- 70 - Watson-Gegeo and Boggs 1977 refer to work by Bernstein 1969 on joking routines
found in one group of part-Hawaiian adolescents, and they conclude their chapter by suggesting that:
children acquire the basic structure of some verbal routines and have the ability to perform them some years before they regularly have an opportunity to practice them or demonstrate
their ability to others. 1977:90
3.6.2 Stages, Strategies and Individual Differences
Several studies have looked at ways in which parents request narratives of personal experience e.g. “Tell Daddy what we did today” and how these can provide support for
learning “not only culturally accepted norms for structuring stories appropriate sequencing of appropriate topics but also correct linguistic forms for doing so Eisenberg 1981; Sachs
1977; Stoel-Gammon and Cabral 1977; see also discussion in Cazden 1979” Peters 1983:69. Johnson 1980 deals with the acquisition of question words and shows how this
can be started with “set phrases tied to very specific interaction routines” p. 1, which the children only later learn to segment into their constituent parts. Researchers have noted
that some children are “productively cautious” and prefer to analyse first and talk later. Others are more eager to talk and so rely heavily on “formulas” and sentence frames which
contain constant + variable elements described by Braine 1963 as “pivot constructions”. One such child is Wong Fillmore’s Nora 1976; she produced freely and relied on
feedback “to guide evaluation of her…productions”. Are these differences attributable to children’s innate preferences for processing language in certain ways, or are they based on
the uses to which the specific utterances are to be put? Then again, what about the nature of the input speech and the kind of speech expected of the child in response? Surely, these
factors influence the strategies a learner employs. Krashen and Scarcella comment as follows:
As we have seen in first language and second language acquisition by children, the “gestalt” route is used by acquirers under similar conditions: where input is complex, and
where conversational demands are present, acquirers may tend to use whole utterances in conversationally appropriate places without a full grasp of their internal structure.
1978:295 There are also cultural differences. How relevant are these to input speech and a child’s
“route to language”? Nelson 1973, Schieffelin 1979, Ochs 1982, and Heath 1982,
- 71 - 1983 show that input speech can vary considerably from culture to culture. McLaughlin
1987 discusses some of these findings: Heath 1983 reported that Black children in the working-class community she studied
were largely ignored as conversation partners until they became information givers. Parents, older siblings, other family members, and friends simply did not address speech
to these children; they learned to speak by taking in and imitating sounds they heard around them. Moreover, the language they heard was well beyond their current level of
competence. Research with children from other cultures e.g., Ochs 1982 points to the same
conclusion. In many societies, parents and other caretakers do not use simpler codes in talking to young children. Simplification is viewed as an inappropriate speech behaviour.
There is now considerable evidence that many children in the world learn language in a way that is different from the way that American [and British] middle-class White
children learn to speak. McLaughlin 1987:44 Peters concludes her discussion on prefabrication, or fusion, of “useful chunks” by
stressing the need for more information about the processes involved in their production. In particular, since morphophonemic processes seem to be highly automatized in mature
speakers of a language, it would be particularly enlightening to document how they get this way. 1983:100
MacWhinney 1978 detailed two stages of acquisition of morphophonology: 1 “rote memorization”, where inflections are not recognized as separate elements and mistakes in
construction do not occur and 2 the early stages of synthesis, which he divides into “analogical formation” and “productive combination”. Stage 2 is characterized by errors
of overgeneralization. Peters speaks, also, of characteristic signs of relatively laborious production and concomitant reduction in processing capacity available to other tasks in
utterance production. As automatization develops and fusion progresses, these signs of difficulty should
disappear. This final stage, then, should be characterized by smooth production, lack of hesitations or self-corrections, absence of analogical or combinational errors, evidence of
more processing devoted to other aspects of production, and automatic morphophonemic adjustments when speech errors occur. 1983:100
- 72 - We might question whether this explanation would be accepted by psychologists; however,
Peters suggests that a study of narratives told more than once might well provide a useful source of data on automatization and fusion.
In the first telling the child would be struggling to find ways to report the salient events. These struggles, aided by promptings, questionings, and clarifications from the first
audience, would serve as a rehearsal for the second telling, which could be expected to be smoother and more effective. An example of such a repeated narrative can be found in
Halliday 1975:112. In my own data I have only the second story in such a sequence. At the time of the first telling, the 4-year-old narrator’s father had been struck by the
difficulty the boy was having in reporting the event, so the next day the father asked his son to tell me the story. This time, to the surprise of the father, the story was told
relatively smoothly and easily. 1983:101 In our data we have only two instances of the same story told twice. For example, Sheiba
told her Story B to Tammy first and then, exactly two weeks later, she heard the original story again and retold it to Shazia. The second attempt is longer, twenty-two clauses in
contrast to fifteen in the first attempt; there are fewer long pauses between clauses, three as opposed to five in her first effort; there is also more elaboration overall.
1 1 One day Father Christmas woke up early in the morning.
2 He looked in the box
3 and saw balls.
2 1 Father Christmas woke up.
2 His cupboard was in a mess.
3 He had to clear it up.
4 He looked in the cupboard
5 and he found some stocking red balls.
6 The balls were special.
Thus, we have some evidence for the operation of memory in the production of lexical and structural material. The story content is relatively familiar and so Sheiba is able to give
more attention to the manner of the actual telling.
- 73 -
3.6.3 Nativelike Selection and Nativelike Fluency
