Castle transcript task

Overview

As Evie is in conversation with someone she knows, she is likely to be more comfortable and therefore take risks with her language choices. Grandma affirms an asymmetrical power balance with Evie, which she maintains by setting the agenda throughout the discourse. However, this does not discourage Evie from developing her language as she uses the set conversation to talk about local topics that interest her; this encourages her to communicate. By doing this Evie incorporates her development into the role-play activity including examples of Halliday’s functions such as imagination.

Six points

1) Skinner’s operant conditioning- how Grandma uses negative and positive reinforcement in reaction to Evie 2) Power- in relation to the lack of politeness strategies from Evie’s point of view 3) Observers paradox- are we observing natural behaviour? 4) Child-led discourse- the use of local topics 5) Theorists- Halliday’s functions and Vtgotski’s zone of proximal development 6) Fairclough- power balancing and powerful participant

PEE paragraph

There is an asymmetrical power balance between Evie and her grandmother. Her grandmother has both instrumental and influential power as she has authority over Evie as there is an ideological assumption in society that adults hold power over children (instrumental); yet, she also has influential power as Evie looks up to her for guidance for her language development as she is a caring figure due to their family relation. Evie’s grandmother shows aspects of being the powerful participant by setting the agenda through the use of interrogatives such as “who else do you want to put in the castle?” However, rather being used to assert her power, she may just be doing this in order to keep the conversation going, encouraging Evie to talk about things she likes which acts as motivation to talk and develop her speech. This supports Nelson’s theory of local topics and results in child-led discourse as Evie names all the nouns, such as “pig” and “triangle” that she would “like to put in the castle”. Evie’s common use of imperatives drives the task, for example “come on car”. This supports Halliday’s theory of imagination as she is incorporating role play into her speech. Furthermore, it also shows an attempt by her to experience the other side of a power dynamic as “come on” is most likely a phrase she has heard in unequal encounters with her parents when they are trying to make her hurry. By repeating this phrasal verb, it shows an example of how usually children feel powerless and want to know what it feels like to be powerful so Evie repeats an imperative usually used against her to do this. The fact she is able to understand the phrase and then apply it shows how she has a more complex understanding of language suggesting she may be in the telegraphic stage.

CLA task

As Evie is in conversation with someone she knows, she is likely to be more comfortable and therefore take risks with her language choices. Grandma guides her speech by developing these skills that are in Evie's zone of proximal development including examples of scaffolding and positive and negative reinforcement which are a part of Skinner’s operant conditioning.

1) Social skills/politeness- Evie's grandmother does not only correct uses of non-standard English but also reinforces the idea of social skills and politeness. For example "hahaha that's a lovely smiley"; smiling is an important social expectation/rule in order to be a friendly member of society.

2) Interaction theory-  Following ideas in Brunner’s interaction theory, Evie’s grandmother uses scaffolding as a form of modelling to show her how to pronounce something. For example how “wan-da” is modelled and therefore corrected to “panda”.

3) The observer's paradox- Usually when people are filmed they start to display unnatural behaviour, this is called the observers paradox; however, this may not actually effect the conversation between Evie and her grandmother as the camera has been incorporated into the conversation as a game. The whole conversation is centred around “who else” they “shall take a picture of”.

4) Skinners operant conditioning-  Evie makes a virtuous error when using the declarative “I sneeze” as she omits the past tense suffix. Her grandmother uses negative reinforcement to correct this by repeating her statement except this time adding the suffix, “you sneezed”.

5) Child-led discourse- Evie is encouraged to speak about things that interest her as this is motivation to communicate. Her Grandma achieves this by using local topics, an idea by Nelson, of the toys around her such as “tigger” and “cat”.

6) Power- Evie’s grandmother sets the topic of conversation, this demonstrates her instrumental power; however, her the interrogatives used are always open, such as “what’s that? Who is it?”. This suggests that rather than displaying her power through asking questions, she is rather trying to keep the conversation going by giving Evie an opportunity to talk about something she knows about and is familiar with in order to develop her language.