Transcript Language socialisation of children with communication difficulties in

Language socialisation of children with
communication difficulties in
multilingual families
Jane Stokes: University of Greenwich
and
Deirdre Martin: University of Birmingham
The space we are in
Building a knowledge ‘object’
 Our intellectual journeys:
histories and personal - professional narratives
 What is meant by ‘knowledge object’?
Building this new knowledge object
Needs and challenges in different
communities
NEEDS
 of academic community: limited research in
communication difficulties in multilingual families
 of service provider community of health, education and
social care providers : SLTs, health visitors, educators,
ed.psychologists
 of user-client group: bilingual/multilingual families with
children who have communication difficulties
Challenges
 Challenges for academic community
 Challenges for service providers
 Challenges for bilingual families with children
with communication difficulties
Scientific and spontaneous concepts
Concept
Scientific
concepts
•Impose on child logically defined concepts
•Scientific concepts move ‘downwards’
towards greater concreteness
•Evolve in highly structured and specialized
activity of classroom instruction
Mature concepts
Spontaneous
Concepts
Object
•Concepts emerge from the child’s own
reflections of everyday experience
•Spontaneous concepts move upwards
towards greater abstractness
•Develops in child’s everyday learning
environment
Crossing boundaries
Dissatisfaction between the traditional separation between
language acquisition and language socialisation (Kramsch
2002)
Language acquisition: learner as computer
Language socialisation: learner as apprentice
Language acquisition
Key concepts of this perspective through
metaphors of language development
 Acquisition metaphor
 Participation metaphor
 Co-construction metaphor
Metaphors for culture
Culture as ‘medium’; as a nurturing garden
Cole (1996)
Cultural psychology
and
Cross-cultural psychology
Vinden and Astington (2000)
“There is a danger that those who focus on
biological [including cognitive] explanations and
those who focus on cultural ones cannot even
talk to one another because they are grappling
with essentially different issues. We hope we are
not talking past [other presenters here] but rather
initiating a crossing of borders that will eventually
lead to the kind of co-operation and
transformation that we see as crucial to
advancing our understanding”
Language socialisation
Key concepts of this perspective
Ochs 2002
“
the marriage between culture and developmental research is
uncertain. While culture is considered important to fathom, it is
obscure and difficult to analyze. Culture, like God, seems
unknowable. Central to understanding the relation of language and
culture in human development is long term, rigorous ethnographic
observation, recording, description, and analysis of displayed
preferences and social actions, and their historical and ontogenetic
enduring and changing relation to social identities and activities.
Without this ethnographic knowledge, it is difficult to grasp the
realms of social meaning that novice and veteran members of
communities are building when they interact, and the sociocultural
fissure points that land them in tangled webs of miscommunication”
Van Kleeck 1994
“We have come to realise.. that language use is
essentially a cultural phenomenon, both reflecting
and transmitting deeply held cultural values and
beliefs. If we are to provide increasingly efficacious
services to all families we serve, we must grapple
openly with the infinitely complex issues presented by
the cultural diversity of the clients we serve”
Van Kleeck A (1994) Potential cultural bias in training parents as
conversational partners with their children who have delays in
language development American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association
Communication as culture
Key concepts of culture and language socialisation
of communication needs in multilingual families
 Communication difficulties as cultural difficulties
 Autism and culture
Some questions to shape a knowledge object and
our thoughts
How is the family collective building communication
practices with and around the child?
What is the ecology of the family and the tension with
individuality?
What are constellation of behaviours within families and
cultures?
How do we build a new knowledge object to bridge the
traditional separation between language acquisition
and language socialisation?