Although this is a complex area for young children it is an aspect which we can begin to talk about in the early years. Raising awareness of the different ways the children talk is a starting point. Ask children:
■ How do you greet your friends/head teacher?
■ Do you speak differently to babies/grandparents?
■ Do you have different words for going to bed/feeling tired?
■ Do you have different words for kinds of food, e.g. sweets/lolly/toffees?
Reading stories and poems containing a variety of speech also helps to raise awareness of diversity, although some aspects of this last point perhaps need to be considered. Can or should we affect another dialect or accent? Teachers fortunate enough to have a varied language background can easily take on accents or a dialect from their own repertoire, for example the Yorkshire tones of Stanley Bagshaw by Bob Wilson, but how desirable is it to adopt another accent when reading perhaps the Anansi stories?
Completing a language profile is a useful activity and promotes a great deal of talk about talk and the language we use. To begin with, it is worth while for the teacher to complete her own language history, using the following questions:
■ Where were you born and how has that affected the way you speak?
■ Have you moved and has that altered the way you speak?
■ How has your education affected the way you speak?
■ Does your accent reflect your social class?
■ Do you vary your accent at all?
■ Do you speak in a regional dialect, standard English, a patois, and do you vary your dialect according to the person you are talking to?
■ Do you have another language that affects when and where you speak English?
■ Does the way you speak reflect your age?
■ Could you change the way you speak, and why?
These questions are taken from eastLINC materials (Smith et al. 1991).
An easy and enjoyable way to present your own language repertoire to children is to bring in a photograph of yourself as a child and tell them the story of your language.
Other authors/titles
John Agard I Din Do Nuttin’. Poems.
John Agard and Grace Nichols No Hickory, No Dickory, No Dock.
Allen Ahlberg Burglar Bill.
Tony Bradman Adventure on Skull Island.
Dick King-Smith George Speaks.
Kaye Umansky The Fwog Pwince.
Conclusion
This chapter ends with the words of a four-year-old, Linda, who was part of my research. This transcript of a conversation with her mother as she is being put to bed shows Linda is able to use talk in a highly sophisticated way.
Linda: I like you best.
Mother: You like me best?
Linda: Not when you shout at me.
Mother: Not when I shouts at you? (laughs) You should be good shouldn’t you? Eh?
’Cos if you was a good girl sometime I wouldn’t have to shout at you would I?
Linda: You don’t like shouting?
Mother: No, I don’t like shouting at you and I don’t like you being naughty.
Linda: Don’t you? Don’t you think it’s a shame when I cry?
Mother: Do I think it’s a shame when you cry? Sometimes.
Linda: Sometimes you don’t?
Mother: Yes, sometimes I don’t, ’cos sometimes you get sent to bed don’t you?
Linda: When I get sent to bed don’t you care?
Mother: Of course I care. Do you care?
Linda: Care about you.
Mother: You care about me?
Linda: Every day.
Mother: Every day?
Linda: Even when I’m being naughty.
By their first day at school most children have learned how to talk and many of them, like Linda, in a very sophisticated way. That enormous development children have made in the first four or five years of their lives can now be given range, diversity and depth through systematic teaching in the early years classroom.
Further reading
Tassoni, P. and Hucker, K. ( 2000) ‘Providing opportunities for language and literacy’, in Planning Play and the Early Years. Oxford: Heinemann.
Whitehead, M. (2002) Developing Language and Literacy with Young Children. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
Chapter 2 has shown the importance of the home and community where children have already become competent speakers and listeners and where, as well as their unique family narratives, they have had access to a variety of media materials: TV, film, video, music, computer games, mobile phones and other aspects of digital technology (Hall et al.2003).
They share a cultural landscape and communicative practices outside school from which they will have drawn ‘textual toys’: media materials, songs, narratives, characters and images (Dyson 2003). These unofficial media materials will soon become part of their official school concerns and are part of their developing literacy practices where, through a process of recon- textualising, they will intricately weave their textual toys into official school contexts (Dyson 2003: 15–17).
This chapter looks at children’s informal language on the playground and at their develop- ing skills as storytellers in the classroom. It is based on work on the playground and in the classroom where trainee teachers, acting as researchers, listened closely to children’s talk. As a researcher you take on a very different role to that of teacher; the relationship between teacher and taught has shifted. You do not know the answers and your questions have to be genuinely investigative, closer to the kind of questioning recommended by Robin Alexander (Introduction, p. 8) and the resulting talk will be nearer to the dialogic model proposed in Speaking, Listening, Learning(QCA/DfES 2003). By observing children’s spontaneous play, listening and recording it, we can learn about interests and obsessions which may not surface in the classroom. Teachers need ‘to be aware of both their pupils’ passions and preoccupations and how these can be productive in enabling new meanings to be created’ (Millard 2003: 7).