Language & Literacy in the Early Years 0-7

Marian R Whitehead

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446243664
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

This Fourth Edition of Language and Literacy in the Early Years has been fully revised and updated to reflect current professional interests and the latest developments in the field. The book provides comprehensive coverage of issues in language, literacy and learning, focusing on the age range from birth to seven years. New material covers theory of mind, key persons, and social and emotional dimensions of learning. The author added material on difficulties with language development, phonics and new literacies. Key terms, further reading and a revised layout make the book accessible to students.

The author emphasizes the joy and creativity involved in supporting young children?s development as speakers, writers and readers. While taking account of current initiatives and programmes, the author supports flexible teaching methods in what is a complex teaching and learning process. The book is fully illustrated with examples and photos from early childhood settings.

This book is essential reading for primary and early years students and practitioners in the field of language and literacy including nursery nurses, classroom assistants and foundation stage teachers.

PART 1

LANGUAGE AND
LEARNING

CHAPTER 1

LINGUISTICS: THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

This chapter includes:

• a brief introduction to linguistics
• modern approaches to understanding grammar
• brief comments on signs, symbols and cultural systems.

This book hopes to establish a healthy respect for the mystery, complexity and beauty of language. It is focused on early childhood because early years practitioners are privileged to be the professionals closest to young children’s discoveries and happy inventions in their first language learning. Indeed, early childhood practitioners are well placed, like parents, to appreciate children’s language learning, particularly the determination and ingenuity with which they set about tackling the linguistic unknown – sometimes head-on and sometimes by devious routes. One way for all of us to comprehend the sheer scale of young children’s linguistic achievements is to attempt a little linguistic learning for ourselves. Other gains include the clearing away of some common misunderstandings about language and the establishment of ground rules for further talking and reading about the nature of language. Furthermore, if we are at ease with some of the main concepts and specialist terminology of linguistics, we are less likely to be misled by dubious claims about language and learning and by questionable childcare and education interventions. So here are some working generalizations about linguistics and modern approaches to grammar.

Linguistics

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The study of language (one simple way of defining linguistics) has probably been pursued in various forms for thousands of years. Humankind has puzzled over the proliferation of many different languages: we might call this the Tower of Babel problem. Earlier generations were fascinated by what we could call the ‘roots’ issue – when and where did human language originate? People have even speculated about which language God, or the gods, spoke and which language totally isolated and untutored babies would first utter naturally. Clearly, ordinary people as well as philosophers, teachers and linguists have persistently asked, what is language and how does it work?

For centuries the proposed answers to these questions were highly prescriptive, that is, they were cast in the form of rules and assertions about which language was best, the ways in which it ought to be used, and which ideals and models of linguistic perfection should be emulated. It is not surprising that traditional prescriptive linguists frequently promoted the superiority of their own particular form of language use. As we will see later, this tradition of linguistic partiality is deeply rooted in communities and in the attitudes of individuals. For example, it is noticeably difficult for many monolinguals (people who speak only one language) to take seriously other ways of naming, organizing and thinking about the world, apart from their own linguistic practice. Furthermore, any attacks on these language loyalties can lead to passionate and violent reactions, as linguistic conflicts all over the world often demonstrate.

At the personal level, the language of home and early socialization is an intimate part of our sense of self, and any attack on our first language can be insulting, disturbing and alienating. One of the reasons for the huge numbers of bilingual and multilingual speakers in the world is the desire to preserve the languages and the traditions of the home and cultural group, while living and working within another language community.

Saussure and modern linguistics

Modern linguistics originated alongside the other modern social sciences (notably psychology and sociology) in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although it had little impact until the twentieth century. One man, Ferdinand de Saussure, is usually credited as the founding father of linguistics but his ideas were only published in 1915, after his death, as reconstructed lecture notes (Saussure, 1974). Despite this haphazard publication, Saussure’s work radically challenged traditional approaches to language studies and outlined a methodology and an analysis of linguistics that remains the basis of modern linguistic science.

Saussure’s work proposed a complete rejection of prescriptive judgements and unfounded and fruitless speculations about the origins of language. In their place he suggested a scientific approach to analysing and understanding the nature of human language as it exists and as it is used. In order to clear the ground for this more scientific study of language, Saussure formulated a set of linguistic distinctions, or definitions.¹

What has emerged most clearly from Saussure’s radical reshaping of the study of language is a scientific concern to observe languages objectively, to propose theories about their systems and to attempt to reconstruct and describe them accurately. This descriptive linguistics, as it is sometimes called, created new scientific procedures for collecting unknown languages ‘in the field’, using phonetic systems of notation as well as recordings and photographs. The work also developed a useful technique of relying on the ordinary ‘insiders’ of a language and culture as linguistic informants.

Saussure’s linguistics

• Linguists must clearly distinguish in their studies between the concept of language as the known system of rules of a specific tongue (for example, Welsh or Gujerati), and actual instances of language in daily use – that is, utterances or written examples. Saussure happened to be a French speaker and his original choice of French terminology for these distinctions, langue for language system and parole for specific usage, are still commonly used by linguists. Any book about grammar or modern linguistics is generally a study of langue, but an investigation of the languages and dialects used by inner-city schoolchildren would be predominantly a study of parole.
• Any language is a total system – a structure of elaborately interrelated elements and relationships. This emphasis on the relationships and the rules that link the elements of a language has led to all approaches since Saussure being broadly defined as ‘structural linguistics’.
• Linguistic studies should distinguish between descriptions of the current state of the language (synchronic language study) and accounts of the historical evolution of a language (diachronic language study). Synchronic approaches with their emphasis on describing how the language is ‘now’ tend to dominate modern linguistics.

This kind of approach has been taken up by most later researchers and used in the study of child language and language variety. The modern researcher tests the plausibility of any hypothesis about the nature of an utterance or a linguistic form by trying it out on a native speaker. In other words, the ordinary speaker–listener’s knowledge of the particular language system they use is the reality against which the professional linguist must test any theories.

In emphasizing the existence of ordinary knowledge of language, linguists simply claim that the native speaker (adult or child) knows one or more language systems at a deeply intuitive level. We know that we ‘know’ language because we produce it and comprehend it fairly effortlessly and, frequently, under many different circumstances and in a great variety of situations. Furthermore, we self-correct our own minor slips of the tongue, the pen and the keyboard, and confidently reject any ungrammatical forms of our languages that we happen to encounter. Faced with foreign speakers or infants, we strive to make sense of their intended meanings despite errors, misunderstandings and inaccurate pronunciations.

Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the shared area of psychology and linguistics, and it studies language as a major expression of human thinking and learning. It is of central interest to early years practitioners and explains how language is first acquired in infancy and how language, thinking and learning are related. Most people are clear that language is for communication with others and that it has an obvious social dimension, but they are often less consciously aware of its personal function in our thinking and self-organization.

Sociolinguistics

Language is, of course, a crucial method of social communication, cultural cohesion and dissemination. It is the tool, the manner and the matter of much of our socialization in infancy. Linguistics cannot ignore the totality of the human settings in which language is shared with others and learnt in interaction with them. Sociolinguistics is the branch of language studies that seeks to explore these complex areas of linguistics and sociology. Language and its social contexts are of major significance in child development and educational studies, particularly because homes, early years group settings and schools are very different contexts in which children learn to use and develop their languages appropriately. Language is a social creation, the voice of a community, but it becomes a highly personal possession for each of us and a way of thinking. We cannot understand language, learning and thinking, unless we keep both the social and the psychological factors in focus.

Applied linguistics

The above comments are an example of ‘applied’ linguistics: using linguistic findings for practical social activities like education. Pure linguists pursue strictly linguistic ends, such as refining even more detailed and accurate descriptions of language or languages, but there are many other applications of linguistics, apart from the educational.

In the medical sphere, linguistics provides help with the study and treatment of language disorders caused by congenital or accidental brain damage or disease. Language disorder and retardation also occur in children and adults who have a variety of abnormalities in the organs of voice production or have some specific sensory impairment such as degrees of deafness. These complex problems can only be touched on in this book but progress in dealing with them has been enhanced by detailed linguistic knowledge of non-verbal communication, phonology and verbal thinking.

The application of linguistics has always been associated with the work of anthropologists, who study remote and unknown languages and cultures, but this approach has in recent decades been adapted to support the long-term and in-depth study of distinctive groups and communities existing within a larger community or society.

Another aspect of applied linguistics is the study of artificial languages and the creation of voices for robots and computers. In the past, ideological and pedagogical theories also promoted artificial languages, such as Esperanto and ‘basic’ forms of English. The best-known application of linguistics is also the most obvious: the use of linguistic knowledge in the teaching of natural languages to adults and children in a variety of educational institutions.

Summary

• Linguistics is the study of language.
• Modern linguistics is descriptive and scientific in its approach and can be contrasted with traditional approaches that were prescriptive.
• Prescriptive linguistics emphasized notions of correctness and ideals for good language use that were often based on a respect for classical languages and formal written texts.
• Modern linguistic science primarily studies spoken language forms; it describes a language in terms of its structures and relationships. These are the internalized sets of rules that govern its use by native speakers.
• Psycholinguistics is the study of language as it relates to human thinking and learning, particularly the capacity to learn a first natural language in infancy.
• Sociolinguistics is the study of language as it is used and modified by varied social contexts.
• Applied linguistics is the use of language knowledge in practical social settings: educational linguistics is one example, although there are significant applications for linguistics in medicine, information technology, criminology and anthropology.

Grammars

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Grammar is not a popular topic with the majority of people, apart from professional linguists and language teachers. This is nothing new and many attempts have been made to sweeten the pill. In the early 1800s the paths of grammar were ‘strewed with flowers’ (Opie and Opie, 1980: 46) as well as jolly rhymes and exquisitely colourful engravings. In the latter part of the twentieth century there was a steady flow of books, as well as radio and television programmes, that assured us that grammar and language study could be funny, fascinating and even sexy! The humorous approach has continued to be surprisingly popular in the current decade (Truss, 2003). These guides are nearly always well researched and linguistically serious, but they have to combat a general fear of grammar by using such devices as cartoons, jokey sentences and glossy formats. Boredom and anxiety are, in fact, reactions to the half-understood prescriptive grammar referred to in the previous section. This traditional grammar may be a largely discredited ideal based on Latin, but it is only fully rejected by linguists and students of linguistics. The identification of learning, high culture and power with grammar and classical languages has deep roots in Britain’s history, political life and establishment culture (see Chapter 2).

Modern linguistics describes a rich and complex range of grammars. There are several differing theories about the structure or grammar of human languages, but it is possible to identify two important characteristics they all share.

• The grammars are all descriptive: they set out to describe the complex sets of relations or rules that link the sounds of a language, or its written symbols, with the meanings or messages intended. In attempting to describe a grammar, the linguist behaves like a scientist, or even an early years practitioner, and observes, records and hypothesizes.
• All modern grammars describe far more than the surface of a language – that which is heard or seen in writing. The traditional prescriptive approach placed great emphasis on the surface written form and analysed that into categories derived from Latin. Modern descriptive grammars identify and describe at least three major levels of a language and, thus, they can be said to be richer and more complex models of language than the traditional prescriptive ideal.

Phonology, syntax and semantics

The three major levels of a language that modern grammars describe are,

• phonology
• syntax
• semantics.

Lexis, more commonly referred to as vocabulary, is sometimes added to this list. Lexis refers to all the words in the definitive dictionaries of a written language or the stock of words available to an oral-language community. This does not mean that we all know all the words of our first languages; nor does it follow that measuring or assessing anyone’s vocabulary is an easy matter. We all operate an active vocabulary of words we use regularly and confidently, as well as having a passive vocabulary of words and meanings we understand but are not likely to use freque...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• PART I LANGUAGE AND LEARNING
• PART II LITERACY
• Language and Education: Some Key Texts
• Literature Referred to in the Text
• References
• DVDs and Useful Websites
• Index