We are all aware that communication and language can be very complex skills to master and it should best be understood when it is applied in a context of social interaction. In children, they must learn how to use language in appropriate ways within various contexts because it is crucial to the successful development of communication skills. This area in communication and language is called linguistic pragmatics, which refers to rules and conventions that govern how language is used for communication in different situations. Pragmatic communication skills also include many nonverbal behaviors.
For example, when someone gives a child some food, the right thing that a child should say is “thank you”. This repetitive and voluntary form of conversation is considered a linguistic routine. Aijmer (1996) informed that linguistic (or conversational) routines are characterized in terms of their function (social, psychological, and most importantly, pragmatic) as well as their formal features (grammatical, prosodic, and sequential). She introduced two criteria for conversational routines: grammar and fixedness. For children, linguistic routine is defined as “a series of set phrases, sentences, or small exchanges used repeatedly throughout the children’s interactions” (Danielewicz et al., 1996).
There is much evidence that children can engage in linguistic routines. Cook et al. (2004) suggested how the situational context influences how a person communicates: (a) the people present; (b) what was just previously said; (c) the topic of conversation; (d) the task that communication is being used to accomplish; and (e) the times and places in which the communication occurs. Observation suggests that young children readily use these contextual clues to enable themselves to understand much more than words alone. As Bates (1976) described it, the acquisition of pragmatic skills begins to develop well before children’s first words. Bates described various pre-linguistic communication acts such as pointing and reaching, combined with vocalizations and directed eye gaze. These behaviors, which typically emerge in young children around the 10th month, lay an important foundation for later language development.
Cook et al. (2004) revealed that it is around 20 to 24 months that the infant has learned approximately 50 to 100 words and he or she will begin to put them together. Often his first combinations will be words he already uses. For example, instead of saying “milk” or “more” to get another glass of juice, he will say “more milk.” Just why the infant begins to combine words in this way is not clear. For many years, child language acquisition research focused on this process of learning to produce longer and longer utterances that conform more and more closely to adult language. The structure of language refers to how words are combined into sentences (syntax) and the various forms of words (morphology). The young child must learn to say “I want cookies,” rather than “Want cookies I,” and “The boys are running,” rather than “The boys is run.” According to Cook et al. (2004), there is much literature from the 1960s and early 1970s that described in some detail the evolution of children’s grammar. Although teachers of young children need not be familiar with all the specific details of children’s grammatical development, they suggested that it is important to know the major stages of language structure development as described in the following paragraphs:
- Telegraphic language. When children begin to combine words, they are most likely to use words that have the most meaning. In earlier writings on child language acquisition, these utterances were called “telegraphic” because they appeared to omit unessential words. Utterances such as “Baby like bottle” is typical of children in this stage.
- Grammatical morphemes. Around 2 years of age, children begin to include grammatical morphemes in their utterances. Words such as the and word endings such as plural – s, present progressive -ing, past tense -ed, and others are gradually included. As a child first begins to use grammatical morphemes, she may often use them incorrectly. For example, she may say “The boy runned” or “an apples.” The teacher should be aware that incorrect use of grammatical morphemes nevertheless represents a more sophisticated stage of grammatical development than the earlier telegraphic stage in which grammatical morphemes were omitted altogether.
- Simple sentences. Gradually, by the age of 3, children learn to produce sentences that resemble simple ones used by adults. These sentences will contain a subject and a predicate and will include the necessary grammatical morphemes, although still not always in the correct form. The 3-year-old says “I want some milk, please,” or “Let’s go outside,” or “My dollies is mad!” The 3-year-old has also learned to make sentence transformations, that is, to ask questions (“Do you have my doll?”) and give commands (“Give me my doll!”), as well as to make simple declarative statements (“This is my doll.”).
- Complex language. By the age of 4, young children can easily combine words into sentences and produce them intelligibly. In addition, they can produce complex sentences such as “I don’t want to go to the store if I can’t buy a new toy.” Perhaps even more important is their increasing linguistic flexibility. They can now adjust the structure and content of their language according to the nature of the situation and the age and status of the listener. For example, to his 2-year-old sister, the 4-year-old might say, “Give me the ice cream!” But when talking to an older adult he would change the structure of his language (e.g., “Could I have some more ice cream, please?”).
The 4 or 5-year-old child is also capable of carrying on a conversation. The child can take turns, extend the topic, and return the conversational floor to his partner. The following dialogue demonstrates these conversational strategies, which are so crucial to the young child’s development of social skills:
Danny: Did you see Spongebob on TV last night?
Angie: No, ‘cause I watch Powerpuff Girls.
Danny: Spongebob got in trouble.
Angie: How come?
Danny: He played a trick on his boss.
Erin: I like Powerpuff Girls better than Spongebob.
Finally, the 4 or 5-year-old child can engage in the narrative — stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The child is now able to use language not only to manipulate the environment and obtain social interaction but also to express emotions and to share experiences and ideas with others. Language and cognition now become inextricably woven together as a means of problem-solving and learning about the world.
Incidentally, it is also in the ages of 2 to 4 where the child can have a competent use of apologies as it represents a mastery of a relatively more challenging pragmatic skill. For example, routines involving terms like please, thank you, hi, hello and goodbye are all reported to appear regularly in the discourse of children under the age of two (Ninio & Snow, 1996). Acquisition of these more common terms involves a smaller set of schemas that are likely to be more routinized and frequent (Ninio & Snow, 1996). In contrast, knowing when to apologize requires both an awareness of a wide array of moral, social, and situational standards (Kochanska, Casey & Fukumoto, 1995) as well as an appreciation of what represents (often infrequent) ‘apologisable’ breaches of such standards. In addition, it is also possible that parents may increasingly hold children more accountable for their behavior as they enter toddlerhood. In this regard, it is noteworthy that most direct elicitations of children’s apologies occurred only after the second birthday. Although it is unknown where the comparable onset data on other politeness routines are, it is suspected that parents are prompting children to say “please” and “thank you” at a much earlier age. Thus, it is not surprising that the acquisition of apology routines lags behind the acquisition of other politeness routines (Ely & Gleason, 2006). Ely and Gleason (2006) gave an example of how parents teach their children about apologies. In this case, the lesson was initiated by the child, Naomi (at age 3). She is questioned by her father about her response to having pushed another child (Naomi, what did Kimberly do when you pushed her?):
Father: She cried?
Child: Yeah.
Mother: Did you say that you were sorry?
Child: Yeah.
Mother: Were you sorry?
Child: Yeah. I sorry.
Ely and Gleason (2006) thought this sequence, involving both parents, reflects the degree to which parents are invested in their children’s mastery of not only the form of the apology linguistic routine but also its associated affective experience.
On the other hand, Achiba (2003) studied the routine linguistics of a seven-year-old Japanese girl (her daughter, Yao) over 17 months, during which time they lived in Melbourne, Australia. Yao attended a primary school in a middle-class community with minimal English as Second Language (ESL) support at school. Yao continued to be exposed to Japanese spoken by her mother and in a once-a-week Japanese school. Achiba collected Yao’s spontaneous request speech through audio- and video-taping and diary-keeping. The tape-recorded data, on which Achiba based her analysis, include Yao’s oral production whilst she played with friends at home after school. The interactions were performed on a one-to-one basis. Achiba played the role of participant-observer. Yao’s interlocutors, native speakers of English, are divided into three types: peer, teenager, and adult.
One interlocutor of each type interacted with Yao for approximately one hour in each session, with sessions being separated by four to six weeks in most instances. By analyzing the course of Yao’s progress in making requests, Achiba identifies four phases, each with distinct characteristics. Phase 1 (the first 12 weeks) is characterized by the frequent use of routine formulas such as it’s my turn, hang on, and imperative phrases. In Phase 2 (weeks 13 through 31) there is a marked shift from formulaic language to productive language, as evidenced by Yao’s use of longer, more elaborate, and more specific sentences, such as can I have a look at that book please? rather than can I have a look? Achiba also reports a remarkable increase in conventionally indirect strategies during this phase. In Phase 3 (weeks 32 through 61) Yao showed dramatic development in her sociolinguistic competence. For example, she started to use a mitigation strategy by choosing the could you (I) … ? form rather than the can you (I) … ? form. In addition, Yao began to differentiate request expressions appropriately according to social contexts such as the addressee and the goal of the request. Moreover, in this phase, Yao became able to reiterate her requestive intentions by employing different request forms rather than merely repeating the same form. Phase 4 (weeks 62 through 75) is characterized by increasing sophistication in Yao’s social use of language, with Yao’s repertoire of conventionally indirect strategies becoming noticeably richer.
In this case, we can say that social interaction can improve the routine linguistics of a child. It is said that lack of appropriate interaction limits communication development. Studies in many areas support the importance of loving, emotionally satisfying stimulation from birth. However, some parents simply do not know how to talk to their young children. They may think it silly to talk to their infant before he or she learns to talk.
It is usually assumed that people who speak a language, children as well as adults, instinctively know how to talk to children. Parents can learn to use everyday experiences to teach communication skills. Cooking, cleaning, and gardening are excellent experiences for children. Conversation during these activities becomes an excellent language-teaching time. Washing the car and working with tools provide additional excellent opportunities to foster speech and language learning. But parents need encouragement, effective examples, and thoughtful reminders if they are to make their child’s language-learning environment stimulating.
The early literature on so-called “motherese” and mother-infant interaction described several specific strategies mothers use to encourage and maintain a dialogue with their infants (Cross, 1984). These include behaviors such as (a) use of rising intonation “yes/ no” questions (e.g., “Wanna eat now?” or “Is baby tired?”); (b) pausing expectantly after each utterance to give the infant a turn; and (c) imitating the infant’s vocalizations or responding to the infant’s vocalizations as though they were intelligible (e.g., “Oh yeah?”, “Is that right?”, “No kidding!”, etc.). Maternal responsivity has frequently been found to be a robust correlate of later development in young children. Particularly important for the early childhood special educator is a sensitivity to all communicative attempts on the part of the child. For example, a child with severe disabilities who is nonverbal and rarely initiates interaction or attempts to get attention should receive immediate attention for any communicative effort, including gestures, changes in body position, vocalizations, and so forth. The child who communicates only by crying or pulling the teacher’s sleeve should receive an enthusiastic response for making a grunting sound or pointing to get a drink of juice because this is new behavior for the child. MacDonald (1989) described an interaction strategy called “upping the ante,” in which the teacher or parent encourages a slightly more sophisticated response than the one the child typically uses.
Another important aspect of maternal responsivity, albeit a more subtle one, is the ability to change or terminate interaction with an infant in response to such cues as gaze aversion, changes in body tension and facial expression, or lack of response from the infant. Interventionists, too, must be able to read children’s cues of disinterest, overload, or distraction. Continuing a particular cue or prompt, such as “Show me the doll,” when the child is not attending to the stimulus is wasted effort and may eventually teach the child to “tune out” as a generalized strategy to overwhelming or meaningless stimulation.
Much has been written about the maternal language patterns that are typical of middle-class mothers as they interact with their young children. Some of these communicative interaction strategies appear to be correlated with the improvement of linguistic routines. People should use these language behaviors in response to the infant’s or toddler’s interest and attention, as demonstrated by the child’s eye gaze, gestures, and vocalization or words. These interaction strategies include:
- Commenting on what the infant or child appears to be attending to (e.g., “Oh, you hear that doggie barking, don’t you?”), also referred to as “parallel talk” (McCormick et al., 2003).
- Repeating and recasting one’s own words or phrases in different ways to emphasize important words (e.g., “Doggie. That’s the doggie. Hear the doggie? Doggie! ”).
- Matching the child’s vocalization or word with a slightly more elaborated response, thereby interpreting the utterance (e.g., the child says “buh” and the teacher says “Bottle, yes bottle”). This is also referred to as “progressive matching” by MacDonald (1989).
- Expanding the utterance syntactically (e.g., the child says “cookie” and the teacher says “That is a cookie”); or semantically extending, that is, adding meaning to the utterance (e.g., the child says “doggie” and the teacher says “Yeah, that’s a big doggie!”).
In the end, true communication skills like linguistic routine should be made functional for the child, so that they will be able to imbibe it. The ability to provide rote answers to stereotyped questions is not communication. Infants and children must have opportunities to initiate communication. Observation of early childhood special education classrooms reveals that children are too often placed in a respondent role. That is, they are taught to respond to specific prompts and cues provided by the teacher. Communication used only in this way cannot be a learning tool for children. They must be encouraged to initiate interaction, to use language and other communicative behaviors to appropriately manipulate the environment, to ask questions and obtain information, and to solve problems. Children must learn to use language for purposes other than simply answering questions. This is why providing effective language inputs finely tuned to the child’s perceptual and cognitive level will be favorable when we follow the child’s lead and it occurs within a context of social interaction. This will greatly facilitate their communication skills development and enhance their ability to master linguistic routines.
Works Cited
Achiba, Machiko. Learning to Request in a Second Language: A Study of Child Interlanguage Pragmatics. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003.
Aijmer, Karin. Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. London & New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996.
Bates, Eizabeth. Pragmatics and sociolinguists in child language. In D. Morehead & A. Morehead (Eds.), Language Deficiency in Children: Selected Readings. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1976.
Cook, Ruth, Klein, Diane, Tessier, Annette, and Daly, Steven E. Adapting Early Childhood Curricula for Children in Inclusive Settings, 6th ed., New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Danielewicz, Jane M., Rogers, Dwight L., and Noblit, George W. “Children’s discourse patterns and power relations in teacher-led and child-led sharing time”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 9.3(1996): 311-332.
Ely, Richard and Gleason, Jean Berko. “I’m sorry I said that: apologies in young children’s discourse”, Journal of Child Language, 33.3(2006): 599-620.
Kochanska, G., Casey, R. J. & Fukumoto, A. (1995). Toddlers’ sensitivity to standard violations. Child Development 66, 643–56.
MacDonald, James D. Becoming Partners with Children: From Play to Conversation. San Antonio, TX: Special Press, 1989.
McCormick, L., Loeb, D. F., & Schiefelbusch, R. L. Early Language Intervention (2nd ed.), Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2003.
Ninio, A. & Snow, C. E. (1996). Pragmatic Development. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.