Berman and the development of discourse

2.6 Berman and the development of discourse

From the perspective of 1 st Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and Form/Function linguistics, Berman and her international team investigated how children

develop the ability to construct discourse in French, Hebrew, Icelandic, Dutch, Spanish,

Swedish, and American English in a large-scale project, known as the Spencer Project, or officially as “Developing literacy in different contexts and different languages,” which

began in 1997 1 .

The project involved the elicitation of written/spoken personal experience narratives and expository texts from 80 individuals from the seven countries represented

by her team, evenly divided into four groups of 20 individuals each: Grade School (4 th graders, 9-10 years old), Junior High School (7 th graders, 12-13 years old), High School (11 th graders, 16-17 years old), and Adults (university graduate students in their 20’s and

30’s). As Berman and her team thoroughly analyzed the 320-text corpus for patterns of development across the independent variables of age-level, genre/modality, and language, dozens of studies were published on the different findings that emerged from the analysis. Berman and her colleagues wanted to describe “the linguistic, cognitive, and communicative resources that [speaker-writers] deploy in adapting their texts to different circumstances”—across modality and genre—“and to detect shared or different trends depending on the particular target language” (Berman & Katzenberger 2004: 62). These aims are summarized under the heading of measuring speaker-writer’s development of

1 Berman and her colleagues had previously studied the different developmental and linguistic aspects of children’s narrative discourse, inspired by the work of Dan Slobin at Berkeley who conducted work on children’s construction of oral narratives (1996).

Berman & Slobin’s (1994) “Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental study,” known as the “Frog picture story book” studies, analyzed and compared the oral fictive narratives of 3‐, 4‐, 5‐, 9‐year olds and Adults in English, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Spanish. Evident in this work, Berman expressed a view of language acquisition as an integrated, protracted process linguistic literacy, or, the ability to deploy flexible a variety of linguistic forms to meet various communicative functions in various contexts. Berman & Slobin assert that that “the mastery of language structure and language use cannot be explained in monolithic terms […] within the framework of any single linguistic, psycholinguistic, or sociolinguistic theory” (1994: 593). Berman asserted that children “bootstrap into knowledge of linguistic forms” through the confluence of different information sources—linguistic, cognitive, social‐interactional, etc. (1994: 593). Though the youngest children in the study had mastered what she calls the “core grammar” of their languages, they were still “far from the ‘endstate’ of a proficient speaker or proficient narrator” (1994: 593). These notions of later‐age first language acquisition remain as an important assumption throughout all Berman’s work.

linguistic literacy. First outlined by Ravid & Tolchinsky (2002), the notion of “linguistic literacy” (not merely the “literacy,” of reading/writing) is characterized by speaker- writers possessing a varied repertoire of linguistic resources, the ability to access/deploy these resources to meet different communicative ends in different contexts, and a meta- linguistic awareness of the effect of using these different linguistic forms in different situations. Linguistic literacy develops toward its zenith of “rhetorical flexibility or adaptability,” which means being “rhetorically expressive” enough to “hold the attention of their addressee” with “interesting and varied linguistic output that is attuned to different addressees and communicative contexts” (Ravid & Tolchinsky 2002: 418). Key to the idea of rhetorical flexibility is the ability to intermingle features from different genres (narrative and expository) and to adapt these features to be as “rhetorically more powerful, convincing, and precise” as possible (2002: 435). Berman evokes and reiterates the same idea of linguistic literacy as the developmental target in the first Spencer Project article, referring to it as “the ability to readily and effectively access and deploy a wide range of written materials in a given target language” (Berman & Verhoeven 2002: 14).

To measure speaker-writer’s developmental stages of the achievement of linguistic literacy, or the production of well-formed discourse, Berman eventually developed a complex analytical framework made up of the different aspects of discourse production abilities (Berman 2008). Berman defined five aspects of discourse construction that were quantifiable across language, age, and genre/modality and which younger/older speaker-writers were found to deploy with gradual mastery at different stages of development. The five “functionally motivated” discourse features comprise an “integrative framework,” that proceeds from (1) global-level principles via (2) categories To measure speaker-writer’s developmental stages of the achievement of linguistic literacy, or the production of well-formed discourse, Berman eventually developed a complex analytical framework made up of the different aspects of discourse production abilities (Berman 2008). Berman defined five aspects of discourse construction that were quantifiable across language, age, and genre/modality and which younger/older speaker-writers were found to deploy with gradual mastery at different stages of development. The five “functionally motivated” discourse features comprise an “integrative framework,” that proceeds from (1) global-level principles via (2) categories