Learning English

Neil Mercer, Joan Swann, Barbara Mayor, Neil Mercer, Joan Swann, Barbara Mayor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000155334
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Learning English focuses on young children's acquisition of spoken and written English in monolingual and bilingual contexts and explores the debates surrounding English in schools and colleges, and the often controversial nature of the English curriculum in different parts of the world.

English is learned in most parts of the world, both through use in the home and community, and as a major language of education. Learning English represents just some of this diversity.

1
English as a first language

Dennis Bancroft, with contributions from Julia Gillen

1.1 Introduction

What does it mean to learn a language such as English? The task is such an ordinary one that it’s easy to forget it’s also quite a remarkable achievement. David Crystal (1995) outlines the knowledge that young language learners need to acquire in order to speak English:

• The 20 or so vowels and 24 or so consonants of a spoken dialect of the language, and over 300 ways of combining these sounds into sequences (such as /s+k+r/ into scream, and /m+p+s/ into jumps).
• A vocabulary which can evidently reach 50,000 or more active words, and a passive ability to understand about half as many again.
• At least a thousand aspects of grammatical construction, dealing with all the rules – some very general, some very specific – governing sentence and word formation.
• Several hundred ways of using the prosodic features of pitch, loudness, speed, and rhythm, along with other tones of voice, to convey meaning: ‘it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it’.
• An uncertain (but large) number of rules governing the ways in which sentences can be combined into spoken discourse, both in monologue and dialogue.
• An uncertain (but very large) number of conventions governing the ways in which varieties of the language differ, so that the linguistic consequences of region, gender, class, occupation, and other such factors can be assimilated.
• An uncertain (but even larger) number of strategies governing the ways in which all the above rules can be bent or broken in order to achieve special effects, such as in jokes and poems.
  (Crystal, 1995, p. 426, italics added)

What is all the more remarkable is the speed with which such knowledge is acquired. Crystal comments that by the time they attend their first school ‘most children give the impression of having assimilated at least three-quarters of all the grammar there is to learn’ (Crystal, 1995, p. 428).

This chapter describes the development of young children’s ability to speak English and considers how this development is influenced by specific linguistic and cultural factors. The particular perspective on language development that I take in this chapter is this: when young children acquire English, or any other language, they are acquiring a tool for social action. They learn language in social situations where they, and other people, are trying to get things done.

ACTIVITY 1.1 Allow 5–10 minutes

Consider, for example, the case of Susie, recorded at the age of 4 years 7 months talking to her babysitter (Crystal, 1986). What does Susie seem to have learnt to do in English? What skills has she acquired in order to take part in a conversation and tell a story? (Note that ‘–’ indicates a pause.)

SUSIE Oh, look, a crab. We seen – we were been to the seaside.

BABY-SITTER Have you?

SUSIE We saw cr – fishes and crabs. And we saw a jellyfish, and we had to bury it. And we – we did holding crabs, and we – we holded him in by the spade.

BABY-SITTER Did you?

SUSIE Yes, to kill them, so they won’t bite our feet.

BABY-SITTER Oh.

SUSIE If you stand on them, they hurt you, won’t they.

BABY-SITTER They would do. They’d pinch you.

SUSIE You’d have to – and we put them under the sand, where the sea was. And they were going to the sea.

BABY-SITTER Mhm.

SUSIE And we saw some shells. And we picked them up, and we heard the sea in them. And we saw a crab on a lid. And we saw lots of crabs on the sea side. And I picked the –fishes up – no, the shells, and the feathers from the birds.– And I saw a pig.

BABY-SITTER Gosh, that was fun.

SUSIE Yes, and I know a story about pigs.

BABY-SITTER Are you going to tell it to me?

SUSIE One – one day they went out to build their houses. One built it of straw, one built it of sticks, and one built it of bricks. And he – the little busy brother knowed that in the woods there lived a big bad wolf, he need nothing else but to catch little pigs. So, you know what, one day they went out – and – the wolf went slip slosh slip slosh went his feet on the ground. Then – let me see, er – now I think – he said let me come in, you house of straw. And he said, no no by my hair of my chinny-chin-chin, I will not let you come in. Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down. So he huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed, and he puffed, and he blew the little straw house all to pieces. Then away went the little brother to his brother’s house of sticks …

(Crystal, 1986, pp. 9–10)

Comment

As you may have observed, Susie is clearly a competent conversationalist, able to take turns, involve her interlocutor, respond to prompts and questions, etc. In addition, she has developed some specific skills to do with storytelling. Crystal comments on her retelling of The Three Little Pigs as follows (we have italicised some of the key words and phrases in his account, and to distinguish these we have placed Susie’s original words in quotation marks):

The story-line … comes from one of her favourite bed-time sagas, and she has evidently been a keen listener. She reproduces several of its phrases very accurately – not only the wolf’s words, but some of the story-teller’s style, such as ‘Away went …’. She also dramatizes the narrative – though you can’t tell from the above transcription: ‘big bad wolf’ is said with long, drawn-out vowels; and the huffing and puffing is accompanied by a great puffing out of the cheeks, and an increased presence, as Susie draws herself up to her full height – all 42 inches of it. You can easily tell, from her version, how her parents must have acted out the story.

On the other hand, this is definitely Susie’s story, not the book’s. If you compare her words with those of the original, there are all kinds of partial correspondences, but hardly anything is repeated exactly as it was.

For instance, the book does not begin with that opening line; the phrase the ‘little busy brother’ isn’t used there; and she puffs far more than the wolf does. Susie may have learned the events of the story off by heart, and several of its words and phrases, but it is largely her own grammar which is stringing them together. It is also very much her style: at the time, the use of the ‘you know what’ and ‘let me see’ were definite ‘Susie-isms’.

As you can tell from the pauses and the rephrasings, Susie’s speech isn’t perfectly fluent. It’s rather jerky at times, and sometimes it comes out in such a rush that it’s difficult to follow. Her pronunciation, too, is somewhat immature – she says [kwab] for crab, for instance, and [bwve] for brother [you will find a brief note on the use of phonetic script representing language sounds in the Introduction to this book]. And she has the child-like preference for joining sentences using ‘and’ – the commonest linking word among children, from around age 3 onwards. She is also still sorting out some points of grammar, especially in relation to the way verbs are used: she says ‘knowed’ instead of ‘knew’, ‘we seen’ alongside ‘we saw’, ‘we did hold[ing]’ instead of ‘we held’, and there is the interesting ‘we were been’, with its confusion of tenses.

But the overwhelming impression we receive from the story, as from the whole dialogue, is one of great competence and confidence.

(adapted from Crystal, 1986, pp. 10–11)

The linguist Michael Halliday was one of the first to develop an understanding of language development based on analysis of the functions of utterances (summarised in his seminal 1978 book, Language as Social Semiotic). In particular, he introduced the valuable, but difficult, notion that a functional approach to the development of meanings (i.e. looking at what children learn to do with language) implies a social foundation for the development of language. This perspective is very influential among developmental psycholinguists and it has informed the selection of materials in this chapter.

This seems to me to be a plausible start to our journey since it does not constrain us to an investigation of children’s language use from the moment they begin to speak recognisable words, but allows us to explore the possibility that the basis of later language development rests in children’s early, preverbal, efforts to make their wishes known.

The chapter has four main sections, dealing in turn with the development of the sounds of language, a child’s first words, the beginnings of grammar and finally, as examples of sophisticated usage, the development of humour and narrative skills.

1.2 Sounds and exchanges

Many psycholinguists have investigated stages in the development of communication in infants. A flexible vocal system over which one has control seems to be an essential attribute of all spoken language users and, during the first year of life, infants produce a range of sounds and begin to indulge in vocal play. However, this is not all that they are learning to do. Table 1.1 shows the generally agreed sequence of communicative milestones, as summarised by Lauren Adamson (1995).

Table 1.1 Milestones of early communication development

Milestone	Average age (in months)	Typical range (in months)
Eyes open	0
Eye-to-eye contact
Social smile	2
Coos and goos	2
Laughs	4
Squeals, raspberries, growls, yells, etc.	4
Canonical babbling (e.g., [bababa])	7
Comprehends a word	9
Comprehends 10 words	10.5
Variegated babbling	11
Onset of pointing	12
Comprehends 50 words	13
Produces first word	13	9 to 16
Produces 10 words	15	13 to 19
Produces 50 words	20	14 to 24
Produces word combinations	21	18 to 24

(Adamson, 1995, p. 17, Table 2.1)

Notes on some of these terms:

‘cooing’ – often high-pitched vowel-like sounds that can be combined with [g] or [k]

‘babbling’ – repetition of well-formed syllables constituted of a vowel and at least one consonant. Usually the same sound is reduplicated, e.g. [b7 b7].

Develops into ‘variegated babbling’ where a number of varied syllables are combined together

‘raspberries’ – these too can be described in linguistic terms! Adamson (1995, p. 90) explains they are ‘labial trills and vibrants’.

Psycholinguists such as Adamson are careful to explain that such charts must be interpreted flexibly. Children do vary hugely in rates of development, and occasionally they may omit a stage such as babbling. Also, of course, many of these milestones may be defined in different ways by observers. It is clear, how...