Caught in a Web of Words: Some Considerations on Language Socialization and Language Acquisition

Abstract

"words and therefore language itself, as the fundamental social reproductive agents" (p. 37). ...the question of the actual mechanism through which this transmission takes place, that is, the components of language in which the 'social genes' are carried, is the subject of much debate... the question of how language assists the child to become a full fledged memeber of society has not received any systematic attention. To answer this question we need to consider langauge acquisition as part of a more general theory of socialization..." (p. 37). "...the role of the child as an active human agent with the rapidly developing ability to look for, recognise and use socially meaningful communication. Placing human agency in such a central position makes the transmission of socio-cultural knowledge, not simply an instrumental matter, but a creative process. Children's efforts to make sense of the communicative environment that surrounds them from the intial stages of life, involve both learning to understand interpersonal relations and a growing realizaiton of the inescapable normativeness of languae as a system of shared meanings. The power of language lies in its ability to influence and control others" (p. 38). "...metaphorically, language acts as a web of words which supports the child's earliest attempts to construct socially acceptable communcative exchanges. Not only are children enmeshed in langauge from their initial entry into life; even their earliest acts of communcation are mediated through language (Bullowa, 1979). By attempting to communicate and later to talk they achieve shared and situated understandings with others, understandings that are sustained by 'the elesticity of the web of words.' By this I mean that since what is doen or said in everyday life is always subject during the course of on-going interaciton to multiple interpretations, this fact allwos children to be accredited the status of a purposeful communicator. Whatever the syntactic limits on their language processing, both the assumption of social agency and that of purposeful intent underlying all talk, tends to give the child's verbal acts and sense of contexual approriateness. Thus we might say that the web not only sustains children's attmeps at communcaiton, but also offers a safety net thorugh which the apprentice speaker gains both the good graces and attention of others in order to have opportunities for correction or repetiton of the message. It is also on this basis that the 'polite fiction' of childhood rests, the fiction, by virtue of which children are treated as if they had conversational and social understandings far in advance of their apparent grammatical capabilites [my notes: see also Locke, 1993]. This is an assumption that only becomes realised in the course of further development (Dunn & Kendrick, 1983; Schutze, Kerppner & Paulsen, this volume)" (p. 39). By looking at the child's development of grammar or speech acts, even in different social contexts, we are not solving the problem of the child as a developing social person. To explore how the interactive process of speaking is situated within the soical constructive occurrence of any activity, we must look directly at social uses of linguistic knowledge and how linguistic knowledge serves to convey social information" (p. 49). Three basic principles of language socialization: 1. the child's dialogic achievement of language. 2. language acquisition as socio-cognitive strategies (constructor of knowledge) 3. the social organisation of language: Language as an external problem space ("how do social rules and regularities experssed socio-linguistically become part of the child's organised cognitive domain" (p. 53).