Evie Transcript Work

To what extent is this an example of child led discourse? What is characteristic of the two participant’s language?

Evie is being recorded by her grandmother while playing with her toys, she is 2 years and 7 months old and is in her ‘telegraphic /post telegraphic stage’. This is an example of child led discourse because Evie is the one who chooses topics but her grandmother is encouraging her to speak by asking her tag questions as well as trying to make her elaborate on what she’s saying; she asks her basic questions like ‘what’s that? (2) Who is it?’ the two second pause indicates that Evie is thinking about what to say and is trying to find her words, so the grandmother rephrased the question to a different one. Evie doesn’t finish her words or sentences and has long pauses sometimes but her grandmother tries to finish them for her (encouraging her to practise to use more words) e: ‘(2) gon (.) get (.) out now’ and g: ’he wants to get out okay’ her grandmother is trying to encourage her interaction with adults around her to support her language development (LASS- Language Acquisition Support System). At the start of the transcript we can see that Evie uses very simple language due to her age, she mainly starts off with using just nouns to communicate with her grandmother and misses some prepositions and throughout this conversation Evie doesn’t really look at who she is speaking to (her grandmother) and seems like she is almost just talking to herself, this is shown in: e: ‘(2) one two’ g: two cats (2) how many things have we got now in the picture?’, as shown previously her grandmother is again trying to teach Evie, but this time she’s teaching her how to count. To show she is still in the telegraphic stage Evie makes a grammatical error which she ‘no put it all’, but I think she means that she has got it all. She frequently uses action words like ‘go’ and ‘now’ to communicate with her grandmother what she means. Evie also uses may phonemic expansions and contractions showing how she is trying to practice her language and experiment with sounds (examples: ‘sho-o-o-w’ – phonemic expansion and ‘gon’ – meaning going to, phonemic contraction).

Answers to questions:

1) There are four different pronunciations that Evie uses to say ‘picture: picture [pɪʧɪt], picture of [pit ɘv], picture of [pɪtɘ], picture [pɪʧɘ]. All her pronunciations start with ‘pi’ but some of them contain an ‘f’ sound or other sounds which wouldn’t normally be found in ‘picture’. However some of the sounds found in ‘picture’ she does use but says them in the wrong order.

2) Throughout the transcript Evie’s grandmother tries to encourage her to speak by using tag questions and trying to get Evie to elaborate on what she’s saying. As well as trying to get her to engage with the conversation by giving her ‘activities’ or tasks she can do. Overall, the grandmother uses 57 things to encourage Evie to speak and support her talking.

3) The grandmother is encouraging Evie to speak by adding questions and trying to engage her more into the conversation ‘how many? Count them’ she uses a forceful verb to try and get her to develop her language and mathematic skills.

4) Overall, the out of the 51 utterances Evie’s Grandmother makes 34 of them are questions; the main functions of Evie’s grandmother asking questions are to encourage her to speak and to encourage her to elaborate on what she says and sometimes to guide the conversation into a certain direction.

5) The misunderstanding was that Evie went to look and find the actual bath tub that’s in the house, when instead her Grandmother meant the toy one in the wooden house.

6) The switches between the real and play world are interesting because Evie could possibly be unaware about the toy world and she is incorporating her knowledge about what she uses and then assumes that everything else could do the same thing as her and have the same needs.

7) As Evie is aware of the camera she may have the observer’s paradox which can change her language and she may be more conscious of her language and become a little bit nervous. This could have the effect that some of the things she says are unusual or she says less because the camera is watching her, although behind the camera is her grandmother who she acts comfortable around- which might bring up her confidence.

8) Evie says ‘kangaroo’ in four different ways: kangaroo [kænɪru:], kangaroo [kænɘru:], kangaroo [kæmɘrɒn], kangaroo [kæŋru:]. I agree with the statements ‘trying to get it right’ and ‘creative experimentation with sounds and words’ because she is in the telegraphic stage, Evie still needs help pronouncing some words but gets on well with other words. She needs to practise saying these words more so next time she will get it right.

9) The non-standards forms of English that Evie uses like ‘fings’ and ‘a-coming’ can be associated with the Durham accent.

10) Evie is in the telegraphic stage which means she is still learning language and still sometimes gets things wrong because she is learning but she’s still trying to develop her language.