The Importance of Language: An Introduction
Communication is perhaps the one thing that brings and keeps human beings together. It is through talking to each other that we are able to belong. Without language this wouldn’t be possible. The most striking example in world literature, that could prove this statement is the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Because of his looks, he is completely shut out from society. Only with time does he understand that the only way for him to become part of this very same society is through language and communication, through trying to understand people and be understood. Only after gaining enough skills to articulate his thoughts and feelings in a way not to be misunderstood, is he able to take part in social life.
It is then natural to assume that the ability to express ourselves, as well as the ability to comprehend what is expressed, is one of the major criteria for socializing. It allows us to belong to a community. This ability develops throughout our lives. We start from zero as infants and become more and more skilled as we grow up.
This “gain[ing] of competence in sense-making”, as Elinor Ochs (1991: 44) calls it, has been a major research topic for linguists. Ochs tries to show in her article, “Misunderstanding Children”, how close this process of developing language skills, in order to understand/comprehend, is connected to the social and cultural development of individuals, because “[e]very society establishes norms of competence and all members of society, including infants and children, are evaluated in terms of them” (Ochs 1991: 44). Children become linguistically and culturally competent members of their communities through interactions with caregivers and other more competent members of their community (cf. Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Through this language socialization, children learn the behaviors that are culturally appropriate in their community (cf. Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986).
Table of Contents:
1. The Importance of Language: An introduction
2. Gaining Competence
2.1. Child-Centered Society
2.1.1. Misunderstanding Children’s Utterances
2.1.2. Children’s Misunderstanding of Other’s Utterances
2.2. Situation-Centered Society
2.2.1. Misunderstanding Children’s Utterances
2.2.2. Children’s Misunderstanding of Other’s Utterances
3. Conclusion
Bibliography
Plagiarism declaration
1. The Importance of Language: An Introduction
Communication is perhaps the one thing that brings and keeps human beings together. It is through talking to each other that we are able to belong. Without language this wouldn’t be possible. The most striking example in world literature, that could prove this statement is the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Because of his looks, he is completely shut out from society. Only with time does he understand that the only way for him to become part of this very same society is through language and communication, through trying to understand people and be understood. Only after gaining enough skills to articulate his thoughts and feelings in a way not to be misunderstood, is he able to take part in social life.
It is then natural to assume that the ability to express ourselves, as well as the ability to comprehend what is expressed, is one of the major criteria for socializing. It allows us to belong to a community. This ability develops throughout our lives. We start from zero as infants and become more and more skilled as we grow up.
This “gain[ing] of competence in sense-making”, as Elinor Ochs (1991: 44) calls it, has been a major research topic for linguists. Ochs tries to show in her article, “Misunderstanding Children”, how close this process of developing language skills, in order to understand/comprehend, is connected to the social and cultural development of individuals, because “[e]very society establishes norms of competence and all members of society, including infants and children, are evaluated in terms of them” (Ochs 1991: 44). Children become linguistically and culturally competent members of their communities through interactions with caregivers and other more competent members of their community (cf. Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Through this language socialization, children learn the behaviors that are culturally appropriate in their community (cf. Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986).
Language socialization studies focus on naturally occurring interactions with and around children and analyze the ways in which the community’s norms are expressed. Because occurrences of misunderstanding are universal in every society, Ochs (1991: 46) argues that they “provide an opportunity space for socialization”, through developing children’s abilities not only to “recognize signals of misunderstandings”, but also to “isolate sources” and “determine strategies” to deal with them in a way promoted by a certain community group, or in other words – through developing their skills in using language as a communication medium in ways approved by the society they live in. Here it is important to mention that from hence on we will regard misunderstandings as “communicative activit[ies] in which one or another participant signals noncomprehension or partial noncomprehention” (Ochs 1991: 45).
With time children are provided with tools to deal with such a situation, but more important, these tools are dependent on culture and society. Each community prefers a specific approach to misunderstandings; it “relies upon a set of linguistic (and gestural) forms to constitute the social and linguistic activity of misunderstanding. In this sense, the co-occurrence of these particular forms indexes that the activity of misunderstanding is taking place” (Ochs 1991: 47). Children are socialized through gaining an understanding of how the whole activity, the process, is accomplished. Furthermore, the use of a specific strategy in engaging in misunderstanding is in a way of defining a social identity. Children are socialized into further definitions of the context of situation and context of culture (cf. Malinovski, 1978).
The ideas and conclusions I am going to present here are based mainly on Elinor Ochs’s article “Misunderstanding Children” (1991), although my approach to them will differ slightly. I will try to put my emphasis not on the different strategies that exist in dealing with noncomprehension, but on what strategies two certain types of societies use and how those strategies correspond with the society’s perceptions as a whole.
In the following we will concentrate mainly on communities with interaction patterns with a child-centered context. In other words, we concentrate on European and North American society. In these communities adults tend to adjust their speech to children, and regard them as equal communicative partners. We will take a closer look at the strategies and tools they use in dealing with misunderstandings, in which children are involved, and we will try to examine how these strategies influence the further understanding of the child.
In order to avoid this work to be one-sided, we will also mention how situation-centered child-raising communities behave when a misunderstanding occurs. We will take a look at the strategies and tools they use, and try to explain why their perceptions differ the ones we have already mentioned.
2. Gaining Competence
Improving their language skills means for children, not only starting to understand the meaning of an utterance but also understanding their purpose, or the intention of the speaker. For children at an early age this is particularly difficult because of their lack of competence, and that is the reason why infants and small children are so often misunderstood, or misunderstand themselves. But this noncomprehension, on whichever side it occurs, is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it can be, as already mentioned, an opportunity space for them, because it gives them the chance to participate in a complex social activity, including the detection, overcoming, avoiding, and solving of misunderstandings. To be able to do all this, children need to be provided with tools. But communities do not always have the same approaches towards this kind of interaction, mainly because of different, culture-specific perceptions of child status and knowledge theories in each community. Consequently these so called tools don’t necessarily have to be the same everywhere.
2.1. Child-Centered Communities
European and North American societies can be regarded as child-centered, because here children are regarded as potential conversational partners from an early stage. They “are treated as persons who have a right to be heard, even when their speech is unclear” (Scollon 1982: 87).
2.1.1. Misunderstanding Children’s Utterances
The statement above explains why the most common strategies, of overcoming noncomprehension in what a child intends to say, are through showing minimal grasp and guessing, whereby adults try to make sense of what a child’s utterance might mean (cf. Ochs 1991: 49).
The former is signaling that what the child is saying is unclear to the hearer. Golinkoff (1986: 464) specifies three ways of showing minimal grasp: (1) nonverbal indicators (for example quizzical looks), (2) clarification request (“huh”, “what”), and (3) a direct and clear statement of noncomprehension. Although this strategy doesn’t necessarily lead to a better understanding of the child’s utterance, it at least shows the attempt of the caregiver to socialize the child through taking interest in their actions and involving them in communication.
The latter is a high accommodation to the child. What the caregiver is doing is basically putting himself in the position of the child in question and proposing an option, or guessing what the child might be intending to say. This expressed guess (cf. Ochs, 1991) can be nonverbal or verbal; for example, picking up an object and showing it to the infant as a candidate referent, or reformulating the unintelligible utterance. Whatever form it might have, the important thing is that the adult is taking the child’s perspective.
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