Analysis of the transcription for English

While analysing the linguistic features within a transcript between a five-year old girl and her father, I have categorised my findings into four main frameworks; questions, pronouns, determiners and negatives. These are aspects of language that children generally struggle with whilst learning the English language, and so I have analysed these areas carefully. However, in the specific transcript I am analysing, there are no negatives, and I will evaluate why this is.

The first framework to focus on is the use of questions in the grammatical structure; there are a significant amount of interrogatives used by the father during the conversation, but very little used by the girl. For example, the daughter says ‘some kids just love ducks’, and the father replies, ‘just love the ducks?’ This is not only an example of questioning, but also formulation. Formulation as an interrogative for a parent gives the child an opportunity to think about what they have just said, decide if it is correct and also show a high level of enthusiasm, which is needed for children around five years of age. It is arguable that the reason the father uses more interrogatives than the daughter is because he is guiding her to understand that questions keep a conversation going, and creates adjacency pairs much more fluent than a list of declaratives. Also, his questioning allows his daughter to feel like she has the attention. Vegotsky, a theorist, suggested that children are ego-centric and self-centred, meaning they love to have the attention on them as they grow up. This could be for a number of reasons including the need of interaction for learning. The fact that the father has adopted the language of his daughter and begun to ask questions, reflects that he subconsciously knows his daughter needs a lot of attention to be able to learn. Another thing to note about the questioning framework is that the fathers questions are to scaffold the daughter’s language and show her that certain things she says are wrong, without being rude. For example, the father picks up of the fact the daughter says ‘um’ very often in sentences as a non-verbal filler, to allow her to think about the grammatical structure of the sentence she is about to say. This can relate to Layoff’s theory that women use hedges and fillers more often than men. For example; girl: um (.) we have computers. Dad: ‘computers, and what else?’ He encourages her to stop using the word ‘um’ by asking a question, without that word- this will teach her that non-verbal fillers are not always needed when we think. The girl seems to always reply with ‘yeah’ after a corrective question, which indicates she is used to being corrected a lot. Her use of the word ‘yeah’, however, leads to more questions from the father. He also converges to her language by saying things like ‘so is kindergarten like the coolest ever?’ adopting her language style encourages her to communicate more and take more interest in the conversation.

As a five-year old, this girl is quite clear on her pronouns. For example, she is able to use possessive pronouns correctly and use the words ‘me’ ‘you’ ‘we’ ‘my’ ‘her’ etc. At five years old, this is something all children should be pretty clear on, and the girl in this transcript clearly is. This girl never uses a negative in this transcript- I could argue that this is because the conversation structure is dad asking a question, and her confirming it all the way through. Instead of mentioning things she doesn’t like or doesn’t do, she mentions all the things she did do and the things she did enjoy at kindergarten.

The last framework is determiners. Again, this girl is fairly clear on the use of determiners, and is able to distinguish between definite and indefinite articles, and possessives (as mentioned above). For example, the girl says ‘let’s go to the ducks!’ this indicates the fact that she is able to recognise that it’s an indefinite article, while maintaining her simple lexis. She knows that there are multiple ducks, and so it is better to say ‘the’ than ‘a’ (which would indicate there only being one duck). Her father shows her she is correct by using a discourse marker and beginning a new topic. Not only does this show her that what she previously said was correct and needs no more acknowledgement, but it also demonstrates his power and ability to drive the conversation. Not only does this girl show her language development through advanced determiners, but she also reformulates her father’s language. For example, she says ‘they may say’. This is fairly complex semantics and children of the age of five generally do not use the word ‘may’ as a substitute for ‘might’. This reflects her dad’s language and backs up BF Skinner’s theory that children reformulate their parent’s language.