Imitation and reinforcement are the most crucial tools for CLA

English essay

Imitation and reinforcement are the most crucial tools for CLA

Towards the end of the transcript, Tom uses an interrogative in the utterance ‘is (.) is dat your talker’ by using Halliday’s representational function to request facts and information. He uses this representational function by using over extension by category with the concrete noun ‘talker’ due to Tom not knowing what the object is himself. Due to Tom repeating the irregular verb ‘is’ suggests that he is thinking about what to call the tape recorder, reinforcing Vygotsky’s CLA stage as Tom is trying to independently think for himself. However, the use of the interrogative implies Tom is hinting for help with what to call the tape recorder showing intelligence due to him understanding that by putting the stative verb ‘is’ at the beginning, initiates a question. This gives evidence for Tom being in the Zone of Proximal Development as he understands he needs scaffolding to be able to get the correct term. The phonetic spelling of the determiner ‘dat’ is an immature pronunciation of ‘that’ suggesting Tom has not yet got the full idea of how to pronounce the morpheme ‘th’. In contrast, later on in the transcript, Tom pronounces ‘three’ correctly. This could be because his Mother replies with ‘that’s’ modelling the morpheme pronunciation or it could be a type error. As well as this, Tom uses the determiner ’your’ to refer to his Mother but because she replies with the interrogative ‘my talker?’ indicates that Tom did not make it clear  he was addressing his mum. This could be because he was either not close to his mother or that there was other people in the room at this point in time.

The second part of the Mothers utterance is a declarative with ‘that’s a tape recorder’.  Although negative reinforcement is being displayed with the mum using the standard form of  ‘that’s’, it seems to be modelling which is being taken place, with the subject being the proper noun ‘tape recorder’ and the Mother focusing on correcting Toms accuracy rather than his grammar.  This supports Brown and Hanson’s theory as they say children rarely get corrected on their grammar but more on truthfulness and politeness.

Before this part in the transcript, Tom asks the interrogative ‘is these drawing Cartoon Network cup of tea mum’.  Tom uses the irregular verb from ‘to be’ with the verb ‘is’ at the start of his utterance, which shows how Tom uses this regularly to begin his questions.  The missing agreement inflection with the determiner ‘these’ and the verb ‘is’, as well as with the subject ‘ drawing’, with the missing morpheme ‘s’, gives evidence of Tom being in the Telegraphic stage. This is because there is enough information for the sentence to just make sense even with it being grammatically wrong.  Due to children at this stage getting mixed up with objects and words, suggests that Tom may be overgeneralizing the proper noun ‘Cartoon Network’ with the picture on the cup. However, there is evidence of Tom moving into the post-telegraphic stage with Tom’s utterance containing 8 morphemes. The average number of morphemes for his age is 3.5 to 4 suggesting Tom is gaining more sophistication within his sentences. Tom ends his interrogative with the vocative ‘mum’ showing he may be seeking reinforcement as he is specifying who he wants reassurance from.

 The determiner ‘these’ has deictic reference as we do not know how close Tom is to the cup because young children are not normally allowed close to hot drinks. The noun phrase ‘cup of tea’ shows how Tom may know the liquid in the cup is hot even if he cannot see what is inside as he has learnt through language that people call a mug full of tea a ‘cup of tea’. The cup may not contain any tea so Tom may just associate mugs with the drink tea. Even though

this is an example of the symbolic stage which is normally found in 7 year olds plus, Tom is beginning to take in information through different forms such as language and because he has learnt this noun phrase, implies Tom has been around a cup of tea before. As a result, this may be a local topic. ‘Cartoon network’ is also a local topic for Tom due to it being a children’s channel, this implies that Tom will have some knowledge as to whether the picture is actually from this channel.  This proper noun also shows how Tom is in the iconic stage because he is remembering information through images.

Because Tom is not completely sure whether the picture is from Cartoon Network indicates Hallidays’ Heuristic function is being displayed, with Tom wanting to learn whether the picture on the cup is what he thinks it to be through a question. Halliday’s representational function is also present with Tom requesting information from his Mum, the information being whether the image displayed on the cup is from Cartoon Network.

All of this allows me to come to the conclusion that reinforcement is a crucial learning tool when it comes to a child understanding when they are right or wrong in terms of the language they use. Although many other learning tools are just as important such as the different stages in language and a child gaining different skills in how to learn language, if a child does not learn whether the language they have used is right or wrong, then they will not know whether they are using the correct grammatical terms.