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.