University of York, 12-14 January 1996. (1996b) The discourse context of metaphor. Current Issues in Language and Society 3 (1). Ching, M.K.L. (1993) Games and playpervasive metaphors in American life. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (1), 43-65. Dent-Read, C.H. and Szokolszky, A. (1993) Where do metaphors come from? Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (3), 227-42. Edwards, D. (1997) Discourse and Cognition. London: Sage. Frith, U. (1989) Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gibbs, R. W. Jnr (1994) The Poetics of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Hale, C.L., Tardy, R.W., and Farley-Lucas, B. (1995) Children's talk about conflict: An exploration of the voices and views of the 'experts'. Discourse and Society 6 (3), 407-27. Happé, F.G.E. (1993) Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition 48, 10119. (1995) Understanding minds and metaphors: Insights from the study of figurative language in autism. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10 (4), 275-95. Harré, R. and Gillett, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hobson, R.P. (1991) Against the theory of 'Theory of Mind'. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 9, 33-51. (1993) The emotional origins of social understanding. Philosophical Psychology 6 (3), 227-49. Holroyd, S. and Baron-Cohen, S. (1993) How far can people with autism go in developing a theory of mind. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 23 (2), 379-85. Kennedy, J.M. (1982) Metaphor in pictures. Perception 11 (5), 589-605. Kittay, E.F. (1987) Metaphor: It's Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lakoff, G. (1991) Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. In B. Hallet (ed.) Engulfed in War: Just War and the Persian Gulf. Honolulu: Matsunaga Institute for Peace. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marjanovic-Shane, A. (1989) 'You are a pig': For real or just pretend? Different orientations in play and metaphor. Play and Culture 2, 225-34. McCune, L. (1995) A normative study of representational play at the transition to language. Developmental Psychology 31 (2), 198-206. Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Millward, P. (1990) Drama as a well-made play. Language Arts February. (1996) Children constructing dramatic experience. Current Issues in Language and Society 3 (1), Child Language: The development of sociolinguistic competence. Nerlich, B. and Todd, Z. (1996) 'Mummy, I like being a sandwich': Metonymy in language acquitision. Paper presented at the workshop on Conceptual Metonymiy, University of Hamburg, June 22-24 1966. Tamis-LeMonda, C.S. and Bornstein, M.H. (1994) Specificity in mother-toddler language play relations across the second year. Developmental Psychology 30 (2), 283-92. Todd, Z. and Clarke, D.D. (1996) When is a dead rainbow not like a dead rainbow? A method for investigating differences between metaphor and simile. Paper presented at BAAL/CUP seminar on Researching and Applying Metaphor, University of York, 12-14 January 1996. Ungerer, J.A., Zelazo, P.R., Kearsley, R.B. and O'Leary, K. (1981) Developmental changes in the representation of objects in symbolic play from 18 to 34 months. Child Development 52, 186-195. Vosniadou, S. (1987) Children and metaphors. Child Development 58, 870-85. Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language. Revised and translated by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Wahi, S. and Johri, R. (1994) Questioning a universal theory of mind: Mental-real distinctions made by Indian children. Journal of Genetic Psychology 155 (4), 503-10. Winner, E. (1988) The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, S.A. (1994) Learning to act/acting to learn: Children as actors, critics and characters in classroom theatre. Research in the Teaching of English 28 (1), 7-44.
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The Development of Sociolinguistic Strategies: Implications for Children with Speech and Language Impairments Amanda Hampshire The Language Resource Base, Cheveley Park Primary School, Scardale Way, Belmont, Durham This paper looks at the points raised in the preceding chapters, and considers their relevance to the sociolinguistic development of children with speech and language impariments. Children with speech and language impairments are often noted to have low self-esteem, and this in part might be explained by their inability to negotiate an identity for themselves through conversation and discussion with their peers. Speech and langugage impaired children also have problems in interpreting metaphor and idiom, and are frequently unable to appreciate the intended comparison, and thus the underlying meaning. Furthermore, they may lack the scripts necessary for them to be able to participate in drama and make-believe play, because they have been unable to take part in real life situations which would have taught them how to interact with others in different contexts. Ways in which adults working with such children might address these problems are suggested. There is a growing number of children who are being identified as having speech and/or language difficulties. These children present with a range of different types of problem. More often than not, they are integrated into mainstream school, with little or no extra support. Yet the issues raised in the papers presented as part of this seminar, demonstrate just how significantly these children are handicapped in their social and academic development. It is also clear that there are positive steps that teachers can take in order to maximise the learning potential of these children and to ensure that they access the curriculum. Sealey and Maybin both explore how young children negotiate an identity for themselves through their interactions with others. Using language, children describe themselves and one another in order to establish some sort of personal and social identity. This is done both through narrative (Maybin) and in conversation (Sealey). The negotiation of self seems to work on several levels. Clearly the child's perception of him/herself is reflected in what he/she says about him/herself; and the way in which others respond to any assertions about self will modify that self perception. Significantly, the examples quoted in these papers represent positive perceptions of self; for example, Emma as 'the lottery girl', Lee and Geoffrey as gentle and caring boys who look after creatures in distress etc. Children with speech and language difficulties are immediately excluded from these sort of negotiations. Because they do not understand the contributions of others or are unable to make their own utterances understood, they cannot participate in the rapid cut and thrust of everyday interaction in the same way as children with normal language. They also find it difficult to sequence information to tell stories, and rely very heavily on others, particularly
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adults, to help them structure their narratives. Consequently they cannot make positive statements about themselves in order to project a personality when with their peers. They are also frequently exposed to negative and critical comments from adults and other children which they may be unable to refute. It is not therefore very surprising that these children have a low self-esteem, or that they develop emotional and behavioural problems. Teachers will often report comments made by language impaired children, describing themselves as the 'dud', or reporting that they have no friends. The long term effects on the development of personality are difficult to assess. It would thus seem especially important that adults, and particularly parents and teachers, take great care to develop the selfesteem and confidence of children with speech and language difficulties. Perhaps there is a need to set up situations in which the children can make positive statements about themselves and each other. For example, circle time would lend itself very well to games like 'Pass the Compliment' and 'Things I like about myself/you', allowing the children more time to think about what to say about themselves, and how to say it. It may be necessary to teach the children how to tell stories, by modelling for them stories which they might wish to tell about themselves, and by teaching them the structure on which to base their narratives. Children with language problems also need more simplified explanations and demonstrations in order that they appreciate concepts. They need concrete examples to help them understand a new word or idea. Feelings and personal attributes are often quite abstract concepts to grasp, and the children often need several examples of what constitutes, for example, being 'kind' or 'honest' in order to appreciate when they or anyone else is demonstrating these characteristics. Instances of 'kindness' and 'honesty' need to be flagged up in day to day situations so that all the children learn to identify and value these aspects of their personalities. Difficulties with working out the meaning of abstract concepts are not, of course, exclusive to children with language problems. Many young children interpret language in a very literal way and thus make mistakes in decoding metaphors and idiomatic phrases. Most children will however very quickly learn the actual meaning intended by phrases such as 'pull your socks up', 'give yourself a pat on the back' or 'it's raining cats and dogs'. Again for language impaired children, adults need to take a more active role in teaching the child exactly what these phrases mean, as the child will not otherwise make the connection in the same way as might a child with normal language. Cameron's paper on metaphor highlights the difficult task facing language impaired children in a classroom setting. Paradoxically in trying to simplify an idea or concept by using a metaphor which is within the children's field of experience, the teacher may in fact achieve the opposite effect and obscure the concept more. Children with language difficulties will interpret phrases like 'the desert is a sea of sand' or 'the atmosphere is a blanket of gas' in the same literal way that a younger child might. They will not appreciate that the metaphor is describing something in comparison to something else, or be able to pick out the key attributes of the metaphorical vehicle (i.e. the 'sea' and the 'blanket') which are being applied to the topic (i.e. the 'desert' and the 'atmosphere'). There are a number of ways that Cameron flags up in which teachers might
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be able to use metaphors more effectively in the classroom. For children with language difficulties, it is crucial that the teacher makes sure the children understand that the metaphor is a comparison. To say that 'X is a Y' only serves to confuse these children, whereas the use of a comparison word, 'X is like a Y' makes the metaphor much clearer. It is also helpful, as Cameron suggests, to draw out which features of the vehicle are being compared to the topic. For example, Cameron shows how the teacher who is describing volcano lava signals to the children which feature of 'treacle' the children need to focus on, i.e. it's stickiness. The same teacher demonstrates a third technique to simplify the metaphor, that of encouraging the children to extend the metaphor by thinking of other vehicles with similar properties. Thus a teacher might do better to explain the nature of the atmosphere for example, by saying that it is 'like a protective blanket of gas around the Earth', and by helping the children to think of other protective comparisons such as a 'shield' or an 'umbrella'. These appear to be vital measures to ensure that language impaired children, particularly those who have receptive language difficulties, can make sense of what they are being taught. By encouraging them to describe what they are learning about in relation to something they already understand or have experienced, the teacher is helping them to extend their knowledge. Moreover the active participation involved in generating new comparisons could also be therapeutic in terms of building up vocabulary and developing an awareness of the properties of objects and the relationships between words. It is obviously crucial to explain metaphors and idioms in the context in which they occur. In recent years, professionals working with language impaired children have become increasingly aware of the growing number of children who present with semanticpragmatic disorders. These children have specific problems in interpreting language in context, and seem to have particular problems with metaphor and idiom. Some assessments, such as the Test of Word Knowledge (Wiig & Secord, 1992) include subtests that have been designed to consider whether the child appreciates the significance of idiomatic phrases. In these tests the child is asked to explain the meaning of a word or phrase, or choose a meaning in a multiple choice format. That the children often perform poorly in these subtests is perhaps unsurprising in view of the fact that the idioms and metaphors are presented out of context, and there are no extralinguistic clues to help the child make sense of them. It might be more informative to put the idioms and metaphors into the context of a sentence or even of a story, in order to assess in a more realistic way whether or not the child appreciates their meaning. The use of story and drama can be very beneficial in the therapy of children with speech and language difficulties. Because of their communication problems, children with receptive and expressive language problems often do not benefit from their life experiences in the same way as their peers. They miss out, not only because they do not understand what is happening in a situation, but also because their language problems prevent them from taking part. Millward's paper demonstrates how children with normal language use their knowledge of role relationships and their own life experiences to create meaningful drama. With language impaired children, drama can, in contrast, be used to teach children how to relate to others in certain situations, and give them the scripts
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which they need to make sense of those situations. It may also be used to help them develop their play. Teachers can create drama scenarios such as 'going on the bus to school', 'at the doctor's' or 'having a meal in a cafe' either using toy material or other more able children to model what might happen in these situations, and what participants might say to one another. Children with language difficulties can then be encouraged to take on the roles they have seen acted out, and thus to take part in the drama themselves. The drama can be extended further by the teacher introducing complications to the original script, in order to elicit more language, new vocabulary and different roles. In this way the teacher can help the children learn how to cope with real life situations in a safe environment, thus preparing them for the experiences they are bound to encounter outside the classroom. It is clear that many of the difficulties outlined here are not specific to children with speech and language impairments. Many children with global and/or more specific learning disabilities also have problems accessing the curriculum and developing socially. They, too, may have difficulties in negotiating an identity for themselves, and may lack the awareness of causal, intentional, spatial and role relationships necessary to sequence information to tell a story or to extract the scripts for different life experiences. They also have problems in grasping new concepts, and fail to appreciate the significance of metaphor and idiom. As professionals working with children with a whole spectrum of special educational needs, it is crucial that we are aware of all of those areas which will cause particular difficulty, in order that we can take steps to resolve them and thus enable each child to reach his/her potential. This seminar has highlighted at least some of these areas and has illustrated some of the strategies teachers can use to overcome them. References Wiig, E. and Secord, W. (1992) Test of Word Knowledge. USA: The Psychological Corporation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.
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Debate This paper summarises the discussion that took place in response to the papers presented. Four main themes emerged from our deliberations: children's developing sense of identity; children creating narratives; research issues associated with methods of collecting and analysing children's spontaneous speech; and ways in which children are capable of creating social contexts through their language. The following extracts from our discussions summarise the debate exploring these four topics. Children's Developing Sense of Identity. Peter Millward (University of Durham): One gets a real sense of privilege from listening to these tapes of children's conversations and getting a glimpse into their lives. I am particularly interested in this notion of identity and the ways in which we, as people, behave in certain situations. There is a sense in which each individual is an inner being who acts differently from time to time. From the data you (Alison Sealey) have presented, we hear the children involved in interactions, constituting their identity at a particular moment in time, but while the children are doing this they are also presenting a stable identity of themselves that goes through time. This is a feature of my own data too (see Millward this volume). As researchers, what we are able to see are ways in which there is a shift in the presentation of self, across time and place and to trace the ways in which these changes take place from context to context. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): Like you, I feel a little unsure about what it is that is stable over time; clearly something is. Yet so much seems to change and be re-negotiated or re-constituted by the speakers. It also seems to be unpredictable since as individuals we do not know for sure who we will be interacting with or how we will respond to emergent situations. I have tried in my interpretation of the data to avoid the implication that the children know that they are doing all of this. It is not that the children are making conscious moment-by-moment changes as they speak. We only become aware of the shift because we are able to listen to the tapes, and read the transcripts. Elizabeth Ashton (University of Durham): I would like to pick up on the way in which there is a clear sense of rivalry between the two sisters in Alison Sealey's data. It seems that the elder girl was not prepared to be patronised by her younger sister. The incident recorded reminds me of an event I witnessed when I was a classroom teacher. One pupil repeated to a peer comments that I had made about her needlework. It was well intentioned but that did not prevent it from being received with a certain hostility. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): There is a sense in which there is a certain hostility present in the conversations between the girls but I have tried not to go beyond what is actually on the tape in my interpretations. In another section of the tapes Jenny (one of the children) offers the question 'What shall we play now?' and she is completely ignored on every occasion. So perhaps Jenny and Emma do have quite a difficult relationship but I didn't think it appropriate
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to pursue this except to describe how they handle these interactions linguistically. There is another occasion when Emma corrects Jenny's grammar. Jenny says 'she buyed' and Emma says 'bought, it's not buyed, it's bought' and is seemingly very pleased to be in a position to make that correction which pulls her toward the group of people with power and status, who know more about language, who are adult and who can correct children's language. While on other occasions it is Emma who is feeling that there are people above her who can tell her what to docause her to make Easter hats and so on. Amanda Hampshire (Speech Therapist, Durham LEA): I work as a speech therapist and many of the children I see do not have the language they need to negotiate these complex relationships successfully. Indeed some cannot even manage routine exchanges in everyday situations. I am interested to know how we, as professionals, can help children to develop their communicative strategies. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): The classroom environment is in many ways very limiting and does not always allow children to fully demonstrate what they can and can not do with language. I have not directly addressed the issue you raise. My concern with the research presented here has been to throw some light on what children can do with language. Many of these strategies operate below the level of consciousness, so it may be that raising them to the level of consciousness for the purpose of instruction will not always work very well, if it is too contrived. When I have worked with children on aspects of speaking and listening within the National Curriculum for English, like turn taking for example, the children construct for themselves sets of rules which, although they seem co-operative, are actually nothing at all like successful turn taking as it has been analysed by linguists. It is often artificial and contrived, and not what people really do when they are talking fluently. There is a big difference between speaker's implicit and explicit knowledge, of course. Amanda Hampshire (Speech Therapist, Durham LEA): I agree, but maybe there is an interim style that teachers and other professionals could devise to support children who are not fluent and confident and able to manage everyday interactions. A minority of children simply do not seem to be able to operate within the established rules for negotiated turn taking, for example. Peter Millward (University of Durham): I am sure it comes back to this point that individual contributions to the ongoing conversation cannot be separated from the overall context, nor from the other discourse participants' contributions. Amanda Hampshire (Speech Therapist, Durham LEA): Perhaps if we tried to record the children as they interact and then played the recording back to them, it could be used as a starting point for discussion with them about their role in the interactions; or maybe it could be used as the basis for further role play. Using the children's own language in this way may help to overcome the barriers of artificiality imposed by the constraints of the classroom context. (Amanda Hampshire has developed these ideas in the paper that appears in this volumeEd.). Felicity Breet (University of Sunderland): These children in Alison Sealey's study were all insiders, in the sense that they had all been in this shared environment for some time. They were a group of friends. But there is another
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way in which we as researchers, could gain insights into children's developing sense of identity, and that is by observing a child in the group who is not 'one of them', for whatever reason. Recordings from contexts where one of the children is a newcomer may mean that the established group would provide information by telling the outsider how they had to behave, or this is how we do it. I have an example of one of my nephews saying to another child when they were together in my house, and when he thought I was not listening, 'no, that's not how you do it here'. This was particularly interesting because my nephew was also an 'outsider' in this particular context. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): Having completed this initial study I do have clearer ideas about future work: in particular, how I could extend and/or repeat the range of contexts for data collection. But for this study, I wanted to leave quite a lot in the hands of the children and so I did not try to predetermine what would count as data and what would not. The informants did have a 'Sheet For Guidance' from me, on the types of contexts they might like to tape, and then the freedom to make a range of recordings of themselves in interaction with people they were in contact with. So the possible contexts that you describe were not part of the lives of these informants during the period of these recording. Linda Thompson (University of Durham): It strikes me that there is a clear link in these data between what I shall call the macro and the micro level social contexts (see Thompson, this volume). The girls' talk about the lottery refers, of course, to the recently introduced National Lottery. Inherent in their exchange is a value system that derives from a national perception of the lottery as a positive thing. We, the public at large, the press etc. only talk about lottery winners. We rarely if ever, refer to the lottery losers, yet they are clearly the majority each week. So although they cannot legally buy a lottery ticket, nevertheless these children have quickly learned this predominant view of the world and this new value system. There are lottery winners, a high profile minority, and there is the unspoken of majority, the lottery losers. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): Children are relatively powerless members of society and there are fewer things that children can change, and have an effect on. But the other side of this is that because children are young and are growing up now, there are certain things that they take for granted, things that as adults we have had to learn. These vary of course, but include things as diverse as how to do the lottery and dealing with computers and the new technologies. One 10-year-old child has told me that the children in his class have discovered the moves by which you can 'cheat' computer games, and so they can bypass the very moves that the software was designed to teach by going through the program in a set way, trying this or that. They have discovered that, as with the other games that they play away from school, there are 'cheats', so if they just press 'control' they can move on and get to the answer very quickly. Apparently, this is circulating at primary school level in much the same way that I've heard that undergraduates offer over the internet (for reward) their winning essays, so if you know what to do you can learn how to write a grade one essay by using the internet in a way that possibly the tutors who are setting these essays wouldn't feel so confident about. So there is always the potential for the social
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change and the language change to come from the children, as well as the sense that there are things in the world and their society already there for them to learn. Part of children's developing competence is learning how to receive these things. There are other cultural institutions that children talk about in my data: sport, television programmes, films, clothes, pop music and football, for example. Jim McDonagh (Sheffield Hallam University): The children you have taped come from different socio-economic groups. Would you say you have a representative or random sample? Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): I do not know that it can even be called a sample because it is such a small group. All I think I can say is, 'These children said this'. I would not even want to say 'this is what 8 and 9-year-old children do'. But we do routinely categorise children by age. We talk about children being in Year 4 at school, or being in Key Stage 1. By contrast it would seem odd to categorise adults so specifically. Adults do talk about children in relation to their age and in turn children learn to talk about themselves in the same way. This is an example of the way in which children learn the language and the social rules simultaneously. By comparison, the linguistically unmarked age is adulthood. Perhaps we need to compare children's conversations in specific social contexts with those of adults in the same contexts, discussing the same topics, to see where and if similarities and differences occur. But that would bring its own methodological problems. Children Creating Narratives These data were presented by Janet Maybin to illustrate the ways in which children can create narratives. This following is an extract from a conversation between two girls Josie (aged 12) years and Nicole (aged 11 years). Transcript A: Stories of films: Josie: It was about this man, he had a sort of brother and he kidnapped him and he's getting fed up with him and he tried learning him manners and everything and if his brother hurts the other brother he'll write it all down and he'll remember, right and this man, his brother told him to read the telephone book and they're in the cafe the next morning and he, there was this lady and he remembered her telephone number, so he shouted it out, it was funny. Nicole: Right what happens, she has this really smart leather jacket and these boots and these boots are in this shop and she had a choice to give the coat to the shop and get the boots, so she done that and that, this girl bought it and it was her sister and then she's chasing her round with the boots and she wants her coat back and the boots and she chases her and then she gets nicked and everything and it was really good. Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): I should like to discuss those extracts from Janet Maybin's data that she has said do not count as narratives, for example, the children's stories of the films (see above). I should just like to suggest that by labelling these examples as 'non-narratives' maybe we are in danger of discarding some important data by default and therefore losing some insights.
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If you are not going to call these examples narratives, what are you going to call them? Janet Maybin (Open University): What features of these extracts would you say were particularly important? Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): Well, taking this example of the 'story of films', I think that perhaps some teachers might feel that it was important for them to help children to tell this kind of story, as well as stories to tell about their own personal experience. Janet Maybin (Open University): In my data almost all of the children's narratives in their informal conversations do fall within the Labovian structure (Maybin, this volume), and I found this a particularly useful way of looking at how children are trying to evaluate their experience. Children's re-tellings of the stories of films, when I asked them to tell me about a film they'd mentioned, seem rather different (see extract above). They lack the shape and coherence of the coherent narratives. I have another incoherent example, again when I asked a child to re-tell a story. I asked a 10-year-old child about a story she had read in her English class, and in her account she quoted bits of the written story, mixed up with her oral re-telling, in a really confused and disjointed way. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): There are clearly differences between these extracts. In their spontaneous narratives the children highlight certain features that seem to be especially meaningful to them. Whereas, in other re-tellings, some of the information just seems to be a backdrop for their own stories. Janet Maybin (Open Univeristy): When the children tell their own stories there is something special about these stories, whereas other people's stories, these secondary stories, the children do not seem to have the same investment in them, so they do come across as rather flat and unlively. The more I listen to them, the more I am convinced that there is quite clearly something very different about there-tellings. Children's accounts of other people's stories lack a central 'incident', whereas their own spontaneous narratives are bright, coherent accounts. These are of course not the only examples of children's stories in my data, they are just a sample. Sometimes of course, the children just give a story abstract, then the conversation moves on before they have a chance to tell the story more fully. All the stories have to be looked at within their conversational context. For example, when Geoffrey tells the story about the cat (Maybin, this volume). These are stories that just do not get developed because the conversation moves on. For example, when the first boy tells the story about the cat, he finished it with 'well the shop would be shut because it's 9 o'clock'. It was only because I then said, 'well, what did you do then?' that he extended the story with more action and gave another resolution. So this story is clearly constructed, in part, by the context in which it was created. It was my intervention that altered his story. Sometimes, of course, they just give a short abstract, then the conversation moves on before they have a chance to tell the story more fully. All the stories have to be looked at within their conversational contexts. For example, when Geoffrey tells the story about the cat (Maybin, this volume). Very often they do have shared
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information with their teacher, and this leads them to think, 'Teacher will know what I mean'. Felicity Breet (University of Sunderland): That could perhaps explain why this extract seems less like a narrative. I think that one of the differences in the children's accounts of the film is their lack of a sense of audience (the listener). For example, the children don't say things like, 'did you think it was funny?' or 'did you laugh like I did?'. Whereas in the collaborative (spontaneous) story, you as the researcher, were also a really important part of their audience. The children were required in their re-telling to make you agree with them at the end of their account. This reference to the outside, or the sense of audience is important. Perhaps, this linkage is one of the features of narrative. Perhaps narrative needs to relate to something outside of itself. If that need to make connections is not in the teller's mind, then it doesn't work as a narrative. Peter Millward (University of Durham): This is, in a way, a feature of classroom interaction between pupils and their teacher. The teacher asks a question and even the child who does not know the answer will keep on talking but not answering the teacher's request for knowledge. It is very difficult to interpret these interactions without reference to their context. The dramatic contexts that I describe in my paper (Millward, this volume) is of course different in so many ways, but it too has to be understood from within the context in which it was created. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): Maybe the children sometimes construct their stories in order to achieve other ends, so they may make a story funny, in order to make people (their audience) laugh, and maybe children learn to do this and refine their skills of performance through previous re-tellings of the story. Janet Maybin (Open University): Certainly, some children do seem to be skilled in this. They are real raconteurs, some individuals are always telling anecdotes and stories. Alison Sealey (Warwick University): In the exchange about the 'lottery girl' (Sealey, this volume) while I accept that it is a report and not a narrative, it is regarded by Emma (the teller) as a little bit of news that she thinks is worth telling people, and she tells it well. Linda Thompson (University of Durham): Looking at the stories and the codings, I am not always absolutely convinced of Labov's categories, for example an evaluation may sometimes be the start of a new story that does not get developed because the conversation moves on. Janet Maybin (Open University): I found the categories useful up to a point, if you push them too far, then uncertainty begins to creep in. It's often at the boundaries of other speakers' turns that structures become more ambiguous and provisional. At these points the dynamic nature of the narrative structure is more obvious, and how it fits, in the process of being negotiated between two speakers. In the codings of the transcripts presented here, I am not always absolutely sure if it is a Resolution or Complication or Evaluation. The categories are not absolutely finite.
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Collecting and Analysing Children's Spontaneous Speech: Methodological Considerations Janet Maybin (Open University): For purposes of data collection I found that friendship pairs are really productive. When I have interviewed even really confident children on their own, and I have felt that I had a good relationship with them, they didn't tell their stories in the same way. But having a friend there, and having the adult interviewer, creates an ideal context for storytelling. The friend corroborates the stories and the adult provides the audience. So researchers collecting data from children need to give special consideration to the contexts in which the data are to be collected. There were occasions when a child would have been unable to continue with the story if they had not had their friend there to help them, and to prompt them. Friends offer different kinds of help from the teacher who tends to ask 'teaching' questions to support the child's learning. Inge Cramer (Bradford & Ilkley College): So would you advocate friendship pairs as a method of data collection? Janet Maybin (Open University): It was productive in the interview situation, and it can be a very productive way of collecting data if you want to look at how talk between children without adults around can support collaborative activity, over time. This collaboration is not always immediately obvious. In one situation, two boys, a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old, were sitting working together on a maths problem. The first boy understood how to tackle it, and was talking through the problem. Although he wasn't exactly addressing the second boy, he was in fact modelling the activity for him. The second boy was also vocalising what he was doing, again not apparently addressing anyone, but when he went wrong, his friend straight away corrected him and put him right. So, although this might not be thought of as conventional collaborative talk, it is actually enabling these two boys to collaborate in a very productive way. At the beginning of the morning the second child was unable to do the work, but by break-time he was working independently. It was only through recording that pair of children all through the morning that his pattern became evident. Peter Millward (University of Durham): One of the points I have made in an earlier paper (Millward, 1990) is that I am very conscious that I get to a stage with a transcript where I am in danger of treating it like the script of a play, rather than a transcript of natural language. So as researchers, if there are things that we can do to improve the process of transcribing, analysing and interpreting the data, this can only be beneficial. Researchers need ways of looking at their data because this can lead to greater understanding. Felicity Breet (University of Sunderland): This is always a challenge for researchers. There is a danger that we come to know the data that we are working with so well, that we can not see it with a fresh view. This is particularly true for the researcher who has been involved in the transcription of the data as well as the deep level analysis. There is the danger that we begin to predict where the discourse is going and in our analysis we take the data to that end. Peter Millward (University of Durham): It is a danger, yet that is exactly what we do, as the audience, when we go to the theatre. We are considering a piece of drama here, in these transcripts. In the audience we go over the play in our mind,
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we review it, and we re-think the beginning and the characters, etc. There is a sense in which one can re-think a piece of drama, having created it, but I am very aware of the dangers in this for the researcher. There is always the danger of trying to turn it into a play, when it was never intended to be a play. Felicity Breet (University of Sunderland): I do not know if anyone has developed any techniques to prevent the researcher becoming over familiar with the data. On the one hand you need to know the data very well, in order to be able to decipher it, yet when you do know it that well, it becomes very difficult to say anything different about itto remain analytical. I just do not know how we, as researchers, can overcome this. Linda Thompson (University of Durham): Time is maybe one solution. I am always surprised that I can manage to forget aspects of the data. For me, it helps if I just leave the data, I do not mean for just a day or two but for longer periods of time, perhaps a month or longer, if possible. Then when I go back to the transcripts it is easier to see it afresh. There is of course the reality of pressures of time, and the need to publish quickly. This is a new pressure that in some ways mitigates against ethnographic research. I also find that it helps to share data with a wider group of researchers. At the University of Durham School of Education we organise Data Analysis Workshops as part of our postgraduate research training program. This gives new researchers some practice in handling and analysing data, and it also gives experienced researchers an opportunity to gain fresh insights into the data, new ways of understanding them and a variety of possible interpretations. Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): Collecting samples of naturally occurring data is not always easy. As soon as a teacher or adult is directly involved, they influence the talk and even change the course of the conversation. Peter Millward (University of Durham): Equipment is another consideration. My recording equipment was not really very sophisticated. I had one roving audio tape-recorder that tended to pick up only the contributions of the children who were near to me. There were other microphones and recorders positioned at different points around the room. At the point in the drama, the priests were on their own in a group. It was not until I eventually got the transcript of the tapes that I found that this group of children, the priests, were having their own drama in parallel to the main drama. Of course, I was not a part of this sub-drama but the children's drama still revolved around the absent figure of a teacher. They were talking about him, saying things like 'he looks a bit shabby' and 'he looks weedy, I don't think he's going to make it'. All of this was going on in my absence. In one way this is to be expected within the drama because the children (priests) were sizing the teacher up as a stranger. But throughout their own drama they were bringing the stranger into their group. The teacher's role was still important, even in this mini-drama, and the children were adhering to the rules of classroom language and behaviour. Children Creating Contexts Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): It is quite amazing how children are so
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ready to participate in drama. They are ready to get straight in, apparently without much preparation. Peter Millward (University of Durham): I am now quite certain that drama teachers spend much too long preparing children for drama. Teachers act on the belief that children need to be stimulated, and warmed up for drama. So they tend to do lots of introduction to drama lessons. However, in my experience, most children need remarkably little stimulation for drama. They need to know specific details; the situation and who and where they are. Of course this varies from group to group. It is really a matter of the teacher and children agreeing 'we are now going to create this make believe situation'. It may be that sometimes things do move too quickly, and the children need more detailed information, but one can always stop and provide these extra details. Children already have rich biographies that they bring with them to create these dramatic contexts. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): There are contexts when children, even out of school, go into role. In these situations children tend to try out different ways of speaking and behaving. For example, they try out what it would be like for them to be the kind of person who said things like this. It is not a make believe situation, it is more like role-playing, being different people, speaking in different voices. Peter Millward (University of Durham): I feel that it is very important, even in drama, not to let the participants disappear into a fantasy world. It is of course, difficult to understand these experiences from the children's perspective. One particular example springs to mind. I had been working with a group of 5 and 6-year-old children in a school. The day after the drama lesson, the head teacher telephoned to ask me what I had been doing with the class in the sessions. The children's parents had been asking her (the headteacher) about the woods that the children had visited because the parents wanted to go again with the children at the weekend. Of course, the children had not actually visited any woods, it was part of the dramatic context we had created together. So there is a fine balance to be maintained between creating contexts and creating fantasy. As teachers we may be aware of our intentions but we cannot be sure of the children's response or understanding. David Westgate (Newcastle University): It may be of course that taking the children to a wood was a much more realistic context setting for them than the other context at the side of a volcano. Many children may have actually had the experience of visiting a wood. I'm wondering about the significance of creating the mythical context of living by the volcano for dramatic purposes. Going for a walk in the woods is not at all the same kind of experience for the children. The ways in which children internalise knowledge of their previous experiences when they create dramatic contexts may influence the language they are using. Peter Millward (University of Durham): Clearly the children's language (and behaviour) are linked to their expectations and understanding of a fictional world. They gain their ideas in part from their previous reading and of course, from their previous experiences of similar contexts. Going for a walk in the woods, and living by the side of a volcano are different social and human experiences, requiring different patterns of language and different ways of
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behaving. The 'living by the side of the volcano' drama began at a prosaic level. The situation I outlined for the drama was: I'm a stranger. You (the children) are the villagers living by the side of the volcano. My question to them was, 'what would I have to do to become a member of your community?'. It began with them telling me everyday information about their lives. They told me how they had hot water from the volcano and details like this about their daily existence. It was the children who developed the mythical side of the drama, inventing characters and situations, as you say, are more usually associated with the game of myths and legends. I just followed their initiatives. It may be that the children believe that this is a more appropriate topic for drama. They seem to have a view of drama as belonging to a fictional world. Linda Thompson (University of Durham): The children seem to form their mental maps of situations and contexts based on their previous experiences of these (or similar) contexts and settings. It could be that the children have formed this narrow expectation of drama as something that belongs to a fictional world because this has been their only previous experience with drama and dramatic events. This may stem from visits to pantomimes or a children's television version of what drama is. If we want children to broaden their perceptions we need to create situations where they can broaden their experiences. Alison Sealey (University of Warwick): As teachers we often feel that we have to present things to children through a situation that is child-like. We frequently present things in a way that we consider close to our view of how children ought to understand. Then the children respond to what they think we (as teachers and adults) expect. So it is a complicated cycle of adults' misplaced understandings and expectations and children's (misplaced and misunderstood) responses to these expectations. Linda Thompson (University of Durham): Children are very good at learning to respond linguistically and socially to adults' expectations, and so instead of trying to make sense of a social situation as they experience it, there is the danger that the children will end up trying to make sense of the adult's view of a situation or interpretation of the context. Pupils' Experience of Metaphor in Classroom Language Amanda Hampshire (Speech Therapist): Listening to Lynne Cameron's paper has helped me to realise just how often teachers (myself included) rely on metaphors when talking to children. This can sometimes cause problems, particularly for very young children or children who have special needs. Some children take what the teacher says absolutely literally. Using metaphor to explain things to such children may not be helpful. Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): I think that is probably true. In the classroom metaphors are used for a variety of reasons and functions. For example, metaphors can be used by teachers for discipline, telling them off. Metaphors can also be used for organising the children. Metaphors are frequently used by teachers for controlling a situation. For example, the teacher may say something like 'I don't want to hear anything'. Of course, the teacher is using this
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as a metaphorical way of saying 'Be Quiet!'. But the child who interprets this literally is bound to be confused. Janet Maybin (Open University): In the examples of metaphors that you have presented you have not yet discussed the cultural aspects of metaphor. Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds): It was not really my intention to investigate that in this study, but clearly, metaphors do carry cultural connotations. If you say that you will divide up resources by 'slicing the cake' or 'slicing the salami' then of course the metaphor you choose to express the message alters it. It is not only children who have difficulties in understanding metaphors. When I presented data from this study to a group of teachers from Bangladesh they said, that as bilingual adults, they were confused by the metaphor 'blanket of gas'. It seems that teachers use metaphor in an attempt to help pupils, to explain things and to make them easier, more accessible for the learners. Unfortunately the reality is that they may sometimes achieve quite the opposite.
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